* s
THE
MONTHLY MAGAZINE
GENERAL LIITERATURE AND SCIENCE
PUBLISHED BY THE PAULIST FATHERS.
VOL. CXI.
APRIL, 1920, TO SEPTEMBER, 1920
NEW YORK:
THE OFFICE OF THE CATHOLIC WORLD
120 WEST GOxn STREET
1920
CONTENTS.
After Seven Centuries. E. F. Mac
Kenzie 364
"Apologia Pro Vita Sua," Frederick
J. Kinsman's. Henry A. Lappin, 145
Armenian Tragedy, The. Walter
George Smith 485
Aspen Tree, The Quaking. llarriette
Wilbur 627
Atonement in St. Paul, The. L. E.
Bellanti, S.J 20
Blessed Oliver Plunket. A. 1. du P.
Coleman .307
Benedictine Life, The. W. K. Camp-
bell 200
Boyhood, The Last Stronghold of.
S. H. \ 42
British Imperialism and Poison Gas.
P. G. Smyth, 503
l!y a Western Shore. J. F. Scofleld, 659
Caliphs, The City of Too Many.
Edward Francis Mohler, Litt.B., 756
Catholic Church and Science, The.
Francis Aveling, S.T.D 330
Catholic Literature as a World-
Force. George .V. Shunter, . . 454
Catholic Societies, Federation of.
Frederic Sicdenburg, S.J., . : 433
Children of Shakespeare's Dramas,
The. . J. Gradwohl ... 77
Church Conditions in Jugo-Slavia.
Elizabeth Christitch 351
City of Too Many Caliphs, The.
Edward Francis Mohler, l.itt.B., 756
Co-partnership in Industry. An-
thony J. Beck 54
Domrcmy, On the Road to. James
Louis Small 190
Dramii With an Ideal. Man Bate-
nuin 318
Dramatic Successes of the Season.
Euphemia van HensselutT Wuatt, 471
Early Jesuit Missions in Canada,
The. G. Alexander Phare, . . 343
Episcopal Church, "Salve Mater"
and the. C. G. MacGill, . . .762
Father Garesche. The Poetry of.
Katherine Bregy, .... 32
France, Soldiers of. George N.
Shuster, 10
Francois Coppee Once More. Joseph
J. 'Reilly, Ph.D 614
Federation of Catholic Societies.
Frederic Siedenburg, S.J., . . 433
Frederick J. Kinsman's "Apologia
Pro Vita Sua." Henry A. Lappin, 145
Hands Across St. George's Channel.
John Barnes, 649
Hodgson, Ralph. Theodore May-
nard, 730
Hoivells, The Passing of W. D.
Henri/ A. Lappin 445
Imagination and Emotion in Litera-
ture. F. P. Donnelly, S.J., . . 223
Is Mars Inhabited? Othmar Sol-
nil-ku. M.A., 301
Japan, The National Religion of.
Joseph Freri, D.D 65, 212
Jesuit Missions in Canada, The
Early. G. Alexander Phare, . . 313
John Ayscough, Novelist. Leo W.
Keller, S.J 104
Jugo-Slavia, Church Conditions in.
Elizabeth Christitch, . . . 351
Last Stronghold of Boyhood, The.
S. H. N 42
"Les Jonchees." Henrielte Euyi'iiie
Delamare 358
Literature, Imagination and Emotion
in. F. P. Donnelly, S.J.. . . 223
Literature, The Revelation of an
Artist in. Maurice Francis Egan, 289
Lithuania, Reconstruction in.
Thomas Walsh 175
Lyric-Politico, The. Margaret II.
Downing 604
More, Sir Thomas, Saint and Humor-
ist. James J. Daly, S.J., . . 463
Morlaix, When Mary and I Went
to. Tod 11. Galloway, . . . 494
National Religion of japan, The.
Joseph Freri, D.D 65, 212
"N. C. W. C." The Church in
Action. Benedict Elder, . . .721
Nietzsche, Tolstoy, and the Sermon
on the Mount. Lewis Watt, S.J., 577
Noble Ursuline, A. Dudley G.
Woolen 588
On the Abolition of Critics.
John Hunker 790
On the Road to Domremy. James
Louis Small 190
Passing of W. D. Howells, The.
Henry A. Lappin, .... 1 1")
Poetry of Father Garesche, The.
Katherine Bregu, .... 32
Pearl of Paray, The. /.. \Vheaton, 738
Poison Gas, British Imperialism
and. P. G. Smyth 503
Quaking Aspen Tree, The. llarriette
Wilbur, ....... 627
Ralph Hodgson. Theodore .May-
nard 7.30
Recent Events, 127, 267, 414, 560, 703, 841
Reconstruction in Lithuania.
Thomas Walsl 175
Revelation of an Artist in Litera-
ture, The. Maurice Francis Egan, 289
St. Paul, The Atonement in. L. E.
Bellanti. S.J 20
Saints or Spirits? Agnes Repplier, 1
"Salve Mater" and the Episcopal
Church. C. G. MacGill, . . .762
Science, The Catholic Church and.
Francis Aveling, S.T.D., . . 330
Sermon on the Mount, Nietzsche,
Tolstoy, and the. Lewis Watt,
S.J 577
Shakespeare's Dramas, The Children
of. R. J. Gradwohl, ... 77
Sir Thomas More, Saint and Humor-
ist. James J. Daly, S.J., . . 463
Social Aspects of Rights and Obliga-
tions. Wi';/mm J. Kerby, Ph.D., 179
Soldiers of France. George _iV.
Shuster 10
The Church in Action "N. C. W.
C." Benedict Elder 721
The Pearl of Paray. L. Wheaton, 738
Tolstoy, Nietzsche, and the Sermon
on the Mount. Lewis Watt, S.J.. 577
Ursuline, A Noble. Dudley G.
Woolen 588
When Mary and I Went to Morlaix.
Tod B. Galloway 494
CONTENTS
in
STORIES.
A Mngicinn of Globes. Leslie
Moore 631
The Baptism. L. MacManus, . 780
The Loyalist. James Francis lliir-
rett, . . 86, 229, 371, 512, 665, 797
POEMS.
Chastity. Francis Car/in, . . .493
Dawn. Alice Cashel 41
For Your Birthday. S. M. M. . 357
Jerusalem. Katharine Tynan, . . 31
Jesus. Edward Roberts Moore, . 199
St. Francis of Assisl. Jane C.
Crowell, 796
The Assumption. Eleanor Rogers
Cox 603
The Beggar-Knight. James J. Daly,
S.J 174
The Holy House. Elizabeth Barnett
Esler . .
The Rainbow. J. Corson Miller,
The Road to Bethany. Captain
Harry Lee
The Silver Maple.- Charles Phillies,
The Source. Captain Harry Lee,
The Visitor. Caroline Giltinan,
The World. J. Corson Miller, . .
Upon Discovering a Rose in a Book
of Poems. Charles J. Quirk, S.J.
Were You to be Out. Francis Carlin,
778
502
64
787
664
613
317
470
329
WITH OUR READERS.
Aims and Purposes of the Catholic
Welfare Council 279
American Contribution to Propaga-
tion of the Faith, .... 862
Appeal for Austria, 718
Bolshevism, 856
"Christianity and Industry," by
Albion W. Small, .... 715
Dr. Shanahan's "St. Matthew and
the Parousia," 286
Catholic Federation of Arts, . . 718
Catholic Journalism, .... 712
Dangers to Catholic Education, . 570
Dangers of Federalization, . . . 851
Dr. Small's "Purely Secular
Ethic," 140
English Propaganda, .... 430
Francis Thompson on Blessed
Thomas More, 575
General Green Not an Irishman, . 143
Gothic Art and Belief, .... 863
Hospital Progress 574
Increased Cost of THE CATHOLIC
WORLD, . . . .
Inter-Church World Movement,
Irish Force Bill,
Public Health and Public Morals,
Revue d'Ascetique et de Mystique,
Spiritism,
Survey of Catholic Charities,
The Gregorian Congress,
850
715
860
426
575
142
138
425
NEW PUBLICATIONS.
A Commentary on the New Code of
Canon Law 540
A Cry Out of the Dark, . . . 261
A Dictionary of Canon Law, . . 256
A General History of the Christian
Era 692
A History of France, .... 256
A History of the Great War, . . 694
A History of the Venerable English
College, Rome 683
A Short Grammar of Attic Greek, . 835
A Short History of Rome, . . .257
A Singer In Palestine, .... 122
Alsace In Rust and Gold, . . . 688
Altruism : Its Nature and Varieties, 262
American Marriage Laws, . . . 123
And You Shall Find Rest for Your
Souls 701
An Introductory Course in Experi-
mental Psychology, .... 684
Applied Mathematics 701
Arthur Hugh Clough, .... 831
Back to the Republic, .... 408
Black Sheep Chapel, . . . .112
Bolshevism and the United States, 259
Cardinal Mercier's Own Story, . . 360
Catholic Beginnings in Kansas City,
Missouri, 685
Credo, . . 406
Celebrated Spies and Famous Mys-
teries of the Great War, . . 406
Coggin 698
Collected Poems, 1881-1919, . . 700
Creation vs. Evolution, .... 555
Current Social and Industrial Forces, 681
Daisy Ashford: Her Book, . . . 836
Debs: His Authorized Life and
Letters, . . . . . . /. 836
Dust of New York 107
East by West 554
Europe, 123
Exposition of Christian Doctrine, . 405
Famous Generals of the Great War, 699
Father Ladden, Curate, . . . 701
Father Tom, 833
Foreign Publications, . 265, 556, 839
From Dust to Glory, .... 835
Good Cheer 264
Growth of Religious and Moral
Ideas in Egypt, 545
Happy House 407
Health Through Will Power, . . 109
Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub, .... 260
High Benton 409
Historical Records and Studies, . 837
History of England Series, . . .837
Holy Hour Manual, ,. 123
Home Then What? .... 831
Household Physics 696
How to Speak French Like the
French, 556
In An Indian Abbey, .... 829
Ireland in Fiction, 837
Irish Impressions 540
Jacopone da Todi 819
Jeremy Ill
John Brown, 113
Judith, 116
Just Happy, 696
Keep God in American History, . 119
Leaves on the Wind, .... 838
Liberalism in America, . . . 254
IV
CONTENTS
Life of the Blessed Virgin In Pic-
tures 556
Life of the Ven. Anne Madeleine
Remuzat, 833
Little Mother America 555
"Marse Henry," 250
Memories of Buffalo Bill, . . . 544
Memory Sketches, 697
Mercier, the Fighting Cardinal, . 687
Meslom's Messages from the Life
Beyond 552
Mince Pie, 262
Months and Days, 124
Morning Knowledge, 691
Moses and the Monuments, . . . 691
Mount Music, 409
Mystics All, 263
Nothing and Other Things, . . . 541
On the Trail of the Pioneers, . . 697
Open Gates to Russia 536
Our Saviour's Own Words, . . 556
Outdoors and In, 838
Outland 407
Pages of Peace from Dartmoor, . 830
Pamphlet Publications, . . 125, 412, 701
Pax, 695
Peeps at People 116
Penal Legislation in the New Code
of Canon Law, 538
Pierre and Joseph, 688
Poems, 1908-1919 110
Poetry and Dreams, 117
Preaching, 255
Primitive Society 684
Redemption and Other Plays, . . 411
Religion and Culture 393
Religions and Moral Ideas in Baby-
lonia and Assyria, .... 545
Robin Linnet 539
Ronald o' the Moors, .... 408
Schools of Tomorrow, .... 105
Science and Morals, and Other Es-
says, 253
Short History of Harmony, . . Ill
Siberia Today, 682
Simonetta 412
Some Contributions to American
Life and History 264
Stories of Great Heroes, . . . 264
Stray Leaves 124
St. Bernard's Sermons on the
Canticle of Canticles, . . .689
St. Luke: The Man and His Work, 686
Sunrise from the Hill-Top, . . .120
Swinburne as I Knew Him, . . 831
Sylvia and Michael 835
Talks to Nurses 831
Talks to Parents, 120
Tcte-d'Or, 395
The American Army in the Euro-
pean Conflict, 822
The American Catholic, .... 697
The Armour of God, 124
The Best Ghost Stories, .... 412
The Best Psychic Stories, . . . 838
The Betrayers 118
The Book of a Nationalist, . . .121
The Book of Genesis 552
The Book of the Damned, . . .410
The Born Fool, 119
The Brazen Serpent 695
The Business Career of Peter Flint, 120
The Catechism of Religious Pro-
fession 263
The Cechs (Bohemians) in America, 104
The Chronicles of America, . 396, 546
The Church and Socialism, . . 392
The Cockpit of Santiago Key, . . 412
The Cossacks, Their History and
Country, 542
The Credentials of Christianity, . 820
The Doughboy's Religion, . . . 540
The Drift of Pinions, .... 257
The English Catholics in the Reign
of Queen Elizabeth, .... 534
The Ethics of Medical Homicide and
Mutilation 690
The Fifth Station 121
The Foundation of True Morality, 824
The Future Life in the Light of
Modern Inquiry 121
The Great Modern English Stories, 115
The History of the Yankee Division, 107
The Homestead, 411
The House of Love, .... 838
The Interchurch and the Catholic
Idea, 827
Tlie Judgment of Peace, .... 108
The Letters of St. Teresa, . . .249
The Loom of Youth, 693
The Love of Brothers, .... 542
The Maid of Orleans 254
The Memorial Volumes for Sir Wil-
liam Osier, 826
The Modern Book of French Verse, 834
The Modern World, .... 538
The Moral Basis of Democracy, . 408
The Mountainy Singer, .... 541
The New Black Magic, .... 252
The New Warning, 828
The Philosophy of Conflict, . . 123
The Policeman and the Public, . . 118
The Power of God and Other One-
Act Plays, 698
The Priesthood of Christ, ... 263
The Priest's Vade Mecum, . . .124
The Principles of Music, . . .836
The Pursuit of Happiness and Other
Poems, 261
The Release of the Soul, . . . 832
The Science of Eating, .... 110
The Science of Labor, . . . .830
The Settling Price, 699
The Skilled Laborer, 404
The Social Evolution of Religion, . 258
The Soothsayer 123
The Sorrows of Noma, . . . 544
The Soul of the "C. R. B.," . . . 113
The State and the Nation, . . . 106
The Story of Jack, 838
The Story of Modern Progress, . . 824
The Story of Our National Ballads, 834
The Swing of the Pendulum, . . 700
The Tragedy of Labor 108
The Truth of Spiritualism, . . 552
The Virtues of a Religious Superior, 405
The Worldlings 555
Theologia Moralis, 823
Three Poems of the War, . . . 395
To Margaret Mary in Heaven, . . 263
Up the Seine to the Battlefields, . 694
Voltaire in His Letters, . . .114
Westminster Cathedral and Its
Architect, 821
When the World Shook, . . .117
With Other Eyes, 829
Women of Ninety-Eight, . . . 686
Worth, 825
Wounded Words 554
Your Own Heart 837
THE
Catholic &Jp
VOL. CXI. APRIL, 1920 No. 661
SAINTS OR SPIRITS?
BY AGNES REPPLIER.
SHE great wave of Spiritism which is threatening
the sanity of the world is based on a common,
though by no means universal, desire to enter
into some form of communion with the dead, to
receive assurance of their survival, of their wel-
fare, of the conservation of their human affections. There
are men who do not feel this desire. There are men who love
the light and who have no fear of the darkness; but to whom
all borderlands are inexpressively repellant. David wept in
the dust while his child lay dying, but bathed and dined when
his child lay dead. The veil had fallen between them. "I
shall go to him; but he shall not return to me." It is a clear-
cut issue. Yet David's love for his sons was so strong that it
dimmed his wisdom, and undermined his justice. It is in the
mouth of Ulysses, whose affections were to say the least
under admirable control, that Tennyson puts a sentiment so
familiar to himself, a longing for the sight and sound of the
dead:
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles',
And see the great Achilles whom we knew.
What provision has the Catholic Church made to rest the
Copyright. 1920. THE MISSIONABY SOCIETY OF ST. PAUL THE APOSTLE
IN THE STATE OF NEW YOBK.
VOL. cxi. 1
2 SAINTS OR SPIRITS? [April,
hearts which have suffered the pang of separation, what is the
bridge she has built between the worlds of the living and the
dead? The doctrine of the Communion of Saints, which in
the Protestant churches of Christendom includes only the faith-
ful on earth, who "being united to one another in love have
communion in each other's gifts and graces" (Westminster
Confession) , embraces according to Catholic theology the faith-
ful in purgatory and in heaven. The Church militant, suffer-
ing and triumphant, is united in a spiritual solidarity, and the
links which bind all of her members together are invocation,
intercession and veneration. When a Catholic dies, his
friends follow him in spirit, praying for the repose of his soul.
The fervor and insistence of these prayers prove the longing
that lies in many hearts to reach the beloved dead. The sense
of nearness, the devout belief that from the treasury of grace
help may be drawn for the departed whose period of spiritual
activity is over, fortifies the mourner by giving him a task
to perform. Serenity is restored with the blessedness of
service.
A writer in the Nineteenth Century for March, 1919, as-
serts that Spiritism will in time be able to link "ordinary
humanity with the Divine Hierarchy," and that it will do this
by means of certain elect souls, "advanced leaders of our race,
Masters of Wisdom and Knowledge." This has a familiar
sound. What are the saints but advanced leaders, wise with
the wisdom of incorruption ? And what is their mission but
to link "ordinary humanity" with God? It is hard for any
one outside the pale of Catholicism to appreciate the sweet-
ness and vitality which the Church triumphant infuses into
the Church militant. Sixteen hundred years ago a child of
thirteen was beheaded in Rome. Today, Catholic women
bearing her name receive letters and flowers and gifts on the
twenty-first of January, because that is the feast day of this
little Roman saint. It is a long chain and a strong chain which
binds us to our dead.
In all this there is an absence of curiosity, of restless and
morbid prying into the supernatural. I do not say that such
curiosity is unknown to the devout. How often in pious read-
ing have we come across the phrase : "It was revealed to the
blessed Saint - ;" and then followed particulars more or
less edifying which we were at liberty to receive as we liked.
1920.] SAINTS OR SPIRITS? 3
The Church has always maintained a discreet silence concern-
ing these revelations. "What is called superstition is but sug-
gestion in its unacknowledged and unconsolidated form;" says
an acute English writer, endeavoring to straighten out the
devious paths of psychical research.
There are upholders of Spiritism who claim that it will
renew the faith of the world. Listening to the eloquent plead-
ings of Sir Oliver Lodge, one would imagine that there was no
such thing as belief in the immortality of the soul, and that he
was bringing this consoling doctrine to a race which had either
never heard of it, or had forgotten all about it. Professor
Hyslop admits the existence of faith, but proposes to render
it superfluous by offering direct evidence of survival. He will
replace the Communion of Saints with the communion of
spirits, and the invocations of the Church with mediums and
controls. Because these mediums are sometimes frauds, and
the controls often give indications of feeble-mindedness (as
in the case of Raymond Lodge's Feda), we are disposed to
underrate the fast-growing influence of Spiritism upon a dis-
turbed and sorrowful world.
In this we are at fault. Mr. Cyril E. Hudson, who has
made a careful study of conditions in England (a land friendly
to ghosts), says plainly that Spiritism is a rival to Christianity.
Its advocates are wont to speak of it picturesquely as a "hand-
maid" of religion, inasmuch as it fortifies belief in the unseen.
"But, as a matter of experience, it is found that a man who
becomes a Spiritualist ceases almost invariably to be a Chris-
tian in any traditional r ense of the word. Not for nothing has
the Christian Church throughout her history discouraged the
practice of necromancy, the morbid concern with the dead
which must interfere with the proper discharge of our duties
in that plane of existence in which God has placed us."
Mr. Hudson also calls our attention to one phase of the
subject which is often ignored, but which is of the utmost im-
portance. In Sir William Barrett's On the Threshold, we
find references to "mischievous and deceptive communica-
tions," as well as to the profane and obscene matter which
occasionally intrudes itself into automatic writing. "Some
who have taken the trouble to inquire," says Barrett, "have
come to believe that Spiritism reveals the existence of a mys-
terious power which may be of a more or less malignant
4 SAINTS OR SPIRITS? [April,
character. Granting the existence of a spirit world, it is nec-
essary to be on our guard against the invasion of our wil
a lower order of intelligence and morality."
This is a great deal for an ardent Spiritist to acknowledge.
No such word of warning comes from Sir Oliver Lodge s lips;
yet it represents the darker side of this ^ange substitute for
Christian faith. Without venturing to speculate too lun
on the nature of supernatural visitants, it is folly to assume
that-if such visitants exist-they are necessarily benigna
or that evil spirits will not cross the threshold when the door
is opened. And we cannot protest too strong y against the
subjection of the medium to influences of which she
clients are necessarily ignorant. If she s what she claims to
be, she voluntarily surrenders the control of faculties of whic
she is the proper and the sole guardian, which have been given
her for her own direction, and which it is the instinct of every
sane man and woman to protect from assault
If it be the mitigation of grief which Spiritists seek in their
efforts to communicate with the dead, they are easily com-
foVted Sir Oliver Lodge has assured us that the messages
ent by soldiers killed in battle have proved consolatory to
their families and friends. But beyond vague assurances .of
happiness, and occasional references to "carrying on,
dier spirits, like all other spirits, cling tenaciously, and with
that has been termed "maniacal energy," to the least signifi-
Tant recollections of their mortal lives. The wider outlook
has been lost, the larger purposes forgotten; but a pock
knife mislaid in boyhood, or a slang phrase, common to tho,
sands of other young men, lingers in their memories, and
comes the pivot of their laborious communications.
reTt of a la'd killed in action went, at Sir Oder's suggestion
to a medium who spelled out the word U-L-L-C
seemed meaningless to the mother; but the father deciphered
?s "Ullo 'Erb! familiar syllables heard often from his
son's lips, and he was perfectly satisfied with the
e painful lack of intelligence manifested by spirits, the
puerility of their messages, and the apparent narrowness c
?heTr confines, are accounted for by the difficulty of intercourse,
and by the number of middle men employed. The spirit com-
municates with the control, who communicates with the me
1920.] SAINTS OR SPIRITS? 5
dium, who communicates with the sitter. Naturally something
is lost in this multiplicity of parts, and naturally, as Lodge
feelingly observes, "a great deal of rubbish comes through."
One of "Raymond's" controls was an American Indian named
'Redfeather," and another a little girl, Indian or Negro, named
"Feda," who must have exasperated his family to the verge of
madness.
The Spiritists are logical in asserting that the nature of the
communications received from the dead cannot disqualify
their validity. If it be proven that the messages are genuine,
our disappointment at their triviality is not a determining
factor. It does, however, materially lessen the number of
intelligent converts to Spiritism. Sensitive minds are repelled
by the earthiness of souls who have escaped from earth; prac-
tical minds by their incompetence. "If anybody would endow
me," wrote Huxley, "with the faculty of listening to the chatter
of old women and curates in the nearest Cathedral town I
should decline the privilege, having better things to do. And
the folk in the spiritual world do not talk more wisely and
sensibly than their friends report them to do, I put them in
the same category."
Maeterlinck, that great lover of borderlands who dwells
preferably in the shadows, finds the company of accredited
I use the term only to designate those who are intro-
duced to us with the usual formalities) to be inexpressibly
Burdensome and depressing. He is not incredulous. He can
elate with enviable gravity the details of an evening call paid
by a monk who had lain in the cloisters of the Abbave
de Samt-Wandrille since 1693, and who broke a sleep of two
Centuries that he might spin a table on one leg for the diversion
the poet s guests. The simplicity of this form of entertain-
ment was accepted by Maeterlinck with a tolerant shrug; but
us taste, his scholarship, his vivid and delicate imagination
revolt from the fruitless chatter of the seance.
"Why," he asks, "do the dead jealously hug the narrow
strip of territory which memory occupies on the confines of
'th worlds and from which only indecisive evidence can
5S?J*I thCre thCn n ther Utlets ' no other horizons?
hy do they tarry about us, stagnant in their little pasts, when,
ree from the flesh, they might wander at ease over the virgin
stretches of space and time? Do they not know that the sfgn
6 SAINTS OR SPIRITS? [April,
which will prove to us that they survive is to be found not
with us, but with them, on the other side of the grave? Why
do they come back with empty hands and empty words? Is
this what one finds when one is steeped in infinity? Of what
use is it to die, if all life's trivialities continue? Is it worth
while to have passed through the terrifying gorges which open
on the eternal fields in order to remember that we had a great
uncle named Peter, and that our Cousin Paul was afflicted with
varicose veins? Rather would I choose for those I love the
august and frozen solitudes of the everlasting nothing."
More painful to contemplate than mere inanity is the
evidence proffered us from time to time of the survival of
physical and mental infirmities. Mr. J. Arthur Hill, writing in
1917, tells us of being present at a seance where one of the
spirits was a very old and feeble man. The medium described
him as "tottering with age," and having "a job to stand up;"
but no one seemed depressed by his plight, or by the possi-
bilities it suggested for all of them. Dr. Hodgson described a
seance at which his dead friends were chatty and communi-
cative with the single exception of a spirit who, having estab-
lished his identity, refused to say another word. His silence
was pregnant with meaning to the little group of sitters, be-
cause they knew that before death he had been reduced to
mental exhaustion by severe headaches, and they understood
that he was exhausted still. Things are as they are, whether
we like them or not; but to offer Spiritism as a spur to human
hope, and a solace to human affections, seems a bit beside the
mark.
"There are as great fools in the spirit world as ever there
were in this," said Henry More over two hundred years ago.
Were he living now, and in active communication with the
dead, he would intensify his language. The one thing made
clear to us is that the spirits who manifest themselves by means
of mediums, ouija boards, or rapping tables, are on a lower
plane of intelligence than we are. Enamoured of trivialities,
unconcerned about vital things, they exhaust what little ra-
tionality they possess in the laborious process of identification.
The famous "Julia's Bureau," established in London by
Mr. W. T. Stead, and named after the letter-writing ghost
whose correspondence he gave the world, was for long the
favorite agency through which distinguished spirits communi-
1920.] SAINTS OR SPIRITS? 7
cated with their equally distinguished friends. It was said
that Gladstone, Disraeli, Victor Hugo, and even Cardinal Man-
ning, appeared at this bureau, while Dickens, a bustling and
clamorous ghost, could not be kept away. On earth these
brilliant and versatile minds acquired with every year fresh
ideas and increased knowledge; but, stranded by death in a
stagnant land, they had apparently not taken one intellectual
step. After the death of Professor Lombroso (an ardent
Spiritist), in October, 1909, Signor Guglielmo Emmanuel visited
London and Julia's Bureau, hoping to receive from his dead
colleague some evidence of survival. What was his amaze-
ment to discover that, in the two intervening months, Lombroso
had, indeed, learned the English language hitherto unknown
but had forgotten the Italian of his lifetime.
Professor Hyslop unhesitatingly asserts that Spiritism
speaks in the name of science. "It intends that its belief shall
have the same credentials as Copernican astronomy, Newtonian
gravitation, and Darwinian evolution. It is not uncertain in
its sound." Yet, so far, the standard of evidence is low; and
the investigatory volumes which are published in swift suc-
cession reiterate for the most part unsupported claims. There
is not sufficient allowance made for the influence of that strange
subconscious self of which we are just beginning to take
cognizance. And for that radical weakness of the human
mind, credulity, there is no allowance made at all. That
people see what they come prepared to see, and hear what
they come prepared to hear, and believe what they come pre-
pared to believe, is a truth as old as humanity. Another truth,
less taken into account, is that credulity strengthens with every
indulgence. It becomes a habit of mind. The man who ac-
cepts insufficient evidence once or twice begins to lose his
power of resistance. The walls of his mind give way.
This is what has befallen Sir Oliver Lodge. A scientist,
trained in accurate thinking, and accustomed to sift evidence'
he has little by little surrendered his intellect to a process of
smtegration. He still clings to scientific terms, and has a
harming clarity of speech; but the scientific spirit has col-
lapsed under the insidious influence of the unearthly. He is
no longer a cold and cautious investigator, but rather resembles
i grandfather telling fairy tale after fairy tale to please con-
fiding grandchildren.
8 SAINTS OR SPIRITS? [April,
And what happens when a current of credulity sweeps a
civilized land? A rank growth of superstition springs up in
its wake, and men turn back with startling ease to the least
desirable delusions of the Middle Ages. Apparitions have be-
come the order of the day. Sick people are proffered ghostly
prescriptions for their maladies. Rectors have been asked by
their parishioners for "charms" to ward off misfortune. Men
whom we deemed sane write that a wooden table applauded
the music which pleased it, or "fluttered like a wounded bird,
and dropped gently to the door." Young women devote them-
selves to automatic writing, and reel off spectral literature of
surpassing fatuity. It was testified in a New Jersey court that
a man had bought some farm land because the spirit of a
young girl (Feda must have crossed the sea) had revealed the
existence of treasure two million dollars worth of treasure-
buried beneath the soil. Two gypsy women were arraigned
before a Brooklyn magistrate on a charge of stealing the
money they had been commissioned to "bless." And all this
in the twentieth century, with the experience of the ages to
enlighten us.
Moreover, twentieth century superstition is far more dan-
gerous than was eleventh century superstition, because we are
less fitted, mentally and physically, to face it. In the Middle
Ages, men and women had no nerves. War, pestilence, vio-
lence, the sacking of towns, the savage cruelty of the law, the
fate of unfortunates who languished in dungeons or died on
the rack, failed to impair the vitality of the race, or dim its
love for life. Men took their superstitions, as they took other
picturesque and terrifying conditions, without more thinking
than was necessary. But we, nervous, fretful, introspective,
morbidly sensitive, imperfectly educated and ignorant of our
ignorance, how shall we meet this tide of occultism, and keep
our sanity and self-control? The horrors of the War destroyed
our serenity, the sorrows of the War blighted our happiness.
We believed vaguely in the goodness of mankind; and the
ferocity of Germany's campaign shook the foundations of this
belief. We have discovered that nothing is more possible
than the thing we called morally impossible. What wonder
that with the downfall of familiar convictions, the cession of
familiar thoughts, there shall come this onrush of superstition
which is not the less hurtful for its folly.
1920.] SAINTS OR SPIRITS? 9
Gertrude Kingston, in a very able paper on telepathy and
hypnotic suggestions, comments upon the general absence of
ghosts in Italy. Every house in England or Scotland that has
witnessed a crime of sufficient magnitude harbors its family
spectre, who appears at appropriate intervals, and keeps alive
ancestral traditions. But there are blood-stained old palaces
in Rome, in Florence, in Perugia, whose very walls might
shriek their tale of horror, yet where no man's sleep is broken.
Miss Kingston attributes this peaceful atmosphere to the influ-
ence and practices of the Church. "Ghosts," she writes, "are
not encouraged in Roman Catholic countries, owing to the
habit of saying Masses for the repose of the dead, thus pre-
venting all subconscious suggestion of an uneasy spirit's re-
turn, by removing the motive of its visit."
This is the Communion of Saints. This is the service ren-
dered by the living to the dead. If we content ourselves with
a spiritual bond, which is a real and vital thing, if we can dis-
pense with rapping tables, and the spelling of words on a ouija
board, and the intrusion of controls, then something stronger,
sweeter, holier than the disjointed intercourse of the seance
will unite us with the faithful departed. Like David, we shall
go to them, but they shall not return to us.
SOLDIERS OF FRANCE.
BY GEORGE N. SHUSTER.
HIS article shall be dedicated to the point of view
of that average, every-day American soldier
whose comrade I have been. Despite necessary
limitations, the motto stands with Montaigne's:
"C'est icy un livre de bonne foy." For the soldier
has become the hour's man throughout the world. The people
are made up of him, and it is clear finally that no government,
no social philosophy, can prove stable or successful if it leaves
out of account the sovereignty of democratic opinion. We
may have recall of judges, but we shall never again consider
recalling the jury.
Now men coming home from war bring with them me-
mories of many important things. There are personal expe-
riences, likes and dislikes the myriad details that shaped
heart and brain during that raging period in the crucible of
fire. Much has been written, too, of the soldier's morals, his
religion, his sense of patriotic loyalty. But after all these
things are his individual American business, his contribution
to the citizenship of his country. If our hard victory is to
usher in, some day, the era we have so fervently dreamed of
a new cooperative world is it not most vital to form an idea
of what we now think of our brethren of the world? Hands
across the sea will never mean anything if arm and heart go
not with them. Have the men of America come out of the
trenches and the muddy billet-towns of Lorraine and the
Argonne with some definite appreciation of the common
ground upon which two peoples can unite with others in
the creation of a lofty-souled and harmonious peace? Or is
such union at all possible?
No citizen and no soldier can avoid these momentous
questions upon which the fate of world-friendship so largely
hangs. For Catholics the duty of cooperating with the Church
of France has been extended to fields scarcely thought of be-
fore. Not only must we try to influence the social trend of
particular peoples, but we must succeed or fail in the supreme
1920.] SOLDIERS OF FRANCE 11
attempt to bring the Gospel to all nations. Now the Versailles
Treaty has not been idealistically successful; there seems to
have persisted a mutual distrust in diplomatic circles; men in
numbers have returned with nothing but resentment for bad
treatment, for petty mercantile robbery, for the general squalor
of their army life. To thousands idealism appears to have
been a bad mistake. There is much of the genuine in all of this,
but it is only the picture's evil side. I believe that most of us
have caught glimpses of the fiery vision which sent two mil-
lion men to death for a thing that was France and much more :
a spirit that ran like lightning in countless souls after four
years of unutterable war, and under which gave no thought
of laying down its arms.
Naturally there are individuals who see no hope whatever
in the situation. Thus an article from a German-American
Catholic paper which reads as follows: "Your ape-like love
for France has stricken you with total blindness. The Catho-
lics of France have opposed the persecution (of the Govern-
ment) with many words but no deeds. For this reason the
enemies of the Church have succeeded in uprooting the faith
from the hearts of the French people. The schools are entirely
Masonic, godless and unmoral, and a generation is growing
up which no longer knows anything of God or ethics. In
order to verify this statement of the sad condition of France
you have only to read the accounts of eyewitnesses. Thus
Rev. William J. Munster, chaplain of the American 310th
Field Artillery, reports in a letter to a friend in America that
the irreligious and God-hating spirit is spread all over France.
" 'One may paint for one's self ever so glowing hopes for
the religious future of France and spread the most roseate
articles about the religious revival in France, the fact remains
undeniable that very little faith exists in France,' writes Rev.
W. J. Munster. 'I have lived for long months here in villages
and cities, and have conversed with the population ever since
we landed on French soil .... there exists everywhere a
boundless indifference among men and women.' Refore Rev.
Munster entered the German occupied zone with his regiment,
he visited Domremy, the birthplace of St. Jeanne D'Arc. The
village, according to him, is a mud-hole like the majority
of French villages." 1 And much more in the same vein.
l Ohio Walsenfreund, Columbus, Ohio, p. 177, August 6, 1919.
12 SOLDIERS OF FRANCE [April,
Obviously the Rev. Chaplain's account contains much
truth, even as it would had it been written about any other
country. But sweeping assertions like these about universal
religious apathy and social putridness are quite thoroughly
overdone. One must approach this matter broadly and real-
istically: it is too vital a question to be answered by chronic
bias and narrowness. We have hopes for religion in the har-
rowing wilds of Senegambia: shall we shrug our shoulders
in a land whose very soil is blessed by the footsteps of a
thousand saints? The value of judgment rests upon observa-
tion and, unfortunately, most of us saw but a very little. But
in all truth, out of a patient synthesis of impressions from the
hearts of men that strove to understand, one may build a pic-
ture worthy of the splendor of our hope.
The American going to France had little idea of his
journey's end: it was simply "Over There." The voyage was
a great adventure unfulfilled, a storm brewing, a menace and
a mighty hope. Land France ! The hasty landing, romantic
with the spices of an alien tongue, novel costumes, and an
everlasting difference. The soldier went his way through
the virginal aroma of a film-clad spring whose robes were
woven of blossom and line grass. Dales and slopes, sun-
colored and absorbingly vital despite their peacef ulness, ever-
recurrent spires and the hand-made poetry of each individual
vista! It was beauty, indeed, and few have ever forgotten it.
Except for the rude military train, there was no sign of war.
And yet
A busy town modernity on the background of mediseval-
ism halts the train. A French soldier, who talks English
well, comes up to say: "Bonjour,"
"You also are going to the front?" he asks sadly.
"Yes ... As fast as we can get there."
"Messieurs must realize," he says slowly, "that it is no
picnic one goes to."
Down at the age-worn Cathedral, a gray-haired Bishop
reads the prayers for the dead. In his voice, too, there is no
hesitation, but a yearning sadness which sways like a mantle
of hope over the heads of widows and orphans. Already,
then, the inevitable feet of pain tread on the heels of inevitable
sacrifice. On every street there are living signs of a crumbled
social order. The plainest necessaries of life are doled out
1920.] SOLDIERS OF FRANCE 13
by the State; woman is omnipresent for work and lust; the
children even have put on a wierd impish boldness which even
more than their dirtiness makes them seem young savages.
War sits in the churches, on the marketplaces, at the hearths.
He sits close to sleep and awakening, a terrible grinding king.
Under the sceptre of this despot the American himself
was forced to bend the knee. Drop by drop the magic phial
of his idealism began to dissipate. Nothing mattered beyond
the mud and the everlasting fury of the guns. He had ridden
out of a cloistered past into the terrible kingdom of hell, re-
tracing every step of the world's history from Christ to chaos.
In its depths he floundered, but it was far stronger than he.
Against the dimming of his lamp of vision there was no succor
in the environment. The bloody business of those unutterable
years had ground the sanctities of existence into the slime.
There was an excuse for the army perhaps; but the fringe of
civilian population that had hung on doggedly was unendur-
ably smudgy. In some fearful way it had gone la has, be-
lieving in little, stolid and greedy as a beast. And yet it was
not, in many ways, a bad population but only a starved and
desolate one. I like to hope that strains of that De Profundis
beat upon our hearts in their hungry way to God.
Behind all of this lay something equally malign, equally
powerful, which the soldier did not understand. But there
were times when he knew that war had nothing to do with the
individual, it was the work of titanic forces that had set one
against the other unto destruction. In a large sense he was
correct. Although the great motive power behind the War
was German lust for conquest, still that was only a colossal
manifestation of something deep and bitter that had descended
on the world. In French politics the word "Liberte" has been
omnipresent for almost fifty years, and yet one came away
convinced that in no sense of the term had popular govern-
ment been achieved by the Third Republic. Indeed, rarely in
history has the idea of freedom, though native in France, been
so ruthlessly antagonized as by this regime. Its great achieve-
ments were not universal education or the unhampered develop-
ment of labor for in both these respects it was far surpassed
by the kingdom of St. Louis but the expansion of capitalistic
schemes, the gain of colonial empire, and the erection of a
great military ideal. Modern French schoolbooks, edited by
14 SOLDIERS OF FRANCE [April,
men like Gabriel Hanotaux, removed every trace of religious
teaching and implanted instead an ethic whose basis was a
France of wealth and power. The leadership of the Govern-
ment was frankly materialistic, openly lustful of gain, and as
crassly capitalistic as ever was the Prussian oligarchy. Owing
to the fatal plural party system and the ballot law, this party
held a firm seat until the War.
The spirit of domination had crept in from the world.
Born out of an egoistic philosophy of force, built on the funda-
ment of successful commerce, it preached democracy but
practised the most insidiously selfish programme in existence
since pagan Rome. Was it not Clemenceau who wrote some
five years before the War that "God is always on the side of
the strongest battalions?" On account of this, class-hatred
has been fostered and the spiritual influences of religion
scorned. French tradition succumbed apparently to the phil-
osophy of finance. If anyone doubt what I say let him read
Rene Doumic's recent addresses on the "Liberation of the
French Spirit," or better still, the incomparable Pages Catho-
liques of J. K. Huysmans.
Out of these twin forces a leaden philosophy and an
iron War was created the moral squalor which so largely
surrounded the American soldier. In harrowing and acrid
misery, France reaped what the "gospel of enlightenment"
had sown: not only the losses on the battlefield, but treason
in the high places, decay of vision and universal sackcloth
and ashes. There were, however, two opponents, a traditional
Catholicism and the newer Socialism. We are not concerned
here with the vagaries of Juares' doctrine. What has the
Church accomplished during the War? Can it be asserted
with reasonable confidence that she can reconquer the spir-
itual leadership of French society? Would that all of us had
seen the back-areas where the candles of faith burned so
steadfastly at the myriad shrines of God; that we had heard
the prayer that gleamed like holy fire in millions of stricken
hearts. But truly we shall do better to search for the spirit of
Catholic France on the battlefield, close to the enemy and
scarred with glorious wounds.
There is a great human truth in the mediaeval idea of trial
by fire. Only the pure and holy could survive it unscathed:
it was the proving ground of saints. Now men who have
1920.] SOLDIERS OF FRANCE 15
withstood with superhuman idealism the torture of this War,
have something in them worthy of the traditional heroes.
Mr. Louis Barthou of the Academy declared in his address on
Guynemer, that the secret of the latter's prowess was that
"he knew how to behave in battle and how to say his prayers."
The universality of this knowledge among a type of French
soldier is well illustrated by a page in the annals of the Ter-
ritorials, those brave old fellows who have done such a
difficult bit just behind the limelight of the War.
In an exchange of prisoners there was returned to France
a fine old graybeard, who had been with the garrison of Mau-
beuge when that fortress was captured with its defenders.
The first thing he did upon arrival was to present himself at
the Ministry of War, and, having been admitted, to offer a
bit of cloth signed and dirty with the simple words: "Mon-
sieur, I have the honor to return the flag." It was learned that
before the garrison had capitulated the flag had been burned,
but that, when leaving, this soldier had detected the frayed
bit and hastily concealed it upon his person. Despite four
years of shifting misery and hardship, he kept the sacred
remnant close to his heart and, at length, brought it out of
captivity to the Invalides, where the ages will consider it holy,
though it is very small and shabby. A glorious deed and
typical of France! I have thought of how symbolic it is of
the simple soldier, how like to him in sacrifice and glory and
sacredness, with what equal right the old Territorial might
have presented himself.
"To know how to behave in battle and how to say one's
prayers !" How many vivid examples of that glowing art pre-
sented themselves to the American. In the eddy of life at
the front, amid the passing of endless columns, we have met
many who are dear to us. There has been gayety and oblivion
in tumble-down cafes over a bottle of crude wine; there have
been twilight Masses said by soldier-priests in dusty uniform
when enchanted strains of the Kyrie and the Gloria rolled
over a shell-pocked field. We have sat in dug-outs with
elegant men and those who cut stone in ancient Vendee or
fetched wood from the monotonous wastes of the Landes.
There were artists who toiled at little things for the Paris
Exposition, and an author who had written a book under fire,
in which a cathedral awakens to life and the saints go out
16 SOLDIERS OF FRANCE [April,
from their pedestals to work for the glory of God. And I
do not understand how there could have remained so much
of humanity and fervent idealism after four years in the
ghastly treadmill. These men were thoroughbreds of the tra-
ditional, Catholic France. The rest of it, which many of us
have read about in Under Fire, was natural enough, but the
spirit of these others is a holy thing. In an humble way we
have seen a cinema of the soul of France, and we have not
come away sad.
Indeed, they were men of action and of thought; men
of prayer and beauteous vision; men whose laughter could
not be dimmed by the everlasting scream of shells. Coming
as they did from every stratum of society, one's association
with them furnished ideas of the aspirations of every class.
Though afterward I lived intimately with French families and
in the leisure of University life came to know many people,
it is of the poilu that I like to think as the hope of his country.
He has been her saviour and he will not be absent at the
resurrection. In a sense we, too, have been "Soldiers of
France," and in an intimate way we can propose hopefully the
question: What has been and what will be the influence of
Catholicism in the battleground of the world?
First of all, the thinking Frenchman came to realize that
he was fighting either for an ancient, Catholic civilization or
for nothing at all. If the salvation of the Government had
been the issue of the conflict, verily it would have been a sorry
affair. But it became evident immediately that the contest
lay between two incompatible civilizations, between a modern
error and an ancient truth, between Force and Freedom. The
individual beheld suddenly that there were social ultimates
which if reached would make life intolerable. French liberty
knew that its birthday had not been the Revolution but its
mediaeval emancipation : that its life had been blessed forever
in the shadow of the Christian Church. And, just as the
greatest fortitude was found to spring from Christian virtue
and the sweetest consolation from faith in God, so the most
successful appeals for sacrifice and unity came from those
who preached the value of Catholic civilization. This lesson
will not be forgotten. When Le Temps, established organ of
conservative plutocracy, warns against the "spirit of the
steeple," it is because that steeple has changed from a monu-
1920.] SOLDIERS OF FRANCE 17
ment into a sword. The ancient voice, so long overpowered,
has spoken again and the echoes roll from the battlefields to
the Pyrenees.
The good that was in France has survived remarkably
well this ordeal by fire. Despite the power of an autocratic
and materialistic body in the shaping of French institutions;
despite the fatal brutalizing in education of the spirit of in-
tellectual freedom whereby license was held above liberty:
there remains enough manhood to build up in the words of
Milton, "a noble, puissant nation." The Church will not be
relegated to her position of shame when the reconstruction of
the martyred country shall have begun. The majority of
French citizens are Catholics; from the hill of Montmartre to
the sacred shrine of Lourdes, through a thousand cities of
the saints, there winds a procession of faith which no banded
interests can halt. Nor can the deep and gentle life of the
provinces be severed from its ancient hopes.
French labor is restless, as it ought very well to be, but
seated in his dingy boutique the worker remains master of
the gentle art of getting romance from the winning of daily
bread. Moreover, the ancient attachment to the soil still
heartens the countryside. On the very last day of the War
we came upon an old fellow sitting in his field and pulling
up the grass in his agony. The peasant patois was difficult to
master, but we understood that his only son had just been
killed, and that he had come for consolation to the soil upon
which his boy had fallen. There is nothing deeper or more
appealing in all the world than the simplicity of this love for
the homely sanctity of nature, this earnest and patient tenacity,
bearing its pain as it bears the burden of the harvest. For
the genuine beauty of France is not Paris or Nice, but the
countryside and the toil expended there, the humility and
prayer of the gleaning in the fields.
Such a country needs only the right sort of leadership to
attain the fulfillment of its dreams; and rarely has the way
been so open to Catholic direction. I am ignorant of what
methods will be employed by the hierarchy to regain political
freedom, but I have heard the Victory sermon of the Cardinal
of Paris and the message of the Bishop of Toulouse in behalf
of united action for the laboring classes; I have seen the rise
of a powerful Catholic-spirited press La Libre Parole,
VOL. cxi. 2
18 SOLDIERS OF FRANCE [April,
L'Echo de Paris, L' Action Francaise and I know that French
Catholicism has never stood closer to the heart of the people
or been so free of separatist tendencies. Aside from Social-
ism, it is the only constructive organization that is really alive.
From one or the other must come the forces that will dispel
the moral gloom of France. The infinite troop of mean-souled
venders of merchandise and virtue, have reared upon the soil
of St. Louis and St. Jeanne a degeneration of which every
thinking man is aware. One hears on every hand the speech
of deliberation: "La France sera Catholique ou elle ne sera
plus."
The significant strengthening of Catholic leadership is no-
where more evident than in literature. To some extent French
art has always drawn its inspiration from religion, despite
the peculiar American impression that is formed from Zola
and Eugene Sue. Perhaps no two authors are more disre-
garded in their own country. Why have we never realized
that France's most renowned prose writer is Bishop Bossuet
and her most illustrious poet the spiritual Lamartine? No
intelligent Catholic can afford to be ignorant of the marvelous
contemporary renascence in French literature. Led in jour-
nalism by such powerful men as Maurice Barres, Leon Daudet
and Rene Doumic, and in social effort by Charles Maurras,
Alfred de Mun and Claude Cochin, Catholics have come to
the foreground in every domain of thought. In history there
are names to conjure with: Frederic Masson, Pierre de La
Gorce, and Thureau-Dangin. The novel is in the hands of
masters like Rene Bazin, Louis Bertrand, and Henri Bor-
deaux; poetry has produced marvelous singers, such as Paul
Claudel, Frederic Lammes and Francois Jammes, while the
theatre belongs in large measure to Brieux, Francois de Curel
and Sacha Guitry. There is no need for more names. The
fact that almost every recently elected member of the Acad-
emy is a Catholic, is, in itself, sufficient indication of the
return of Catholic thought.
Plainly then, the religious and democratic effort of a new
Catholic France will provide ample ground for our coopera-
tion. There exist unfortunately certain prejudices which must
be overcome. We need to forget the insinuation that the
country is populated largely by the demi monde. Long ago
Montaigne described his countrymen as essentially a people of
1920.] SOLDIERS OF FRANCE 19
good common sense, and there is nothing of importance to
append to the analysis. Perhaps their social customs, their
ways of doing things are different than ours, but have we
demonstrated our superiority? In all charity let us realize
that an enormous burden rests on them whose fathers have
fallen: the duty not only of rebuilding the national frame-
work but also of realizing the ideal for which the dead have
laid them down. Shall we not believe that out of the bounty
of Providence has come this opportunity to aid in the resurrec-
tion? We, who have seen so much of the beauty of a new
idealism, cannot afford to case our standards now.
It is difficult to arouse concerted action among individual-
istic peoples. The soldiers of both countries have, however,
stood together long enough to make us hope that, through
them, will come the inspiration to united effort which we
now so sorely need. They cannot drop the banner which has
been carried ahead at such cost and be true either to them-
selves or to the dead. Americans must believe in world-friend-
ship whatever the present plans may be or brand this war
a hideous mistake. As Catholics we know that if the Church
can gather its forces in this period of sweat and chaos, its
influence in shaping the destinies of humanity will never have
been larger. When Peter the Hermit preached the first Cru-
sade a cry rang out over the Christian world: "God wills it!"
Now that so many of the old millstones of prejudice have
been drowned in the sea, that the kingdom of brotherhood has
become an actual aim in social life, dare we stand backsupinely
and hearken to no less ringing a cry? Verily, if we do, we
shall not be worthy of our Christian title. We shall have
failed in a mission no less sacred than was the dream of Pope
Urban, and forevermore we shall have doomed the world to
the chains of intolerable and ghastly war.
THE EXTENSION OF THE ATONEMENT IN ST. PAUL.
BY L. E. BELLANTI, S.J.
II.
the previous article we tried to show how the
substance of Catholic teaching on the atonement
that Christ by His Sacrifice and death redeemed
us from sin and restored us to a new life by His
Resurrection is clearly taught by St. Paul. And
that the gradually-evolved and carefully corrected theories
of ransom, substitution and ultimately of satisfaction are fairly
and manifestly deducible from his writings. Did not the
Apostle carry us on with him beyond these limited, if ex-
tremely valuable aspects, of the mystery, he would still have
added his inspired testimony to the independent teaching of
the Gospels and so confirmed the solid basis of our belief in
the atonement. Without adding to the sum of our knowledge,
he would have added to the weight of our witnesses. But, in
fact, St. Paul carries his teaching on the atonement so much
further, that here we can only hope to follow him, hesitatingly
enough, down a few of those avenues of thought along which
he steps with such high and swift assurance.
St. Paul's theology gathers up past, present and future
God, God made Man, Christ glorified and gathers us up
equally into the comprehensive truth. It is, in a special sense,
theology applied and extended to man. Nowhere else will you
find less formalism or more vitality in religion. Hardly has he
proposed a belief before he passes on to show the relation of
that belief to ourselves. So his consideration of the Incarna-
tion or the atonement merges almost at once into an applica-
tion and extension of that Incarnation and atonement to the
Church and the individual. Yet when, as against all this, we
consider how many sided is this mystery of the atonement,
and how limited the capacity of the mind which can only
attend to one aspect, one reasoned theory or set of values at
any given time, then how very incompletely at best may we
expect to comprehend that supreme fact in itself and its over-
whelming import for us!
1920.] THE ATONEMENT IN ST. PAUL 21
We are, after all, and we cannot too often remind our-
selves of it, in the land of images and shadows. Nevertheless,
even though in this life we only see through a glass darkly
and know only in part, St. Paul is very far from minimizing
or depreciating or slurring over the surpassing value of his
own witness to the truth. Fiercely he contrasts his personal
insignificance with the divine significance of his message.
Weakness, fear, much trembling, a sensible lack of the per-
suasive arts, he confesses to them all just on purpose that our
"faith might not rest on the wisdom of men, but on the power
of God." 1 "The gospel preached by me is not after man, for
neither from man did I receive it nor was I taught it, but it
came to me through the revelation of Jesus Christ." 2 And
for fear we should still consider his particular presentment
of the Gospel as rather the human expression of his idiosyn-
crasy than the inspired formulation of God's truth, he empha-
sizes and stresses and insists with deadly earnestness on the
specialized character of his revelation; "the mystery which
hath been hidden from former ages and generations; ....
which is Christ (dwelling) in you . . ." 3 whereby when you
read "ye can perceive my insight into this mystery of Christ,"
this mystery of fellowship by which "the nations are fellow-
heirs, fellow members of the Body, fellow partakers of the
promise in Jesus Christ." 4 Nor is it untimely here
to recall this insistence of the Apostle if the thought of it helps
to give pause to such as would treat his doctrine of our incor-
poration with Christ as merely metaphorical, and his most
inspired and dazzling inferences from this doctrine as the
more or less pardonable exuberances of spiritual genius!
To St. Paul then we owe what is more than an applica-
tion of the doctrine of the atonement to ourselves a piercing
principle, an irradiating generalization that seems almost to
reach the heart of every mystery by the splendor of its beams.
This generalization colors the whole context of his teaching;
it is the key to almost every difficulty in the Epistles, even as
it combines and coordinates, vitalizes and transcends aU he
has to say on dogma and devotion. In sum, it is the fact of
our union with Christ, He the Head, we the members and
He and we one Mystical Body a body living with His life,
'1 Cor. 11. 3-5. >Gal. 1. 11, 12.
' Col. 1. 26, 27. Eph. 111. 4-6.
22 THE ATONEMENT IN ST. PAUL [April,
sanctified by that life, sensitive to every surge of that life,
sympathetic, growing, throwing off dead tissue, generating
new cells, exercising faculties and functions, reasoning, will-
ing, seeing, speaking, working, praying, expectant always of
the final consummation, the gathering of the elect in the full-
ness of time. "He is the beginning ... all things hold to-
gether in Him and He is the Head of the Body, the Church,"
and as the Body is the complement of the Head so is the
Church "the fullness of Him Who is wholly fulfilled in all"
the Church being the complement of Him Who finds His full
completion by being united with all of us, His members. 5
The Apostle's generalization clasps and contains all past
and future time. It takes us far back to man's origin and Fall
and right onward to the fulfillment of man's high destiny.
The race that came into being from God is to be borne back
into the being of God. Fallen man is to be "deified" 6 in Christ.
The Saviour of man associates himself with our humanity by
His Incarnation, sucks the poison from our wounded nature
and, so doing, dies; by rising from the dead He raises us to
a new life, imparts and extends that life to us through the
channels of His grace, assimilates, incorporates, identifies us
with Himself as members of that Church, a Mystical Body
of which He is the Head till, at last, amazingly transformed
and wholly free we pass to the blessed fruition and the com-
plete fulfillment.
Once the synthetic value of this vast generalization is
somehow understood, St. Paul, fearful ever of vagueness and
mere word-spinning, presses home its particular application
to the individual or the occasion. In common with every fruit-
ful generalization its merit does not solely, or at all- neces-
sarily, lie in superseding, as in simplifying and harmoniously
combining processes, often considered by us as severed and
distinct, in a fuller synthesis. By applying the generalization
of the calculus the mathematician is enabled to measure the
area of an ellipse or parabola as easily as that of a circle.
The one formula covers each case. Without it three different
and irksome processes are entailed. While refusing to press
this comparison between a generalization in the sundered
realms of abstract science and revelation, may we not say,
' Col. 1. 17, 18; Eph. 1. 23.
A phrase favored above all by the Greek Fathers.
1920.] THE ATONEMENT IN ST. PAUL 23
too, that it is by reason of its manifestation of the strange
parallelism in the worlds of nature and of grace that St.
Paul's generalization is of such value to us?
If Christians are indeed one with Christ "one body and
one Spirit," 7 "He the Head, we the members," 8 then in their
measure and sphere the known principles that rule the human
body are true of the Mystical Body, the known laws that order
the life of experience hold good for the Christ-life within us.
Nay, the certainty with which life in general reproduces its
own kind and develops towards its term, the phenomenon of
growth, the sense of sympathy more finely wrought as we
ascend the scale of animate creation all these principles and
facts will be exemplified in our supernatural life. In view of
all this, how tempting it is to consider the occasional, frag-
mentary, almost haphazard teaching of the Pauline letters as
some epoch-making manual of divine mechanics transform-
ing man into Christ, and nature into grace, and even framing
a simple formula for the ills and pains of humanity in terms
of the crucifixion and death of Jesus Christ Our Lord. St.
Paul repeatedly tells us in one form or another that Christ
is our Chief and Head.
He assumes that Headship from the first instant of His
Incarnation, though we are really incorporated into His
Mystical Body only after the benefits of the atonement have
been extended to us. By the Incarnation Our Lord draws all
humanity to Himself. Throughout His life He is ceaselessly
weaving its tangled threads into His human texture. When
at last He comes to atone for all the sins of humanity, He
does it not by some form of legal proxy, by a merely juridical
transference of sin from fallen man to the Man-God, but
through His assumption of our nature. Contagiously, as it
were, sin passes to the Sinless One by some divinely-permitted
extension of itself, by a sort of capillary attraction and con-
verging flow through myriad channels into Him Who is with-
out spot. "Him Who knew no sin He made to be sin for our
sakes."' On the cross our sins overwhelm Him. Our Saviour's
communion with sinful humanity is actually a sickness unto
death. And so, quite logically, we are bidden to see in that
death the potential death of all humanity to sin. "One
(Christ) died, therefore all died; and He died for all" 10 The
TEph. iv. 4. 1 Cor. xll. 12, et seq. ' 2 Cor. v. 21. 2 Cor. v. 14, 15.
24 THE ATONEMENT IN ST. PAUL [April,
Lamb of God takes away the sins of the world because on the
cross sin is slain. And just as, to save mankind the innocent
Christ draws men's sins upon Himself, so also to save the
Jews, He, though all-innocent, draws down upon Himself the
curse of the Law so justly pronounced upon the Jews for
their transgressions of the Law. 11 We are even reminded
how "in the fullness of time, God sent forth His Son, born of
a woman, born under the Law, that He might redeem them
who were under the Law." 12
In each case then, whether Christ is made sin for us, or
a curse for the Jews and born under the Law to save the Jews
who were born under the Law and had incurred its curse by
their sins, what the Apostle seeks to emphasize is less the fact
itself of the atonement than the essentially corporate char-
acter of the atonement. The roots of the doctrine are the
solidarity and fusion of God with man. This intimate asso-
ciation is even a prerequisite of the atonement. Christ has
to be man to redeem men, a subject of the Law to redeem
those born under the Law, a member of the great family of
sinful humanity to save sinners, clothed with our flesh to
subdue the revolt of our flesh, in closest contact with guilty
men that His sanctifying flesh may touch and heal them,
Himself bearing all our ills and infirmities that so He may
show forth the ideal High Priesthood reconciling God with
men. 18
That in Christ's death we die to sin is the first half of a
great truth. The other and complementary half of the doc-
trine is that we rise to the new life in His Resurrection. For
quite equally in the Apostle's mind our justification through
Christ's atonement is not so much an exchange of gifts be-
tween two parties, or a Godlike return of good for evil, or
even the distribution of a bounty by the great Lord to needy
multitudes, as rather the redundance of the divine vitality
surging through the Risen Christ to us, the extension of salva-
tion from the Risen Man to all men if they will but rise
the corresponding outflow of life from the Source of life (the
Head), to the members. "Jesus was delivered for our sins
and was raised for our justification." 14 These intimately-
social values of Our Lord's death and resurrection are noted
" Gal. 1H. 13. a Ga i. iv . 4) 5.
"Prat. ThtoloQie de St. Paul, vol. 11., p. 249. "Rom. Iv. 25.
1920.] THE ATONEMENT IN ST. PAUL 25
and their significance driven home in the Second Epistle to
the Corinthians. In that letter the Apostle betrays his anxiety
about the Christians at Corinth. He appeals for a renewal
of their confidence in him, seems almost to put himself on his
defence before them. A possible imputation of arrogance he
disclaims by a touching confession of that weakness whose
only strength is God. "If we were beside ourselves" in any-
thing we have said, "it was in God's service! If we are now
in our senses it is in yours. It is the love of Christ that com-
pels us when we reflect on this that One (Christ) died for all,
therefore all died. And He died for all that they who live
should no longer live for themselves but for Him Who died
and rose again for them." Further on he adds that God made
"Him Who knew no sin to be sin for our sakes that we might
become the justness of God in Him!" 1 "
This is not the place to dwell upon that elaborate and
striking series of parallels between Adam, the attainted head
of the human family, and Christ the Antitype and Head Who
restores and more than restores all that in Adam had been
lost, but St. Paul's teaching here is in the fullest accord with
what has already been quoted "for if by the sin of one
(Adam) death reigned through the one (over all men), much
more shall they that receive the abundance and grace of just-
ness, reign in life through the one Jesus Christ." 16 Briefly,
then the sum of the Apostle's teaching is this : Christ concen-
trates our sins upon Himself that he may diffuse His life to
ourselves; associated with Christ we die to sin in His death
and rise to the new life in His resurrection.
Qui creavit te sine te non salvabit te sine te He Who did
without you in your creation will not do without you in your
salvation. God will save no one against His will. Our co-
operation is required if we are to enjoy the benefits of Christ's
atonement. Faith in Christ leads us to the font of baptism.
This sacrament is the mystical realization of the atonement in
the individual. By baptism sin is slain in us and we are
born again to God through our incorporation with Christ and
the immediate communication of His risen life to us. As in
His death and resurrection we all ideally and potentially died
to sin and rose to the new life, so in baptism the virtue and
power of that death and resurrection are applied, actuated
"2 Cor. v. 21. See also Rom. vl. 5-8; 2 Tim. 11. 11. "Rom. V. 17.
26 THE ATONEMENT IN ST. PAUL [April,
and realized in ourselves. "Or are you ignorant that all we
who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His
death? We were buried then with Him through baptism
into death in order that just as Christ was raised from the
dead through the glory of the Father, so we also might go
about in newness of life." 17
To be baptized into the death of Christ is for each one
of us our real but mystical death in Him Who both really and
physically died for us. Though this baptismal death is mys-
tical and not physical, it is a deep reality. Judged by its
effects, it signifies in us the death of original sin and the
death, too, of actual guilt. And as the death is a reality, so
equally is the resurrection of baptism, for the newly baptized
rise out of the regenerating waters reborn, vivified and quick-
ened by the new life of the Risen Christ. St. Leo the Great
expressed this inspired teaching of St. Paul on baptism with a
reserve all the more felicitous in view of his staggering con-
clusion. "While those who are being baptized," he says, 18
"renounce the devil and believe in God, while they pass from
the old life into the new, while the image of the earthly man
is laid aside and the form of the Heavenly taken up, then is
enacted a certain appearance of death and a certain imaging
of resurrection, so that he who is taken up by Christ and takes
up Christ is not the same after the pouring of the waters as
he was before, since the body of the regenerate becomes the
flesh of the Crucified."
But there is a further sense in which we must consider
this Epiphany or showing forth of Christ's atonement in our-
selves, a sense in which that atonement exacts our lifelong co-
operation and in which the death of baptism is only completed
on the deathbed and its resurrection only in our final home-
coming. The death of "the old man" (our guilty nature) is
to be a consequence of our death to sin. "Our old man was
crucified with Him" 19 when we were baptized into the death
of Christ, that is to say the maimed and diseased side of our
nature, the heritage of original sin contracted from the first
Adam died in the contracting of our union with the second
Adam, Christ.
But universal experience makes it only too clear that here
a progressive death and a lifelong crucifixion are entailed
" Rom. vl. 3, 4. ls Leo. Serm. 63. De Pass. Dom. xil. Rom. Tl. 6.
1920.] THE ATONEMENT IN ST. PAUL 27
since the proneness to evil, the instinctive leap of the flesh
against right reason still survive in the bodies of the regener-
ate. This baptismal death therefore is not an event but a
state, "a daily dying," 20 and "always" we have to be "bearing
about in our body the putting to death of Jesus that the life,
too, of Jesus may be manifested in our body." 21 The death
of Christ on the Cross is reenacted in the death of each one's
sins at his baptism and extends thence forward from the font
to the grave. So, too, the resurrection of baptism is a progres-
sive gift, and the reception of the sacrament ushers in a life-
long effort and struggle to win through the grossness of our
clay to the fullness of God through the life of Christ in us. In
this duel of antagonistic elements in this lifelong crucifixion
we experience the extension of the atonement to us. Through
it we become shareholders in the Passion, brought face to
face, each one of us, with the mystery of pain.
So much has been written on the problem and mystery
of pain, especially of late years, that it may not be unseason-
able at this point to gather up some of the Apostle's leading
ideas on Christian suffering, for it does not come within his
scope to deal with suffering apart from Christ. To St. Paul
faith is the explanation and love is the solvent of pain. "If
Christ is in us then is our body dead to sin, but the spirit lives
on account of our justification." 22 That spirit is the Christ-
life within us, fashioning and shaping us into the likeness of
Christ and extending to us a lifelong participation in Chrst's
atonement. St. Paul bids us be "conformed to the Crucified"
and "configured to His death" even as he "with Christ is con-
fixed to the Cross." 23 If Christ is in us our suffering expiates
our sins, propitiates God, is, in fact, a very sacrifice of recon-
ciliation. "Offer your bodies," he urges, "a living victim, holy,
pleasing to God, a spiritual liturgy of your own selves." 24
Elsewhere he instances the sympathy of the whole body
for localized pain to exemplify the sympathy that should
unite the members of the Mystical Body to Christ, their Head.
Proportioned to our sympathy with Christ will be our "suf-
fering in Him," "our communion with His passion," 25 our
endurance of His persecutions. In this spirit the Apostle took
10 1 Cor. xv. 31. n 2 Cor. Iv. 10. Rom. vlii. 10.
13 Cf. Philip, iii. 10; Rom. vi. 5; Gal. ii. 19, et seq.
"Rom. xii. 1. Philip, iii. 10.
28 THE ATONEMENT IN ST. PAUL [April,
his own persecutions, and generalizing from his own expe-
rience he warned us that "all who wish to live devoutly in
Christ Jesus will suffer persecution." 26 He would as much as
say: "If sinful flesh was arrayed against Christ how not
against us in Him? If all the powers of evil combined against
the Just One how should they not also set on the more we
image His justice." To him who lived so wholly "in Christ"
the mystery is not why do the good suffer, but why do they
not suffer or suffer more? Pain then is not only a purgation
or an expiation of sin, but wholly atoning and making us "at-
one" with Christ. It is the sympathetic echo of Christ's Pas-
sion in the holy city of each Christian soul. It is the fulfill-
ment of a promise made with much love. "My chalice you
indeed shall drink." 27 That we Christians can precisely by
our pain drink of this bitter chalice, be in the suffering
Saviour and one with Him, reincarnating His Passion and
effecting His work, be indeed the Atoning Christ in so much
as His Divine nature acts through our painfully transfigured
humanity, is the open message of the Apostle.
Is it the last word? Is it indeed the secret beyond which
none other lies? We hardly dare say. Certainly St. Paul
does not encourage us to hope that the mystery will be less a
mystery in this life. Its significance will only be revealed to
us with that final and complete realization of ourselves "when 28
as pure spirits by law of nature and gift of grace we rejoin
the spiritual source of life." "Only," says St. Paul, "when
the justness which comes through faith in Christ" is fulfilled
and not before, "shall I know Christ and the power of His
resurrection and all that it means to share His sufferings in
my configuration to His death ... for I am not yet made
perfect . . . but I press on in the hope of grasping that for
which I was grasped by Christ Jesus." 29
But the Apostle beseeches us to accompany him yet
further in this quest, to taste and see, to savor and appropriate
the royal bounty and divine gift of pain. For is not this part
of his apostolic vocation? Hear him telling superbly the tale
of his sufferings: "I preach Christ Crucified." 30 "With Christ
I am fixed to the Cross." 31 "God forbid I should boast of
* 2 Tim. iii. 12. "Matt. xx. 33.
28 Martlndale, Life of Monslgnor Benson, vol. ii., p. 360.
"Philip, ill. 9-12. ! Cor. i. 23. "Gal. 11. 19.
1920.] THE ATONEMENT IN ST. PAUL 2!)
anything save the cross of Jesus Christ Our Lord" 32 . . . "for
I bear the weals of the Lord Jesus branded in my body." 33
"I rejoice in my sufferings on your behalf and make up in my
flesh what is lacking to the sufferings of Christ on behalf of
His Body which is the Church." 34 "It is a privilege to suffer," 35
"follow my example," 36 "be ye imitators of me even as I am of
Christ." 37
Let us now briefly sum up these varied aspects of Chris-
tian suffering:
1. Though St. Paul's teaching admits, allows for and
even welcomes Christian pain he does not anywhere re-
veal the mystery of it. On the contrary he holds that this
pain, as part mystery of the extension of the atonement;
will only disclose its full meaning to us when our atone-
ment is complete.
2. Pain in every Christian is the progressive death and
lifelong crucifixion of "the body of our sin." Considered as
the strength of the Christ-life in us through our repugnant
flesh Christwards, it is the inalienable heritage of every
Christian soul. The grain of wheat must die to bring
forth new life. The purgation of pain must precede our
final incorporation with Christ in glory.
3. Again as life tends to generate, give birth to and re-
create its kind and as the life of Christ is the type to
which our lives must be conformed, the Christian cannot
join Christ in glory unless he has joined Him in suffering.
As a corollary of this, the closer the bond of sympathy
uniting Christ and the Christian soul the more intense will
that soul's suffering be.
4. Further, this suffering is endured in Christ and is in
a very real sense Christ's, enhanced by the sacrificial, ex-
piatory and atoning values of His own passion and death.
5. Pain in fine may come to the chosen few as it did to
the Apostle in the nature of a special and divine vocation.
This is the overplus of pain. Its ultimate, but not neces-
sarily immediate, acceptance by the tortured soul of how
much more than its own burden may well account for the
alleviated lot of multitudes of others.
A word of caution may here be necessary. On no ac-
count would we distort any of St. Paul's words into a glorifica-
"Gal. vi. 14. "Gal. vi. 17. Col. i. 24.
Philip, ill. 8. Philip, iii. 17. " 1 Cor. xi. 1.
30 THE ATONEMENT IN ST. PAUL [April,
tion of pain in itself, pain brooded over and dissected, pain
personified, visualized, captured almost and brought face to
face "in the blue flesh of agony." 38 Such a view is as morbid
at least as it is cruel, dangerous and horribly unchristian.
Nor again does St. Paul teach us that pain is to be sought for
its own sake, as though it were a prize from which we could
wrest those spiritual effects which we may ourselves deem
suitable. These are not God's ways. Pain lies in the strip-
ping ourselves of the irrelevant and in the surmounting of
every obstacle to our union with Christ. Further, "it is argu-
able that pain may contract, numb, cripple or embitter a soul
and drive it into disbelief, cynicism or despair .... true
enough. But not indiscriminately will God grant His privi-
lege of suffering. God permits no winds to blow which might
quench a flickering wick, and refuses the shock which breaks
the enfeebled reed. But granting a soul of royal quality, pain
all but infallibly must perfect it. The Crucified is there for
proof." 89
In conclusion, St. Paul's teaching on the atonement may
be considered either dogmatically or morally according as he
has the objective truth or its subjective application in view.
Dogmatically he lays great stress on the Sacrifice in Itself
while disclosing, too, its redemptive and substitutional aspects
and so leading up to the Church's developed doctrine of satis-
faction. Morally, he insists still more on the extension and
application of that atonement to ourselves through Christ's
death and resurrection mystically reenacted in us at baptism,
and progressing towards fulfillment all through our lives. In
his teaching these dogmatic and moral lessons are never dis-
severed or treated apart, but they stand continuously in a sort
of relation of minor premise and conclusion, while underlying
and supporting both these propositions is the general principle
of our solidarity and incorporation with Christ. The unity,
clarity and deep spiritual attractiveness of St. Paul's theology
is due to the grandeur of this generalization so specially re-
vealed to him. His concern in turn is to reveal it to us and
to show us how, every way, we are one with Christ.
"Monsignor Benson, Initiation.
" Martindale, Life of Monsignor Benson, vol. 11., p. 361.
JERUSALEM.
BY KATHARINE TYNAN.
(Good Friday A. D. 33.)
MOTHER, why are people crowding now and staring?
Child, it is a malefactor goes to His doom,
To the high hill of Calvary He's faring,
And the people pressing and pushing to make room
Lest they miss what's to come.
O the poor Malefactor, heavy is His load!
Now He falls beneath it and they goad Him on.
O the road to Calvary's a steep up-hill road
Is there none to help Him with His Cross not one!
Must He bear it all alone?
Here is a country boy with business in the city,
Smelling of the cattle's breath and the sweet hay:
Now they bid him lift the Cross, so they have some pity:
Child, they fear the Malefactor dies on the way
And robs them of their play.
Has He no friends then, no father nor mother?
None to wipe the sweat away nor pity His fate?
There's a woman weeping and there's none to soothe her:
Child, it is well the Seducer expiate
His crimes that are great.
Mother, did I dream He once bent above me,
This poor Seducer with the thorn-crowned head?
His hands on my hair and His eyes seemed to love me
Suffer little children to come to Me, He said
His hands and feet are red.
Hurrying through Jerusalem on business or pleasure
People hardly pause to see Him go to His death,
Whom they held five days ago more than a King's treasure,
Shout hosannas, flinging many a wreath
For Jesus of Nazareth.
THE POETRY OF FATHER GARESCHE.
BY KATHERINE BREGY.
MERICA by which we mean our own particular
and predominant slice of it has been fortunate
in its poet-priests. First among them, perhaps,
to attain secular popularity was the gentle poet
of Civil War times, Father Abram Ryan. And
first as consummate artist, remains the incomparable John
Banister Tabb. But the whole roll-call is a long and fair
one, in which almost every religious order may be found repre-
sented, with the professor and the parochus by no means in
the background. To enumerate the entire dramatis personss
of our contemporary priestly chorus is practically impossible
while to mention but a few would be ungracious! Hence
must the present pages be dutifully dedicated to one single
son of that St. Ignatius, who seems to have shared with the
more obviously lyrical Francis of Assisi a certain monopoly
in handing down the poetic patrimony. The son in question
is a youg priest already well known in many fields of re-
ligious and civic activity, the Rev. Edward F. Garesche, of the
Society of Jesus.
Holy Orders, for any son of man, mean cross-bearing,
as well as crown-wearing. They comprehend in modern life
at once the most regal and the most democratic, the most re-
mote and the most requisite of the professions. For the man
who would walk as poet, too, priesthood comes with quite par-
ticular qualifications and particular disabilities. It may be
both a blessing and a bane. On the one hand it presupposes
a certain attachment to spiritual things, a mind attuned to
harmonies not altogether of this world, a habit of looking
deeply into the deeds of men, and of judging them by God's
standards rather than by the standards of the world and the
World's Wife. All this is good for the poet. Good, also, very
good, is that tradition of scholarship, that inherited culture
of mind and heart, which is so closely bound up with the
priestly state that not even the most humble or the most ob-
1920.] THE POETRY OF FATHER GARESCH6 33
jective of subjects can quite escape it. On the other hand, the
straightness and strictness with which a priest's duties are
marked, his days filled, are but little conducive to the im-
perious spontaneity of the muse. It is hard for the apostle to
be also the artist; although both feats have been re-
peatedly, and conspicuously well, accomplished. But the very
reverence with which his faithful people regard the Levite
is heavy with danger when he turns to art. Because his hands
dispense God's sacraments, will not something mistakenly
sacrosanct be imputed to their other and quite secular works?
Alas, yes ! For to the conscientious artist it is a real handicap to
miss the healthy competition, the quick give-and-take of criti-
cism, which normally follow an entrance into his chosen field.
And if the priest's efforts are too easily praised betimes, they
are also too readily importuned. He will be asked to paint
every cell in the monastery, as well as the chapel walls he
will be urged to celebrate in verse every pious occasion of
parochial or diocesan moment! And so, unless he be very
strongly endowed with the faculty of self-criticism, he will
fall into facility, into utilitarianism. He will produce much,
for an audience easily pleased and worst of all, he may end
by being pleased himself. He may end, in very excess of
beneficence, by forgetting the eternal, abysmal distinction
between serviceable journeyman verse and the Lady Poetry!
Father Garesche it is one of his chief merits is eager to
remember this distinction. In fact, he is more and more fully
achieving the distinction as time goes on. Each volume of his
poems has been better, conspicuously better, than its prede-
cessor. And this advance has been accomplished in spite of,
or at least, along with, a life literally crowded with more than
the usual sacerdotal duties; with duties requiring travel, office
routine and a multiplicity of executive effort. Admirably has
he kept, even held, the balance between an active and a con-
templative career.
It was in St. Louis, Missouri, that Edward Francis Gares-
che was born, on the twenty-seventh of December, 1876. For
the sake of the eternal fitness of things, it is impossible not to
wish that his birth could be recorded just one day later, on
the feast of the Holy Innocents. But, perhaps, in his case
the feast was but kept by a few hours' anticipation, as it has
been most graciously and consistently celebrated ever since
VOL. CXI. 3
34 THE POETRV OF FATHER GARESCHE [April,
throughout his work. In his blood were strains of French
Huguenot, of English Quaker, of Dutch and Celtic ancestry;
while the Catholic faith, lost long ago in France but refound
in this New World, burned for the family as a prized and
vigilantly tended lamp. The boy's instruction was early placed
in the hands of the Jesuits, with whom he stayed for practi-
cally his whole scholastic career being graduated from St.
Louis University in 1896, and remaining to take his Master of
Arts degree two years later. But it was not the priesthood
to which Edward Garesche looked forward at that time. It
was rather the legal profession, in which he took his degree
at the St. Louis Law School of Washington University in 1898.
He was, in fact, a successful practising attorney in the St.
Louis and federal courts for two more years. Then he quietly
closed his books and his oflice closed his eyes and his heart
upon all that secular life could offer him and entered the
Novitiate of the Society of Jesus at Florissant, Missouri. St.
Ignatius had triumphed over Blackstone; but then, St. Igna-
tius is used to victories, and will have his own.
The long period of Jesuit intensive training, fourteen
years, was slightly shortened for Edward Garesche, as he had
already followed his regular collegiate courses under the So-
ciety's direction. So, after seven more years at St. Louis Uni-
versity this time devoted to theology and philosophy and
the usual pedagogic experiences at Cincinnati and St. Mary's,
Kansas, he was ordained to the holy priesthood at the church
of St. Francis Xavier in his native city, in the June of 1912.
Father Garesche had already contributed in verse and
prose to various Catholic periodicals, and directly after his
ordination he spent a summer in New York City, working
upon the editorial staff of America. Then he was summoned
back to St. Louis, to undertake the entire publication of a
new magazine devoted chiefly to the Blessed Virgin and the
activities of her Sodality, to be called The Queen's Work.
The story of this little periodical, which in five years has
grown from such hopeful roots of nothingness up to a circula-
tion of one hundred and twenty thousand, is rather remark-
able. Frankly dedicated to devotional and charitable en-
deavors, it has, under Father Garesche's inspiration, promoted
innumerable good works throughout our country; at the same
time maintaining a lively literary interest by means of its
1920.] THE POETRY OF FATHER GARESCH& 35
poetic contests and articles of artistic as well as popular
appeal.
The editor's own work on his infant publication has na-
turally, and from the first, been constant the collected edi-
torials having already formed the nucleus of several prose
volumes, Your Interests Eternal, Yoiir Soul's Salvation, The
Things Immortal, and a book of meditations on the Blessed
Virgin, entitled The Most Beloved Woman. These are pages
of eminently popular devotion and discipline, addressed to
young people, to busy people, chiefly, indeed, to Sodalists who
might wish to fulfill their own large and often latent possi-
bilities of sanctity in everyday life. Perhaps, without too
great strain, this little series of books might be called a newer,
briefer, more democratic version of the monumental Father
Faber; shall one say, Frederick William Faber vigorously
"Americanized ?"
Together with the prose works and duties of administra-
tion just mentioned, Father Garesche has stood sponsor for
three volumes of verse and it is chiefly with these that the
present study is concerned. The first of the flock, The Four
Gates, was published in 1913, and its title-poem proved imme-
diately illuminating:
Four are the gates
To the splendors immortal,
Which the slow hours swing
Open and close.
'Tis Heaven that waits
Just past the portal
Of Summer and Spring,
Of Autumn and Snows.
That is to say, while the poems are grouped nominally about
earth's seasons while they contain, indeed, numbers of grace-
ful nature pieces, poems of fire and water, of the star, the
bird, even of the cheery and indomitable mullein,
Straight-stemmed and tall, as peering from afar
To see where yon the browsing cattle are,
one feels that their motivation is essentially religious. They
are such stuff as prayers, rather than dreams, are made of;
songs which might fittingly claim the harp of the young Levite
36 THE POETRY OF FATHER GARESCHt [April,
hastening to his chrism, or awed from its fresh anointing.
Here are religious narratives like "St. Maurice and the Theban
Legion" "St John at Ephesus," et cetera, with a tranquil
befuty much like that of Aubrey deVere. Here are verses To
Young Priest," to "The First Mass" with scores of Manan
poems- and while all show vital sympathy and a strong sense
of music, some are not free from that tendency toward over-
accentuation, toward making much of a slight incident, which
T generally obtrudes upon professionally religious verse.
Over against these will flutter a lyric of truest ongina
even of naive and whimsical distinction, such as
Snowflakes"-while, indeed, the fragrance of Stevenson s
immortal Garden of Verse already penetrated Father Gare*
che's poems to children. Because this is a vein to be
more richly and tenderly developed in his later work 1
delectable lines To a Holy Innocent may be quote
Sudden to felicity
Heaven's herald summoned thee-
Barely hadst begun to be!
What a gulf, from shore to shore,
Thou didst flee in safety o'er-
Nothingness, to Heaven's door!
Wrench and wound and toils and woe,
Thou wilt never come to know
All thou 'scapest here below!
y but guess it all, and pray
For us others who delay,
Coming by a longer way!
!
The' World and the Waters, Father Garesche's second
poetic collection, was published in 1918. It showed a distinct
forward leap in the power of the poet-priest, and the cap v
along the two lines already suggested, the poetry of cluL
and the poetry of nature interpreted Godward. Circumstances
tender and tragic enough-yet destined to be even more tragic
and more tender before the tale should be told to its ending-
have brought particular celebrity to one very lovely po
"To Rose in Heaven," which Father Garesche wrote in qui
1920.] THE POETRY OF FATHER GARESCH& 37
reaction to the death of Joyce Kilmer's little daughter. Of
this poem, Joyce Kilmer himself wrote from France, and
with his customary fine vehemence of praise : "It is so exquisite
that I cannot write or speak all my deep appreciation of it.
But I know that it is not my personal feeling alone that makes
me consider it one of the noblest elegiac poems in our lan-
guage." On the technical side, it is worth noting that in this
poem Father Garesche makes not his first, but perhaps his
first consummately successful use of the Patmorean ode-form,
which he has since employed in much of his best work with
such memorable beauty and power. The Eucharistic poems
of this volume, very brief and very simple in the main, but
fragrant with truest devotion to Christ's "palpitant, wistful
Bread," should really be more popularly known among Catho-
lics. And "Sunbrowned with Toil," a little colloquy between
St. Francis and the Tuscan laborer, is a poem of solid beauty
solid, even although the upheavals of modern labor would
seem to relegate it into some realm of fair Utopian fancies
clustering about "the constant service of the antique world."
Taken for all in all, there is probably no better example
of Father Garesche's general method and general excellence
in the poetic understanding of nature than "The Voice of
Creatures." It may very well be questioned whether this
little poem is not quite worthy of Wordsworth in its affection-
ate and authentic observation of the big and little things of
the daily miracle, in its direct simplicity and its sincere emo-
tion "recollected in tranquillity:"
Oh, wonder of the commonest things of God!
The lowliest of His works can startle thought
Beyond pursuit of words. A power as vast
Dances yon dust-mote whirling in the ray
As stirs the star-dust o'er us. Every touch
Of timid green that bids young Spring good-morn
Hath in its juicy veins life's miracle. The sun
That veils his western fires is not so strange
As the dim worm his swift declining gleam
Sees glittering in the grass. Far swung aloft
The swallows circle in their evening skies
Who bears them, freed from earth? Oh, in the deep
Of yonder melting clouds, and in the far
Pure fields of air, and in the quiet world,
38 THE POETRY OF FATHER GARESCHt [April,
The answer sings and murmurs to mine ears,
With voice of winds and birds and leafy groves;
Soft, whispering accents, clear to him who lists,
Chorus eternal, "Praise our Maker, God!"
This poem, as hinted a few lines back, represents the general
excellence, the poetic tableland, as it were, of its author. But
Father Garesche has scaled more spectacular and starry peaks.
In fact, it remained for this young Missouri Jesuit to celebrate
with anything like worthiness the natural glories of Niagara
to compass, for that white American miracle, an ode that
might stand with the best in American literature. Like most
fine things, it should be read entire; but space permits the
quotation of only a single stanza here, a stanza of superb
metaphor and music:
Tongue of the Continent! Thou whose hymning shakes
The bosom of the lakes!
O sacrificial torrent, keen and bright,
Hurled from thy glorious height!
Thou sacerdotal presence, clothed in power,
At once the victim and the white-robed priest,
Whose praise throughout the ages hath not ceased,
Whose altar steams with incense every hour!
Lo, in all days, from thy white waters rise
The savors of perpetual sacrifice!
I see pale prophecy of Christ's dear blood
The transubstantiation of thy flood !
There echoes somewhat more than the "poet of the return to
Nature:" there, surely, is a shaking harmony reminiscent of
that Francis Thompson who was fain to be "poet of the return
to God."
Another book of poems came from Father Garesche's
hand that same year, 1918 the tiniest and most modest of
volumes, yet weighty enough with the burden of its title, War
Mothers. In point of fact, this little book of ten lyrics, dedi-
cated "to one lately gone," Joyce Kilmer, is for uniform excel-
lence and wide appeal the most important yet achieved by
the poet-priest. Here was reached absolute mastery of the
ode form which, as hinted before, he has been able to make
both simple and popular which, indeed, he has adapted with
surprising skill to the sequence of unstrained human speech
and the outpouring of powerful emotion, tuning it, often, to a
1920.] THE POETRY OF FATHER GARESCHE 39
very rare key of pathos or of ecstasy. Very tender, very noble
are the verses "To Blessed Jeanne D'Arc," and to "Our Lady
of the Battlefield," while the title poem must have brought
comfort to many an anxious mother's heart during the recent
conflagration. But, perhaps, the best poem of all one which
may well be singled out as the best single poem Father Gares-
che has yet written is the chant "To a Warrior Gone." No
higher praise need be given the lyric than to say it is entirely
worthy of its subject, worthy of the high-souled poet, Sergeant
Kilmer, who did not lose, but gave, his life:
O Lord Michael, puissant and glorious,
Tell me how he came to thee, where thy legions are,
From the dark and from the din, the stark fray uproarious,
Winning up his eager way from star unto star.
Did he come before his time from that fight furious,
Leaping up the lanes of light before he heard a call,
Ere he wearied of the earth, of heaven curious,
Casting mortal days away ere he gleaned them all?
How I fain would hear of him in that new mustering
Where his welcomed spirit shines midst his holy peers,
Where the gallant hosts of God, in gold glory clustering,
Shout for the new recruits coming through the years.
* * * *
He will touch a mighty harp to great lays and beautiful;
They will gather there to list as we came here.
While he sings to every saint fair songs and dutiful,
Chanting with a new voice, charming heaven's ear.
He will give to Christ the King his great heart's loyalty,
Loving to be near to Him, eyes on Him alone.
What will his station be in God's bright royalty?
He will join the flaming band that stand about the throne;
He will watch the White Throne, his bright lance carrying,
And be Our Lady's messenger, her little ones to aid;
He will love to come again, in old haunts tarrying,
Bringing Blessed Mary's help when we cry afraid;
He will walk in heaven's streets and seek their holy history,
Loving every stone of them worn by human feet;
He will yearn to untwine the stars' sweet mystery
Oh, the quest for holy lore, he will find it sweet!
O Lord Michael, puissant and glorious,
Tell me how he came to thee, where thy legions are,
From the dark and from the din, the stark fray uproarious,
Winning up his eager way from star unto star!
40 THE POETRY OF FATHER GARESCHE [April,
There are three other poems to the soldier-poet in this same
volume, but the brightness of this apostrophe dims them all.
It has sheer ecstasy in the simplest words simple, indeed, as
a prayer or as a tear.
The more closely one lives among poets, the more thor-
oughly is one convinced of the naturalness of their calling
of its harmony, indeed, with the other natural and beautiful
and necessary things of life. Joyce Kilmer, at one extreme,
fashioning his masterful song of "Rouge Bouquet" out of the
transubstantiated mud of a dug-out in France at the other,
Father Edward Garesche, writing a really poignant ode to
War Mothers or to Blessed Margaret Mary, as he speeds from
one post of duty to another in a cross-country Pullman have
each, in different measure, the same salutary lesson to teach.
They teach beyond peradventure that the poet is, and should
be, a very human person first of all; not less, in fact, but
more human because more highly sensitized than the rest of
men: endowed, as Wordsworth long ago put it, "with more
lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness" . . . one
who "rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that
is in him." Here, then, is the poet-priest's authentic patent
of nobility, he rejoices more than other men in the spirit of
life that is in him! He rejoices more, or at least more articu-
lately, in the consecration of his daily life, in the beauty of
the world about him, above all in the glory of the Faith he
serves as chosen vessel. He sees the glory of simple things,
the nearness and simplicity of sublime things. And the erratic
and erotic vagaries, by which whole hosts of lesser poets make
bids every other day for a cheap and easy fame, must be to
him as though they were not.
Modestly has Father Garesche come to his dual task, ask-
ing no particular dispensation from duties high in themselves,
but perhaps over-weighty for one who would bear also the
burden of song. He has not taken himself or his gift with
over-seriousness, but as part of the robust and varied day's
work; feeling only, as he somewhere said, that the sum of
Catholic poetry in English which can be defended as essen-
tially poetic and essentially Catholic is not so large but that
one may hope to do service by increasing it, "at least in one
or two pages." He has so served and so increased it! He has
shown the beauty of holiness to men and women, and little
1920.] DAWN 41
children, too, both within the Church and beyond. Whether
the future permits him to sow and reap still more generously
in his art, or assigns him to less flowery plots of the eternal
harvest fields, he will at least have justified to himself the title
of poet. For what, after all, does the title mean? Many wise
men in many strange lands have disputed the matter, but a
rarely-tuned contemporary genius one who sings of "old, for-
gotten, far-off things," when he is not soldiering or hunting or
lecturing gives as fine a definition as our own generation is
likely to come on. Let Lord Dunsany, of County Meath, sum
up the question for priest and layman, too :
"What is it to be a poet? It is to see at a glance the glory
of the world, to see beauty in all its forms and manifestations,
to feel ugliness like a pain, to resent the wrongs of others as
bitterly as one's own, to know mankind as others know single
men, to know nature as botanists know a flower, to be thought
a fool, to hear at moments the clear voice of God."
DAWN.
BY ALICE CASHEL.
SONG, pure from the throat of the lark,
Floats through the heather land.
Peace, pouring from out the dark,
Falls on the golden strand.
Dawn radiant out of the gloom
Floods all the purple hills.
The dull world watching awaits its doom
As on high the pure note thrills.
A world grown weary a world grown sad!
A world lost on its way;
Battles and tempest the man gone mad!
Hush! the lark greets the Day.
THE LAST STRONGHOLD OF BOYHOOD.
BY S. H. N.
T may seem most whimsical to those who have
heard many an indictment of orphanages, to have
the assertion made that in some of them are found
boys in all their naturalness; indeed, that the
last stronghold the kingdom of boyhood can
boast of holding is an orphan asylum. That there is a king-
dom of boyhood needs no proof, for, in the high courts of
judgment, it has been recognized through the years, and to
it embassies have come from adult realms to placate it when
offended. Yes, and it has been the gracious deed of many
former citizens of the kingdom to set forth in glowing words
the achievements of this powerful nation, flaunting its banner
in the face of all, the banner so dear to their hearts, because
it represents to them the land of long-gone days
When they were young,
Sweet childish days, that were as long,
As twenty days are now.
At the outset, let it be remembered that the kingdom is
not an organized government in a modern sense, with all the
ills organization entails; but it is a state sufficient for its pur-
pose, to provide the utmost happiness for its loyal subjects.
In the kingdom, there is no law of descent, Salic or other-
wise, as with most simple peoples; and the king of Boydom,
albeit he be king only for a day, is the oldest boy, the best
fighter or the loudest talker; for boys will not give allegiance
except to the mighty, and only to him while he remains su-
preme and uncrowned. It may be seen from this that the
state of Boydom could not be a republic; for not votes, but
prowess in some form gains fealty and homage. And be-
cause they are citizens of no mean realm, boys do not take
kindly to the rule and government of adults: an alien yoke
irks a subject people, and so it may be said that boys are po-
tential rebels.
1920.] THE LAST STRONGHOLD OF BOYHOOD 43
This tendency to rebel, never goes very far in
most cases, because the boy is more or less isolated, and,
at best, meets his peers only for a few short hours a day
from his point of view, a few all too short hours a day; so the
dominating influence of elders in home and school is potent
and effective in checking the inclination, which, one who
knows boys can see, is ever but beneath the surface. Whether
it is best for the boy to be so dominated, is debatable. For
grown people think their duty is done, when they force the
boy to adopt their own ideas before he has become adolescent.
They are content if they can compel him to walk in the hard,
flowerless ways of men, before he has outworn the magic
carpet which makes the kingdom such a land of enchantment.
Their appreciation of much boyish gear is so utterly wrong
because their eyes no longer see with the rainbow-hued, won-
der-working glasses of youth: as far as they are concerned,
"there has passed away a glory from the earth," and they
desire that it should pass away from boyhood also.
"We of this self-conscious, incredulous generation, senti-
mentalize our children," Francis Thompson says, "analyze
our children, think we are endowed with a special capability
to sympathize and identify ourselves with children: we play
at being children. And the result is that we are not more
childlike, but our children are less childlike. It is so tiring
to stoop to the child; so much easier to lift the child up to
you. Know you what it is to be a child? It is to be some-
thing very different from the man of today. It is to have a
spirit yet streaming from the waters of Baptism; it is to believe
in love, to believe in loveliness, to believe in belief; it is to
turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into horses, lowness
into loftiness, and nothing into everything, for each child has
a fairy godmother in its own soul: it is to live in a nutshell
and to count yourself the king of infinite space; it is
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
It is to know not as yet that you are under sentence of life,
nor petition that it be commuted into death. When we
44 THE LAST STRONGHOLD OF BOYHOOD [April,
become conscious in dreaming that we dream, the dream is on
the point of breaking; when we become conscious in living
that we live, the ill dream is just beginning."
And many, far too many, are all too painfully aware that
they live, and they would have those blissfully unaware of the
fact, sobered and made old before their time, by the weight
of custom that lies upon themselves "heavy as frost, and deep
almost as life." And yet, in our dislike of the old-fashioned
boy, of the boy older than his years, and far aloof from boyish
play, we admit, even despite our theories, that this domination
is not best for him.
Now in an orphan asylum, the boys are so large a unit,
and have so many opportunities for the interchange of thought
and opinion, and are left together to their own devices for so
large a portion of the day, under supervision it is true, but to
their own devices, nevertheless, that they reveal, as few boys
elsewhere reveal, the normal attitude of boys towards this
domination. Hence, there is far more truth than is first ap-
parent, in the statement, that an asylum is the last stronghold
that withstands the assaults of the enemy. It is true that the
enemy is within the gates, but there is an inner hold still un-
taken, and its walls are adamantine against all attack.
"Here," and the sequel will show that "here" is used ad-
visedly, the viewpoint of the boys is so nai've, that they cannot
understand that a superior thinks differently than they, and
the invariable appreciation of the best of advice and counsel, if
it does not concur with their own views, or fit in with their own
desires, is: "Oh, he is just saying that," or "He is only saying
that." In other words, he really thinks as we do in the matter,
but his position makes him say the contrary. And "he is only
saying that" would go far to explain many a supposed case
of disobedience. However, there are those who argue that
boys are naturally disobedient, and from sheer perversity do
so many forbidden things. It may be so; but much can be
said for the boy's point of view, that he looks upon older
people, in general, as his natural enemies, ever checking and
hampering his play and games with laborious duties and irk-
some obligations. But even in this final stronghold of the na-
tion, there is no organized opposition, for the powers that be
have the means of punishment, and the leaders of the opposi-
tion would be vicarious victims for the rest, and vicarious
1920.] THE LAST STRONGHOLD OF BOYHOOD 45
suffering has no place in the economy of the kingdom. But
there is something almost as effective as organized opposition,
and herein is the inner stronghold of the nation, impregnable
to all assaults, there is the tacit understanding that rules, and
commands are to be made void as often as possible, and that
disobedience is the thing, when it "can be gotten away with,"
yes, and if the occasion offer, the standard of revolt is to be
raised.
Surely all this springs from the feeling, for boys can have
no conviction in the matter, that Boydom is an oppressed race,
and any evasion is legitimate. The Belgians, during the late
War and the occupation of their country, were not outwardly
more docile and inwardly more rebellious than boys are.
That resistance is secret, does not make it any the less effective,
as parents and elders know who have to deal with citizens of
the kingdom with a grievance.
The attitude towards school is another instance of how
natural boys are "here." Because of the insistence of parents
and teachers on the value of education, there are found boys
"away" who profess to like school and, rarer still, who do like
school; but "here" those who pretend to like school are few,
and those who really like it are unknown. Books, apart from
pirate stories and cowboy tales, and such treasure trove, are
merely instruments of teachers to make them miserable, and
the teachers who wonder why boys are so prone to mutilate
and deface, if not destroy books furnished them, cannot see
how it delights them to "get revenge" on the books when they
dare not revenge themselves on the teacher for the misery
he inflicts. And that it is a misery to coop up these bundles of
nervous energy for so many hours a day, all would concede,
even those who admit it is necessary. It is but another in-
dictment Mother Eve will have to face on the last day; for
had she not been such a seeker after knowledge, her children
would have, without study, all they need to know.
Now, there are boys who like composition and arith-
metic and geography, but the bane of all boys' lives is gram-
mar. For the grammar of the classroom, and with allowance
for the difference in matter, the same could be said for spell-
ing, is made by those who are more or less influenced (English
only is considered) by the classical languages, while the gram-
mar of ordinary conversation is created by usage and made
46 THE LAST STRONGHOLD OF BOYHOOD [April,
by those who speak the language. And to the degree that a
people is influenced by the standards of grammarians, we
have a cultivated speech; but the popular tongue is none the
less grammatical, since grammar serves primarily to enable
one to be understood, and this, every dialect, be it soever
crude, does well. Consequently, as with other simple peoples,
boys dislike grammar as artificial, though the word is not in
their vocabulary. But where else than "here" would you find
boys able to formulate arguments that would justify their un-
grammatical state? When they have been corrected for mis-
takes in grammar, with no thought of impertinence, answers
like these have been given: "Well, anyway, we don't have to
talk that way (grammatically) until we go away." "There is
no school today, so we can talk 'here talk.' " "We don't have
to talk 'way talk' (correct English) except in class and away."
For there is a manner of speaking "here" that amounts to a
dialect: it is peculiar to the place, and is another argument
for the flourishing of the final stronghold of the kingdom in
an asylum, for one of the signs of nationality is a native lan-
guage. Basically, it is English, or as we say, "American," for
to us English is a foreign tongue, as the child revealed who
told the priest that his mother did not speak English, but did
speak American.
It is astonishing how quickly a newcomer picks up this
"here talk," using it with all the assurance of being correct,
and with full knowledge that he will be understood by his
peers in speaking their language "familiar, but by no means
vulgar." There is a charm beyond words in seeing a boy from
the streets, who had lost all the romantic possibilities of "sup-
pose," rediscovering for himself all its wonder-working magic.
His naturalness had been blighted by "No boy plays sissy
games;" "Be sensible now, Willie;" "Aw, be a man;" and all
the other phrases of unimaginative men, but "here" his boy-
hood comes into a second spring, and blooms and flourishes
into beauty. And it is a nimble adult imagination that can
companion a boy when he sets forth on the sea, uncharted
even to himself, of the "Let's suppose," and "Let's pretend,"
to frolic in flights of imagination that make the "stunts" of air
pilots pale into insignificance.
One of the first terms an observing visitor notes is the use
of "here" as opposed to "way." Anything that comes from the
1920.] THE LAST STRONGHOLD OF BOYHOOD 47
outside, or is brought from the outside, be it candy, a hat or a
baseball team is "way candy," a "way hat" or "the way nine;"
while our possessions are "here candy," "a here hat" and "here
nines." "Father, is that a here horse?" was the question that
baffled a new chaplain with a strange horse. The asylum is
the "here place" or simply "here." Consequently a lad was
correct, asylumly speaking, though puzzling to any "way"
person, when he asked at an exhibition of Belgian draft
horses in the city, "Have we horses here better than those
horses there?" While a boy is in the house, he is a "here guy;"
when he leaves, he becomes "a way guy," but to the uninitiated,
"There's lots of way guys up here today" is simply jargon.
There are names for bees and butterflies based on findings
unknown to naturalists other than the "here kind." Butter-
flies are "red lokers and yellow lokers, white millers and yel-
low millers, colored Japans and black Japans, bulls-eyes and
kings" according to colorings and markings. Bees, and as far
as we are concerned, wasps and hornets are bees also, are
"xaminations, waxies, Jeromes, coal oils, bumbolos, kings and
she cornets, Britishers and Chinas." "The king is a large black
bee with nine stingers;" "the waxy has a crooked stinger and
can't sting much." And they know these things, these em-
pirical naturalists, " "cause I let 'em sting me." "The xamina-
tion keeps looking 'round;" the she-cornet (hornet), from its
habit, doubtless, of rubbing its forelegs together, "has a knife
and fork;" "the Jerome (drone) is a big, lazy bee and lets
the others work." Then the different varieties of wild bees
are not varieties really, but male or female bees of different
years of age, and they know the ages! Their natural history
is mixed; but it is uncanny how they classify according to
"here" terminology, a darting butterfly or a swift bee. And
the lore they have gathered and handed down about animals
and insects is remarkable.
All boys have the faculty of bestowing nicknames, and no
matter how the newly-named regards his "christening" it is
idle to object, for in the kingdom titles are given with what
amounts to an accolade, and, for honor or dishonor, are con-
ferred in perpetuity. To a greater degree, perhaps, than else-
where, we have the laughable use of words caught incorrectly
from elders. Among the seeds a boy was going to plant were
"some government examples;" when asked what he was in
48 THE LAST STRONGHOLD OF BOYHOOD [April,
the animal kingdom, another gave this utterly unexpected
reply: "I'm a union bean." Best of all was the calling of a
sulphur spring by a boy who knew neither word, "the egg
pood," and he called it that " 'cause it smells like eggs."
This brings out another interesting point, true for all
children; with all their limitations of vocabulary, they are
always able to express themselves, coining a new word, v. g.,
"wing-flies" for butterflies, or giving a "regular" word a new
meaning, v. g., "egg-pood." For be it remembered, as Alice
Meynell says, "A child thinks grown-up people . . . make
words as occasion befalls. A child would be surprised to
know how irritably poets are refused the faculty and author-
ity which he thinks belong to the common world." When a
lay teacher, for "humbugging," used a lot of big words, his self
complacency was scattered to the four winds, when a lad,
smiling, blurted out: "Aw! you're makin' 'em up."
Each boy in the house has some daily duty, and is said to
be "on dairy, on office, on chickens," etc., through all the
activities of this large place. If dismissed, he is "off Brothers,
off dining-room, off shoe shop," as the case might be. "On
minding," being monitor, is the only temporary task we have.
Now these duties and tasks are prized or disprized according
to their own standards. Consequently, if a boy be put "off"
any work he likes, were he asked why, in nine cases out of
ten, the answer would be: "Brother got jealous of me." For
if the boys envied him, the Brother in charge must also. So
it happens, that to tell a boy he can go back to the yard, if he
does not do his work, is enough. But it is recognized "here"
also, that all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. So
outside of school and duties, there is much time for play and
business.
"Business" is used advisedly. The odds and ends that a
boy accumulates in his pockets and everywhere he can, have
been a constant cause of teasing and laughter to those who
have left childhood far behind. They speak of it contemptu-
ously as "trash," and in so doing, prove they have forgotten a
vital part of their own boyhood. Nevertheless, their opinion
has weight, and many a boy "away" gathers and cherishes
trash in secret, lest he be ridiculed. Therefore, it enters into
trade and commerce only at intervals and irregularly, and
more or less covertly. "Here," however, because the boys are
1920.] THE LAST STRONGHOLD OF BOYHOOD 49
fortunately so large a unit, and able to ignore the smiles or
views of the minority, a public opinion of our own has been
created that has taken away the stigma of opprobrium from
"trash," and the word is used with all honor and respect. In
no sense of the term do we consider a collector of trash "a
snapper-up of unconsidered trifles," for to us, it is valuable
and makes its owner an object of envy and respect. It is
cherished with all openness and pride, being property, as will
be shown later on, and a permanent article of exchange. Em-
bryonic merchants are dealing in it "here," who bid fair to
make their mark when they leave.
To give your trash to another, is to prove that other is
your best friend. And the man who is proffered the little all
of a boy on the point of leaving, is doubly blessed : once, for
having won a friendship like no other in this life, and once,
for being thought capable of understanding. For the shyest of
creatures is a boy, when his affections are liable to be smiled
at or made little of; he never carries his heart on his sleeve
for daws to peck at, as any one can know who tries to have
him repeat, in public, words or signs of affecton tendered in
private.
As has been indicated here and there in the foregoing, we
play many of the games of more fortunate boys "away." But
it is a blessing that we can and do get amusement in things,
other boys, more influenced by older standards, would think
"mean." To us, who have so little, nothing is valueless. But
there are games and sports decidedly national in this little
world of ours. A favorite sport is "charging a hive," and it
will be seen how heroic a sport this is, when it is borne in mind
that the "hive" is really a hornet's nest. Armed with clods of
earth and rocks, with no other protection than caps or coats
held before eager faces, boy after boy charges the hive, bangs
his weapon at the bees, and runs back for more ammunition.
This continues, until the bees are killed or dispersed. But on
the army's side there are casualties also. While the battle is
in progress, and the charging and recharging remind one of a
battle, a little soldier may dash up to you, clinging to his knee
with both hands: "Gee! I got three hot ones!" "Three hot
ones?" The ever-ready interpreter translates, "He means he
got stung three times."
The hive thus obtained at the cost of innumerable hot
VOL. cxi. 4
50 THE LAST STRONGHOLD OF BOYHOOD [April,
ones, on face and neck and body, becomes the cherished pos-
session of the boy who was daring enough to dash in and dig
up the hive, for usually it is in the ground, while there
are still many hornets storming about. He puts it into a box
to "watch the young ones (larvae) hatch out." One such hive
was carried not only in the yard, but into church and class,
dining-room and dormitory for weeks, the owner placing his
own "jarred stuff" in the box so "the young ones can get some-
thin' to eat." As a special concession, he allowed some boys to
peek into the box, but not many, for after it had lost its at-
traction for himself, he traded it to a boy who had not been
allowed, and wisely, too, to see it.
"Knocking bees and butterflies" is another sport. When
one sallies across the yard, there is a call of "first" by the one
who sees it, and "second" by the second, and so on; and it is
an example of Boydom's law to see how carefully they gener-
ally allow the "first" and "second" their turn to knock the bee,
before the others, in the order of calling out, take their chance.
Owing to our lack of marbles and tops and the money for the
purchase of them, trash is also used in games. No boys "away,"
with "really dobes, agates and comps" play marbles that
cause more rivalry and contention than games with skate trash
do "here." Soldier games, with skate trash for bullets, finger
and thumb for guns and odd dominoes or "skinny hunks of
wood" for soldiers, excite as much as if they had all the war
implements of other boys. Cheers burst forth from them when
a sole surviving checker is killed, like Goliath, with a pebble;
and tears are in angry eyes if the enemy has several dominoes
standing, when the last of the old guard falls.
Like other nations, these citizens realize, more or less
clearly one is inclined to think, that once they have lost their
language and customs they will lose their identity. Their
motto seems to be the equivalent of Nihil innovetar. "This is
the way it is done in the yard;" "That is the way we talk
here;" "This is the way the boys here play it;" are rocks upon
which many a well-meaning but officious adult has met ship-
wreck. The fabled immutability of the laws of the Medes and
the Persians is as dew in the summer sun, compared to the
tenacity of the boys to their ways and terms.
Of the one hundred who would laugh at their odd verb
forms, and unusual plurals, and use of the abstract for the con-
1920.] THE LAST STRONGHOLD OF BOYHOOD 51
crete, "I was disobedience, gluttony, laziness, etc.," perhaps one
would be able to show why they are wrong, for they have the
argument from analogy on their side and Chaucer and the
ancients of our tongue as well. Were one to find this "here
talk" among a people far removed from our English-speaking
countries, he would be inclined to think he was listening to the
primitive form of our language, spoken by a race whose civil-
ization is more simple and natural than ours; and in so
thinking he would not be far astray. For not of boys was he
singing, who sang:
We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that
tell of saddest thought.
To the boys "here," the past is gone, for in the sense that
adults speak of memory, boys have no memory; the future
can be but talked about, for while "supposin' " plays an im-
portant part in a boy's life, when he is "supposin' " his dreams
are real, and he is living decidedly in the present, the only
reality, and in this nation as in others, realties alone count.
A boy "here," consequently, is a genuine utilitarian, a disciple
after Jeremy Bentham's own heart. He takes the things
at hand for his purpose, and considers only the needs of the
moment. So b.Q unravels his stockings to "raise up" kite
string; makes a ball from the yarn of his sweater; takes the
nails from his shoes to fasten reed bird cages; uses his neck-
tie or handkerchief for a kite tail; cuts his garters to make
sling shot rubbers of the elastic; tears out the tongue of his
shoe for the sling-shot pouch; and has been found hacking
down a fine young shade tree to obtain a sling-shot prong.
There is no looking before, indeed, else they would know
they needed these things. But it is better in their eyes to go
stockingless and cold to bed, than do without their fun, which
is ever of the present. And there is no looking after, so they
have the gift of forgetting the sorrows as well as the few
comforts of their baby days. Because they do not pine for
what is not, they treasure trash, and deem themselves rich be-
yond the dreams of avarice. Because there is not a bit of pain
52 THE LAST STRONGHOLD OF BOYHOOD [April,
in their laughter, analyze as owl-eyed scientists may, their
mirth is a thing to be envied, for
The soul of all delight
Fills a child's clear laughter.
And if the songs they sing bring tears to the eyes of their
hearers they do not weep themselves, and would sing the sad-
dest air to quick time, with all the lilt of the wildwood.
Yet, unconsciously, they suggest profundities that make
an adult wonder; beneath the utmost artlessness may
found unfathomable depths. A little one of four fell down
stairs; and on the verge of tears was caught up to be told
"You are not a cry baby, but a laughing baby." In a moment,
when the laughter had scarcely died on his lips, and the 1
but gone from his eyes, he wanted to know: "Does a laughing
baby grow up to be the same as a crying baby?"
Be it understood, the citizens of this final stronghold of
boyhood are happy, how happy, only one who lives among
them can understand. And the primary reason for this happi-
ness is, most likely, due to the fact that the boys are allowed
to be themselves and natural more than elsewhere.
Life for these citizens of the kingdom is mostly joy; 1
the little storms of "here" life, like spring showers, are soon
over and clear the air. They are children, though they 1
fourteen- they have the child's inconsequence about money,
his indifference to the pain inflicted on others, his "lack of
feeling" to quote a state inspector, as if in this they were
unlike all other children; but they have the endearing traits
of little ones, artlessness, spontaneity and infectious laughter.
They crave affection and lavish it upon those they love, and
to realize how generously they love, one must be
"here."
But, it may be objected, this view is that of one
blind to the dark side of an orphan's life. Yet that side has
been so emphasized, that some think there is no other side
Permit a glimpse to be given of the sunlight. Pathos, yes, and
sadness also. But the pathos is visible only to adult eyes, and
the sadness moves only hearts that know the heavy hand
ow
None of our boys in this, their little world, can be "lapped
sorrow.
1920.] THE LAST STRONGHOLD OF BOYHOOD 53
about with love in all his hours," for she who would do so, is
gone to God, or is far away; but theirdesire to cuddle into some-
one's arms finds fulfillment, their craving for affection is some-
how gratified, the lack of a mother's love is felt, but not real-
ized. After all, He Who tempers the wind for the shorn lamb,
must have His own way of comforting the little ones He de-
prived of a mother. The taking away was His, and His it is
also to comfort and console; and that He does grant the
anodyne of His gracious consolations to these motherless little
ones in ways beyond the power of words to convey, we, who
live in the midst of them, can see quite clearly.
Truly it is a blessed thing to have the gift of hearing "the
song in the soul of a child." To be a factor for good in his
budding life is happiness enough for any man. And "here,"
for the very lack of a mother, the boys creep into your heart
unawares; and if they find you have the gift of understanding,
a Pentecostal gift, surely, you win a place in theirs.
Child how may a man's love merit
The grace you shed as you stand,
The gift that is yours to inherit?
Through you are the bleak days bland;
Your voice is a light to my spirit;
You bring the sun in your hand.
CO-PARTNERSHIP IN INDUSTRY.
BY ANTHONY J. BECK.
OME years ago a Catholic lecturer engaged in a
debate with a Socialist in a city of the Middle
West. The Socialist opened the verbal battle
with an offensive against the concentration of
wealth and the control of industry in the hands
of a minority. He told how before the Industrial Revolution of
the eighteenth century the artisan generally owned his tools
and a little shop, and how the invention of the steam engine
and other marvelous mechanical devices developed these tools
into complex and costly machinery, placed them in large
factories, and made the former artisan its servant as a wage
worker. Had Mr. Socialist been conversant with the works
of historians like Cardinal Gasquet, he would have pointed out
also the intellectual and spiritual factors which were born
of the liberalism generated by the so-called Reformation, and
which combined with technical changes to make the majority
of modern industrial workers a class without property. "The
Reformation," says Cardinal Gasquet, "was primarily a social
and economic revolution." When, two centuries later, inven-
tions revolutionized industry the descendants of these "re-
formers" and a few fortunate, ambitious, and daring individ-
uals, enriched by discoveries in the New World, became di-
rectors of modern industry.
Though ignorant of this phase of the question, the Social-
ist agitator made a diagnosis which was correct but did not go
far enough. The Catholic lecturer ignored his opponent's
opening argument entirely and concentrated his fire on Social-
ism as a remedy. This may have given some non-Catholics
the impression that Catholics approve the modern industrial
development in all its phases. Be this as it may, the Socialist
was foolish enough to be drawn into a futile defence of So-
cialism. He could have won an apparent victory by holding
the Catholic spokesman to a refutation of his opening argu-
ment. But then his Catholic adversary could have turned the
1920.] CO-PARTNERSHIP IN INDUSTRY 55
tables on him by accepting the Socialist analysis and then,
after exposing the inherent weakness of Socialism, proposed
Christian democracy, especially co-partnership, as the best
means of stopping this concentration of wealth and bringing
about a more equitable distribution of property.
Under co-partnership the workers own a substantial part
of the corporate stock of an enterprise, and exercise a reason-
able share in its management. 1 Co-partnership is justified by
natural law, is practical, and cannot logically be branded as
Socialistic.
Its justification may be deduced from certain passages in
the Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII. on "The Condition of Labor."
"It is surely undeniable," writes His Holiness, "that when a
man engages in remunerative labor the very reason and mo-
tive of his work is to obtain property, and to hold it as his
own private possession." Touching on the sacred duty of a
father to provide for his family, the illustrious Leo says : "Now
in no other way can a father effect this except by the owner-
ship of profitable property, which he can transmit to his chil-
dren by inheritance." After laying down certain principles
on the relation of the precepts of the Gospel to the solution
of our social and industrial problems, on the duties of the
State, and on the elements of a living wage, His Holiness makes
this remarkable declaration: "We have seen that this great
labor question cannot be solved except by assuming as a prin-
ciple that private ownership must be held sacred and inviol-
able. The law, therefore, should favor ownership, and its
policy should be to induce as many of the people as possible
to be owners." It may be objected that Pope Leo aimed espe-
cially at defending the right to private property in opposition
to those Socialists who advocate public ownership of all the
means of production and distribution. But, if the right to
private property is sacred against State tyranny and monopoly,
why should it not be just as sacred against seizure and unjust
monopoly on the part of fellow citizens? And if it be con-
tended that the Pope had in mind private property in land,
we should answer: Could he have been unaware of the de-
velopment of gigantic industrial enterprises owned and con-
trolled by a few persons?
Scarcely anyone conversant with our economic and so-
' The National Catholic War Council's pamphlet on Social Reconstruction.
56 CO-PARTNERSHIP IN INDUSTRY [April,
cial conditions will deny that a majority of industrial workers
do not own property. "A small number of very rich men,"
said Pope Leo, "have been able to lay upon the masses of the
poor a yoke little better than slavery itself." The National
Catholic War Council, in its pamphlet, Social Reconstruction,
estimates that "a considerable majority of the wage-earners
of the United States .... were not receiving living wages
when prices began to rise in 1915," and since then "the average
rate of pay has not increased faster than the cost of living."
Men who do not receive living wages are not likely to own
property. Studies of government statistics by conservative
economists show that a majority of our workers have very
little or no property.
The workers in this class need first of all wages enabling
them to live in a manner becoming to man. Hence, the Na-
tional Catholic War Council advocates, as immediate reforms,
proper housing for workers; legal minimum wages covering
at first "only the present needs of the family," but expanding
until they make possible that "amount of saving which is
necessary to protect the worker and his family against sick-
ness, accidents, and old age;" and representation of labor in
the "industrial" part of business management, which concerns
nature of product, engagement and dismissal of employees,
hours of work, rates of pay, etc. Workers enjoying such a
degree of independence could perhaps not make a just demand
for further industrial democracy in the shape of an oppor-
tunity to become part owners of the business employing them.
With the large quantity of stocks of many different industries
available in the public market, they can invest their savings
in other profitable enterprises or in land.
However, is it not expedient to their employers in the
long run, and to the commonwealth, to let them put their
money and the interest that attaches to it into the concerns
engaging their services? From a psychological viewpoint co-
partnership would yield better returns than does profit-
sharing in added interest in work, increased efficiency, and
contentment. A worker may after some months forget the
generosity implied in a bonus; but he is not likely to be un-
mindful of having a share in the business employing him.
If profit-sharing is combined with co-partnership, the bonus
paid out returns to the business in the form of payment on
1920.] CO-PARTNERSHIP IN INDUSTRY 57
stock and, besides fostering good will, can be used to increase
the plant's security by being placed in a contingency fund.
Co-partnership has the approval of conservatively pro-
gressive economists, eminent captains of industry, and far-
seeing social-minded men. The National Catholic War Coun-
cil is not content with the immediate and far-reaching re-
forms mentioned in the foregoing. It is confident that these
will go far to remedy the main defects of the present system:
"enormous inefficiency and waste in the production and dis-
tribution of commodities; insufficient incomes for the great
majority of wage-earners, and unnecessarily large incomes
for a small minority of privileged capitalists." "Neverthe-
less," it continues, "the full possibilities of increased produc-
tion will not be realized so long as the majority of the work-
ers remain mere wage-earners. The majority must somehow
become owners, at least in part, of the instruments of pro-
duction. They can be enabled to reach this stage gradually
through cooperative societies and co-partnership arrange-
ments."
Dr. John A. Ryan, who is one of the country's foremost
economists, continually insists that "the supreme need of the
world today, even in America, is greater production." The
world has lost five years of intensive peace-time production
in many leading countries, the energy of more than ten mil-
lion men killed and disabled in some form, ten million tons of
shipping, and many hundreds of thousands of tons of food
and raw material. It will take years of production, with
greatly increased energy and devotion, to make good this tre-
mendous loss. "So long as labor remains scarce," observes
Dr. Ryan, "this interest can be secured only by giving the
workers a greater share in the management of industry, and
some share in its profits." 2 Pope Leo expressed a similar
thought when he wrote: "Men always work harder and more
readily when they work on that which is their own ... It is
evident how such a spirit of willing labor would add to the
produce of the earth and to the wealth of the community." 3
This reasoning is borne out by the experience of large
concerns like the Proctor and Gamble Company of Cincinnati.
This company started a profit-sharing system in 1886, and has
since then combined it with co-partnership. The employees
' Brooklyn Tablet, September 27, 1919. Letter on "The Conditions of Labor."
58 CO-PARTNERSHIP IN INDUSTRY [April,
are permitted to subscribe to stock, paying down two and one-
half per cent of its market value and four per cent each suc-
ceeding year. In the meantime the company, which seems to
be unusually prosperous, gives the stockholder employee one-
fifth of his wage in a stock dividend, and after four or five
years the stock is paid up. After different periods of service
the total amount of stock purchaseable is increased. "Profit-
sharing," says Colonel W. C. Proctor, "has many attendant
advantages. For one thing, it inclines a man to stay on the
job by giving him a vital interest in the business." 4 It induces
the employees to promote in every way the success of "their"
enterprise. Other large concerns which have adopted some
form of co-partnership are the Sears-Roebuck Company of
Chicago, the Metropolitan Gas Company of London, the con-
cern managed by George W. Perkins, the DuPont De Nemours
Company of Wilmington, Del., and the Dennison Manufac-
turing Company of Framingham, Mass. 5 In the Metropolitan
Gas Company six thousand employees are stockholders, and
in the Sears-Roebuck Company four thousand hold shares.
The New York Evening Post, which is controlled by a man
prominent in high finance, stated editorially that "many cor-
poration men are today favorably considering" the plan of
giving their workingmen "full and first-hand knowledge of
the business" and "a voice in its management." In his mes-
sage read in Congress on December 2d President Wilson
urged "a genuine democratization of industry, based upon
the full recognition of the right of those who work, in what-
ever rank, to participate in some organic way in every de-
cision which directly affects their welfare." The message
adds that a "return to the old standards of wage and industry
in employment is unthinkable." This view is shared by the
editor of The Pilot, official organ of the Archdiocese of Bos-
ton: "The day of the wage-earner as such is drawing to a
close." 7
Besides promoting efficiency and increased production, co-
partnership encourages thrift. In the words of the Rev. A. M.
O'Neill, who presided at the 1919 New York State Conference
of Charities and Corrections, "the best way to practice thrift
is in paying for a home." And next to his home nothing
'American Magazine, October, 1919. Chicago Tribune, December 3, 1919.
Ibid., October 6, 1919. ' The Pilot, September 13, 1919.
1920.] CO-PARTNERSHIP IN INDUSTRY 59
holds more interest for the average worker than does his
workshop. Mr. Proctor notes that one phase of his company's
plan is to encourage thrift among those employees drawing a
small wage.
Social students point out that a veritable mania for spend-
ing has seized a considerable percentage of workers and their
families. One reason for this is the pleasure-greed of our time,
the desire to seek happiness in purely material things. But
an extenuating circumstance in not a few cases seems to be
the fact that, even after practicing thrift, many workers have
little left at the end of the year and, becoming discouraged,
in their efforts to own a home, spend more freely than they
would otherwise and seek consolation in amusements and
expensive clothes. Co-partnership, if extensively introduced,
would save for business operations and, incidentally, for old
age, large sums now frittered away on shows, clothes, and
dainties.
By stimulating the worker's interest in his industry, co-
partnership would also tend to check the scaling down of
hours and the raising of wages. "Each powerful labor group,"
says Dr. Ryan, who is very friendly to labor, "seeks to better
its condition through higher wages and shorter hours." This
reduces production instead of increasing it, and thereby helps
to offset the great war-bond issues and brings an in-
flated currency closer to its pre-war value. Consequently,
"no matter how high money wages might become," argues
Dr. Ryan, "the increase in prices, owing to the scarcity of
goods, would more than offset the higher remuneration."
Workers holding stock in a business do not easily countenance
demands for unreasonably short hours and excessively high
wages. They exercise a moderating influence and are more
content than mere wage workers. In thus furthering content-
ment co-partnership serves the country in general as well as
the worker and his employer in particular. It is, therefore,
patriotic. "// working people can be encouraged to look for-
ward to obtaining a share in the land," wrote Pope Leo, "the
result will be that the gulf between vast wealth and deep
poverty will be bridged over and the two orders will be
brought nearer together. " s What valid argument can be ad-
vanced to prove that these words of the illustrious author of
'"The Condition of Labor."
60 CO-PARTNERSHIP IN INDUSTRY [April,
"the workingman's charter" apply only to land and not to
our large industrial concerns?
In tending to close the gap between employer and em-
ployee and making for stability of labor and industry, co-
partnership takes the wind out of the sails of Socialism, which
feeds on grievances, discontent, and class strife. Co-partner-
ship also meets the growing demand of the workers for a
more equitable distribution of wealth. Socialism would take
concentrated wealth from the hands of a minority of citizens
and place it in charge of a paternalistic government with com-
plete control of the institutional life of the nation. What the
result would be we may infer from the tyranny and misman-
agement which characterized the Bolshevist regimes in Hun-
gary and Russia. Co-partnership, however, gradually and
without violence, brings about the widest possible distribu-
tion of national income and resources. This alone, not to
speak of its power for contentment, makes it a strong bulwark
of social order and national progress.
It is, therefore, somewhat difficult to understand how
people conversant with our social and industrial conditions
can reject co-partnership as smacking of radicalism. The
Bishops, under whose auspices the pamphlet on Social Recon-
struction was issued, are surely not Bolshevists. They repre-
sent an institution which has fought Bolshevism in a variety
of forms for nineteen centuries. Dr. Ryan declares that Catho-
lics who denounce this form of industrial democracy (co-
partnership) as "Socialistic or Bolshevistic" "are not only
wanting in logic, but ignorant of the social traditions and in-
stitutions of Catholicity. At the end of the fourteenth century,
when the social teaching and influence of the Church were
greater than they had ever been before or have been since,
industry, both in the cities and the country, was mainly in the
control, not of the superior classes, but of the masses of the
workers. Had it not been for the Protestant Reformation and
subsequent social disturbances, this general condition might
have continued, and the workers would have been in a posi-
tion to own and operate the new instruments of production
which came into existence in the latter half of the eighteenth
century." 9
In an address before the Citizenship Conference at Pitts-
Cf. Hilalre Belloc's The Distributive State.
1920.] CO-PARTNERSHIP IN INDUSTRY 61
burgh on November 13, 1919, Charles E. Hughes, former Justice
of the United States Supreme Court, prescribed as an antidote
for Bolshevism a perfectly organized democracy political,
social, and industrial. The latter phase of democracy includes
co-partnership. Mr. Hughes, however, opposes participation
of labor in the management of producing industries. But
Nicholas Murray Butler, President of Columbia University, in
an address on "The Real Labor Problem," advocated coopera-
tion by labor in the management of industry, as well as profit-
sharing, as most potent means to head off revolution and pre-
serve our republican form of government. 10
Co-partnership, like most human things, has its defects
and drawbacks. An organ of high finance points out that
there is a limit to the amount which can be assigned to labor
out of the profits of industry. "Let that limit be passed, and
the needed capital will surely be kept back." Even if labor
is content with less than its share, the capitalists accustomed
to large profits will give a wide berth to enterprises which
introduce profit-sharing or co-partnership. More public-
spirited and less selfish captains of industry will find that the
temporary reduction of their profits will in the long run be
more than repaid in added interest and increased production.
Colonel P. A. Callahan stated some time ago that the profit-
sharing and partnership system of the Louisville Varnish Com-
pany gives the stockholders larger earnings than did the wage
system. 11
Another objection is based on the lack of sufficient edu-
cation and training of large classes of workers for participa-
tion in business management. They have been mere "hands,"
"infants of industry," for so many years that they will not
immediately develop the initiative and spirit of independence
necessary to cooperate wisely with their employers. Some
workers fear taking even the smallest risk with their savings,
and prefer good wages and a possible bonus to helping de-
velop a business with their savings and waiting for good re-
turns. Others are shiftless, try to get the most money for the
least work, and are blind to opportunities in an industry
whose managers would probably give them a chance, provided
they manifested a willingness for special effort. A friend of
"Chicago Herald and Examiner, October 14, 1919.
"Catholic Columbian, December 5, 1919.
62 CO-PARTNERSHIP IN INDUSTRY [April,
the writer holds a position with a large shipbuilding company.
He discovered that through the absence of a high percentage of
workers the concern lost weekly twenty thousand working
hours. He told the men that, at only fifty cents an hour, this
meant a weekly loss of $10,000 to them and to the firm, besides
failure to fill contracts promptly and the consequent loss of
new ones. Many of the men were well paid and took time
off to indulge in dangerous amusements. Their wives,
sisters, and mothers came to the manager with their tales
of woe. This circumstance gave him an additional reason to
carry out his plan, and he greatly reduced the percentage of
absentees. But at first he was denounced by some of the
workers and even threatened with violence for promoting
their own and the company's interests! Such workers require
considerable training before they are qualified for co-partner-
ship.
But it would be unjust to assume that a majority of the
workers are of this class. If it were a fact, it would be little
credit to our republican institutions, so unique in the world's
history. Whatever the percentage of workers unqualified for
cooperating in the management of industry, "neither for so-
ciety nor for their own welfare," as Dr. Ryan contends, "is it
desirable that the workers should permanently occupy the
status of industrial dependency. . . . The theory that our in-
dustrial society should be divided into two classes, one of
which should perform all the functions of direction and man-
agement, while the other should be merely well-fed automa-
tons of industry, is neither in accord with our democratic age,
nor conducive to reasonable life. Therefore, the workers
must obtain some share in the management of industry." A
prominent financier and publicist, Otto Kahn, told a meeting
of bankers in Pittsburgh that "workmen must be partners,
their wages must not be their whole income." John D. Rocke-
feller, Jr., voiced this view in an indirect manner when he
asked at a recent conference in Washington: "What joy can
there be in life; what enthusiasm can he (the worker) de-
velop when he is only regarded as a number on the payroll or
a cog in a wheel?" Quoting this and similar utterances of
eminent captains of industry and educators, Colonel Callahan,
in speaking of his company's relations to its employees, de-
clared that a genuine profit-sharing or partnership plan seems
1920.] CO-PARTNERSHIP IN INDUSTRY 63
to be the best agency to remove the grievances cited by Mr.
Rockefeller and other social students. Colonel Callahan con-
siders this plan a compromise between the autocracy of some
capitalists and the radicalism of certain labor leaders.
Difficulties do not necessarily imply a false principle.
Many a plan now in successful operation met with great in-
itial obstacles. Co-partnership is fundamentally in accord
with the natural law, promises greater efficiency, promotes
thrift and contentment, goes far to counteract Socialism, fos-
ters patriotism and national prosperity, and makes for true
industrial democracy in harmony with our republican form of
government. It may not be generally feasible in the near fu-
ture; but it is the goal toward which the keenest minds in
economics are trying to direct industry. In the words of the
National Catholic War Council, "however slow the attainment
of these ends (cooperation and co-partnership) , they will have
to be reached before we can have a thoroughly efficient system
of production or an industrial and social order that will be
secure from the danger of revolution." 12
Among material factors co-partnership is a means that
offers the greatest promise for a thoroughgoing solution of
our industrial problems. But the spiritual side is, to say the
least, equally important. The Bishops observe pertinently:
"Neither the moderate reforms advocated in this paper, nor
any other programme of betterment or reconstruction will
prove reasonably effective without a reform in the spirit of both
labor and capital." 13 Both must become imbued with a new
spirit, or rather with the good old spirit of justice and charity
that prevailed in the days before the so-called Reformation,
and had been infused into the hearts of men by the Prince of
Peace, Jesus Christ. At best, even with a majority of men
living in accordance with the precepts of His Gospel, this
world is a place of pilgrimage, "a valley of tears," where sor-
row treads on the heels of joy, pain contests for supremacy
with pleasure, and misfortune undoes the triumphs of success.
If material needs alone were at the bottom of our problems,
these should not be so difficult to solve, for this country is
blessed with vast resources. Its people are known the world
over for resourcefulness and a driving genius that accom-
plishes what is considered impossible in many other countries.
"Social Reconstruction, p. 22. "Social Reconstruction, p. 24.
64 THE ROAD TO BETHANY [April,
And yet the spectre of unrest stalks through the land and
demands a prompt and a real solution of our industrial and
social problems, one that will not only fill the dinner pail but
also satisfy the heart.
"Society," said Pope Leo XIII, "can be healed in no other
way than by a return to Christian life and Christian institu-
tions." That is the voice of the Vicar of Christ, Who came on
earth to teach men the way to peace temporal and eternal,
social and industrial, national and international.
THE ROAD TO BETHANY.
BY CAPTAIN HARRY LEE,
Of the Red Cross.
THE last week, the lone week,
Each weary evenfall,
The Master climbed the hill-road
Between the cedars tall.
Beyond the whispering cedars,
The olives gray and dim,
The Master sought the one door
That was not closed to Him.
And always at the last turn,
He saw the little light,
That Mary's hand had set there,
To guide Him through the night.
So for a love-lit candle,
That made the way less bleak,
The Master climbed the hill-road,
The last, lone week.
THE NATIONAL RELIGION OF JAPAN.
BY JOSEPH FRERI, D.D.,
Director, Society for the Propagation of the Faith.
HE aim of this article is to show the attitude of
the Japanese mind towards religion. It will prob-
ably be a revelation to many who believed that
the Japanese had done away with paganism. The
following authoritative and comprehensive state-
ment 1 on the national religion of Japan at the present time was
made by Mr. Tokutomi, a prominent publicist, formerly a
liberal of democratic tendencies, who turned stanch sup-
porter of the reigning bureaucracy and was rewarded in 1911
with a life membership in the House of Peers.
"The Meiji restoration (1868) was the work of men who
clamored for equality of rights with the Western nations. The
immediate result of their first contact with foreigners in 1853
had been the humiliating recognition of the fact that the Japa-
nese were inferior to the Westerners in point of strength and
material progress. Their Yamato spirit (nationalism peculiar
to Japan) was aroused, and they resolved to elevate their
standards to that of foreigners. This was the starting point.
Now, in order to wrest equality from the West, they must first
effect equality among themselves. So they began pulling
down the forces that contradicted the principles of equality,
i. e., feudalism and clannism. The equality of the people was
accomplished under the centralizing power of the Emperor.
In fact the equality of a people without some central restrain-
ing authority is impossible. But the Japanese, unlike the Eng-
lishmen or Americans, have no god. The Mikado is to the
Japanese what the Christian God is to the Westerners. So we
made the only exception in favor of the Mikado, for it is
under him that all the Japanese, from Shogun (regent) to ple-
beian, have been either leveled or elevated to an equal posi-
tion. The word liberty was, of course, much used and some-
times abused by the champions of the restoration, but, to tell
the truth, the people did not care very much for liberty. As a
matter of fact they felt no need of liberty."
1 The Japan Adventurer, June 26, 27, 1918.
VOL. cxi. 5
66 THE NATIONAL RELIGION OF JAPAN [April,
It would be difficult to sum up more accurately the whole
question. The national religion of Japan is nothing but a
name to insure political ends.
Under the old regime, before the restoration in 1868,
which put back the Emperor at the head of the Government,
the moral unity of the Japanese people rested neither on re-
ligion nor on patriotism.
Buddhism, it is true, seemed to have impregnated the life
of the Japanese. It had adopted most of the divinities of
primitive Shintoism, but, while giving a certain satisfaction
to the popular feeling, its moral influence was small, and in
practice its function was to give a religious expression to
ancestor worship.
On the other hand, in that insular kingdom which had
strictly isolated itself from the rest of the world, there was
no room for any display of patriotism as we understand it.
The only way in which it could manifest itself was by helping
to keep the country closed to all visitors. The Emperor, espe-
cially since the thirteenth century, was but the shadow of a
sovereign, held in bondage by the Regent; the people ignored
his name, almost his existence.
The social forces at work were, on the one hand, feudal-
ism, on the other, the family, with its worship of ancestors.
These two forces had taken absolute possession of the indi-
vidual, his body and soul. The notions of human personality
and liberty were not dreamed of by him, and the only moral
law that his conscience recognized were the wills of his over-
lord and of his father, strengthened by a number of tyrannical
customs.
In 1871 the new Government abolished feudalism and
suppressed the three hundred and twenty fiefs, reducing their
lords to the rank of ordinary citizens. Such a radical change
in politics was naturally followed by another in the moral
and social order. Feudalism having disappeared, the family
remained the sole foundation of national life. It continued
to exercise an authority which was sometimes wholesome, but
mostly arbitrary and tyrannical, strictly confined to domestic
affairs. In public and political life the suppression of feud-
alism left a great gap. In times past loyalty to the feudal lord
occupied the first rank among civic virtues, was superior to
even filial devotion, but when the overlord ceased to exist the
1920.] THE NATIONAL RELIGION OF JAPAN 67
citizen was at a loss to whom to pledge fidelity. The problem
was solved by inviting the whole nation to transfer to the
Emperor the homage formerly given to one of the feudal
masters, and, the whole nation thus grouped around him, the
Emperor became the supreme and only political tie of the new
Japan.
While Japan had recognized Christianity, it never ac-
cepted Christianity. Its leading men saw in the adoption of
Christianity and "Western practices," a serious danger for
the Japanese mind and the sentiments which constitute the
most valuable treasure of the race. Thenceforth the admin-
istration took measures to prevent all compromise with the
"dangerous" notions of the West, especially with Christianity.
They saw to it that the Japanese would not care to become
Christians.
Then it was that the imperial question was solved. The
makers of the Constitution had necessarily to find out some
raison d'etre for the allegiance due to the sovereign. They
were confronted with two orders of ideas, the one social, the
other religious, which at one time or another had been ac-
cepted in the Western world, but which were radically op-
posed to the principles hitherto received in Japan.
If the modern ideas concerning the rights of the individual
and the sovereignty of the people were adopted, the sovereign
was nothing but the delegate of the nation, bound to it by a
contract which was revokable at will. This meant the down-
fall of the whole traditional order. If Japan had been able
to foresee, as easily as she foresaw the danger of radicalism,
that Christian doctrines are the only security of true national
life, she would have had no difficulty in finding the solid found-
ation for a progressive new social order. Christian principles
restrict radical tendencies within just limits, and both har-
monize and safeguard the rights of God and those of the civil
authorities, as well as of the family and the individual. But
the traditional intellectual training of the Japanese prevented
them from seeing this.
Individualism was to them a foreign and a repugnant
idea. Furthermore, according to Shintoist principles, the al-
legiance of the people to the authorities could not rest on any-
thing but the divine nature of the sovereign. It was not suffi-
cient for the Emperor to be the lawful successor of a long line
68 THE NATIONAL RELIGION OF JAPAN [April,
of sovereigns whose origin is lost in the early ages of history.
The example of China with its numerous changes of dynasties,
to say nothing of Europe, inclined them to believe that an
authority based on a purely human principle was not strong
enough and could be some day set aside by their descendants.
Hence the necessity of basing that authority on a religious
foundation which would make it sacred and inviolable.
Thus the makers of modern Japan deliberately deter-
mined the course the Japanese people were to follow. Having
rejected modern democratic ideas, as well as the principles
of Christianity, they established the moral unity of the nation
on a new basis. Absolute obedience is due to the Emperor,
not only because he is the sovereign, the father of his people,
the political link of the nation, but especially because, as the
descendant of the divinities who created Japan, and himself a
god possessing the supreme dominion, he exacts from his sub-
jects the absolute and unlimited submission of their bodies
and souls, their minds and conscience. This is what every
Japanese must believe and profess under pain of being de-
clared guilty of sacrilege and a traitor to his country.
Certain Western writers have called this the invention of
a new religion, but it would be more accurate to say that ex-
tant, but almost forgotten, doctrines were made use of for a
political end. As a matter of fact the divine origin of the Em-
perors was always professed by the Japanese. For at least
fifteen hundred years the principal ancestor of the imperial
family, the sun-goddess Amaterasu, has been worshipped at
the famous temple of Ise which attracts annually countless pil-
grims. Her brother's shrine is in the great temple of Izumo,
and from all antiquity these have been the two most sacred
spots in Japan. There are besides numerous temples dedi-
cated to various emperors. Finally in the course of ages the
person of the reigning emperor began to be looked upon as
divine, naturally superior to the rest of mankind, and this at
the very time he was deprived of all real authority and for
political reasons imprisoned in his palace. But in those days
these doctrines had no practical consequences, whereas today
the whole political life of the country rests on the doctrine of
the divinity of the Emperor, a doctrine so essential, say the
leaders of Japan, that, if it were contradicted or so much as
doubted, the country would be in danger.
1920.] THE NATIONAL RELIGION OF JAPAN 69
"Shinto (the way of the gods) ," says Prof. B. H. Chamber-
lain, "is the indigenous religion of Japan and a compound of
nature-worship and ancestor-worship. It has gods and god-
desses of the wind, the ocean, fire, food and pestilence, of
mountains and rivers, of certain special mountains, certain
rivers, certain trees, certain temples; it worships also certain
beasts, first of all the fox, then the dragon, some snakes, etc.,
eight hundred myriads of deities in all. Chief among these is
Amaterasu, the radiant goddess of the sun, born from the left
eye of Izanagi, the creator of Japan, while from his right eye
was produced the god of the moon, and from his nose the
violent god Susu-no-o, who subjected his sister to various in-
dignities and was chastised accordingly. The sun-goddess was
the ancestress of the line of heaven-descended Mikados, who
have reigned in unbroken succession from the beginning of
the world and are themselves gods upon earth; hence the sun-
goddess is honored above all the rest."
In the course of ages, hero-worship added many new
names to the primitive stock; men of national or local fame
were enshrined as deities and the process is going on even now.
The most conspicuous apotheosis of the present day, apart
from the emperors, is that of the soldiers who died in the
recent wars.
"Shinto," continues Prof. Chamberlain, "has scarcely any
regular services at which the people take part, and demands
little more of its adherents than a visit to the local temple on
the occasion of the annual festival. Its priests are not dis-
tinguishable by their appearance from ordinary laymen. Only
when engaged in presenting the morning and evening offer-
ings do they wear a peculiar dress of ancient pattern. These
priests are not bound by any vows of celibacy and retain the
option of adopting another career.
"The services consist in the presentation of small trays of
rice, fish, fruits, vegetables, rice-beer, and the flesh of birds and
animals, and in the recital of certain formal addresses, partly
laudatory, and partly in the nature of petitions. The style of
composition employed is that of a very remote period, and
would not be understood by the common people, even if the
latter were in the habit of taking part in the ritual. With
moral teaching Shinto does not profess to concern itself. 'Fol-
low your natural impulses and obey the Mikado's decrees,'
70 THE NATIONAL RELIGION OF JAPAN [April,
such is the sum of its theory of human duty. Preaching forms
no part of its institutions, nor are the rewards and punishments
of a future life used as incentives to right conduct. The con-
tinued existence of the dead is believed in, but whether it is a
condition of joy or pain is nowhere declared."
The architecture of Shinto temples is extremely simple,
and the material used is plain white wood with a thatch or
bark; in short, it is nearly a reproduction of the primitive
Japanese or rather Malay hut, and usually not much larger.
There are no statues; the ordinary emblem of the deity being
a circular mirror on a wooden stand. We are told that the
number of Shinto temples of all grades amounts to a little over
150,000, but in the country most of them are without appointed
priests, the villagers taking care of their local shrines. The
number of priests is about 15,000.
To be sure what we have here is a very primitive religion,
and the reader may desire to know on what grounds it pre-
tends to found the divinity of the Mikado. Obviously it can-
not be on historical data, but rather on mythological legends
handed down by a long and merely oral tradition. These
legends were for the first time collected and brought together
in two works, the most ancient Japanese books now extant,
written the one in A. D. 712 (Kojiki, "Records of Ancient Mat-
ters"), the other in 720 (Nihongi, "Chronicles of Japan").
The first use of writing in Japan dates from the fifth century
after Christ, and the writing was then borrowed from China;
previously there was none in Japan.
The legends enumerate first six generations of celestial
deities of which nothing more is said afterwards. Next, they
tell the story of six generations of terrestrial deities, the first
giving birth to the Japanese archipelago, the sun-goddess and
innumerable deities, and the last begetting the founder of the
Japanese empire, Jimmu. Then the narration goes on till the
seventh century after Christ, but the miraculous ceases only at
the fifth century, and there is no chronological break between
the fabulous and the real.
"This fact of the continuity of the Japanese mythology and
history has been fully recognized and accepted by the leading
native commentators, whose opinions are those considered
orthodox by modern Shintoists, and they draw from it the con-
clusion that everything in these 'standard national histories'
1920.] THE NATIONAL RELIGION OF JAPAN 71
must be equally accepted as literal truth. The general habit
of the more skeptical Japanese of the present day seems to be
to ignore the history of the gods, save some allusions to the
sun-goddess, while implicitly accepting the history of the em-
perors from Jimmu downwards. This is the attitude of mind
now sanctioned and imposed by the governing class. Thus in
the historical compilations used as textbooks in the schools,
the stories of the gods (before Jimmu) are either passed over
in silence or dismissed in a few sentences, while the annals of
the human sovereigns (i. e., the Japanese traditions from
Jimmu full of the miraculous till the fifth century) are treated
precisely as if the events herein related had happened yester-
day, and were as incontrovertibly historical as later statements
for which there is contemporary evidence. The same plan is
pursued in official publications intended for the Western pub-
lic. Still, for home consumption, the continuity of the divine
nature from the sun-goddess to her descendents, the Mikados,
is always strictly adhered to, and enforced with ever increas-
ing earnestness.
"Further, from that so-called history, the Japanese have
extracted a wonderful chronology. Sanctioning it for one and
all, an imperial edict dated December 15, 1872, has fixed at the
year 669 B. C. the accession of Jimmu, first Emperor, and
promulgated an official chronology of the reigns of his suc-
cessors. Thus the beginning of the Japanese era is confidently
placed thirteen or fourteen centuries before the first book
which records it was written, nine centuries (at the earliest
computation) before the art of writing was introduced in the
country, and on the sole authority of books teeming with mir-
aculous legends. Does such a proceeding need any comment
after once being formulated in precise terms, and can any
unprejudiced person continue to accept the early Japanese
chronology and the first thousand years of the so-called his-
tory of Japan?"
Such is the opinion of Prof. Chamberlain, who so ably
translated the Kojiki into English, and the late W. Bramsen,
in his Japanese Chronological Tables, brands the whole sys-
tem of fictitious dates in the first histories of Japan as one of
the greatest literary frauds ever perpetrated, from which we
infer how little reliance can be placed on the early Japanese
historical works and perhaps on many subsequent works.
72 THE NATIONAL RELIGION OF JAPAN [April,
This digression into such an arid subject as chronology
is necessary in order to show clearly how much honesty and
love of truth we can expect from the modern Shintoists. Even
the most elementary requirements of science are made to yield
to an assumed necessity. The divinity of the Mikado needed
propping up, and the prop utilized was that fictitious historical
continuity and sham chronology whereby a hoary antiquity
is assured to the imperial family.
Since the restoration of 1868 the victorious Shintoists
have worked unceasingly to mold the brains and minds of
the people in accordance with their political plans. But from
the time of the promulgation of the Constitution in 1889, the
plan of Japan's leaders became more and more evident, and its
execution was more openly carried out.
The formula read by the Emperor when he takes the oath
of office begins as follows: "In virtue of the glories of our
ancestors we have ascended the throne of Japan, we, the de-
scendants of an uninterrupted line of eternal sovereigns."
Then the Emperor takes a solemn oath to his divine ancestors
to preserve and continue the old form of government that they
have transmitted to him; next he swears always to be a
model for his subjects in the observance of the Constitution,
and finally, since it is to his imperial ancestors that he owes
the privilege of continuing the national development of Japan,
he addresses to those glorious and sacred spirits a respectful
prayer to obtain their assistance in the fulfillment of his duty.
Such is the national and political foundation of the new
Japan. It is obvious how vitally important it is that the whole
nation be convinced of the divinity of the imperial family,
since the Emperor himself proclaims it and bases his author-
ity on it. It is true that the 28th Article of the Constitution
grants religious liberty, but this is only a subterfuge, because
the Japanese are politically neither morally nor materially free
to deny the divinity of the Emperor nor any of its conse-
quences.
According to that Constitution it was left to the Emperor
graciously to grant his subjects certain civil and political
rights. In his paternal solicitude he was also to guide them
in the observance of the moral laws so that they might make
good use of their new rights. Consequently in the following
year (1890) the famous Rescript called Moral Education was
1920.] THE NATIONAL RELIGION OF JAPAN 73
published. It is a summary of Shintoist and Confucianist
principles and fhe gospel of the new Japan. Several times a
year it is solemnly read by the teachers in all the schools of
the country. In fact, all the school manuals of morality are
merely an exposition and interpretation of this summary of
domestic and civil virtues.
As for the foundation of that morality, the Japanese, hav-
ing set aside all foreign religions, Buddhist, Confucianist, Prot-
estant and Catholic, looked for something more incontrovert-
ible than the doctrines offered by those various bodies, hope-
lessly divided among themselves. They wanted some impreg-
nable basis, rooted only in the soil of the country, the souls of
their ancestors, the heart of every Japanese. The basis of the
Japanese code of morals must be essentially Japanese, and
thereby altogether different from the Christian notions of the
Western world.
The Christians, while placing loyalty and filial piety fore-
most of the natural virtues, seek the source of these virtues in
God; the Japanese stop on the way, finding in their Emperor
the very source of divine authority. Whence it follows that
inasmuch as the imperial authority is for them the necessary
and all-sufficient motive for the observance of the moral law,
loyalty to the sovereign is the only code of morality and the
most powerful incentive to virtue. Let them obey the chief of
the State, and it is enough; they have not even the right to
look for another motive; it would be unpatriotic since there
is nothing higher than the Emperor.
This feature is the specific characteristic of Japanese
morality, and enables its teachers to assert that Japan pos-
sesses a code of moral laws which is unique and, by reason
of its principle, the most excellent. The logical consequence
is that the country would have nothing to gain and everything
to lose by adapting itself to the codes of the Western world.
It is likewise argued that one cannot be at the same time a loyal
citizen and a Christian, since it is an insolence, nay, a sacrilege,
to place above the Emperor a God who exists merely in the
imagination of certain European and American nations.
It is clear that the opposition between the two concepts is
fundamental. Christians in Japan are unable to answer
charges against the Christian Faith because of the rigid cen-
sorship forbidding any discussion on the foundation of Japan-
74 THE NATIONAL RELIGION OF JAPAN [April,
ese morality, the divinity of the Emperor, the official chronol-
ogy, et cetera. The intellectual forces of the Government are
constantly mobilized to lower and ridicule Christianity and
enforce upon all the practices of the national religion. This
is especially the aim of the imperial household. Some years
ago the Bureau of the Shinto temples was detached from the
Home Department and transferred to the Department of Edu-
cation, which indicates that the public school would be used
to inculcate upon the nation the worship of the Emperor.
It is true that in Japan all schools are supposed to be un-
sectarian, neutral, but this does not mean that the Mikado wor-
ship is to be excluded from them. As a matter of fact every
school has become a centre of Shinto propaganda and all the
teachers its active missionaries; Christian pupils are the ob-
jects of continual vexations and not infrequently are expelled.
In country places the teacher or the mayor of the town must
act the part of Shinto priest on feast days. High officials,
diplomats, army and navy officers have to pay homage to the
national divinities before entering upon their duties. The
Home Minister, the Governors of Corea and Formosa, visit the
temple of the sun-goddess at Ise, others must visit one of the
sanctuaries erected within the precincts of the imperial pal-
ace; in the provinces a visit to a local temple is sufficient.
On certain days the school children are taken by the teach-
ers to a shrine dedicated to the soldiers who have given their
lives for the country. If Christian parents refuse to let their
children participate in those ceremonies, the authorities assert
that this is merely a civic function in which people of any
creed may take part without scruple. The explanation is
plausible enough when there is question of honoring soldiers
who fell on the field of honor, but how explain visits to the
temple of Inari (the Fox) or the goddess of rice, or again why
should children be made to visit the temples of Suiten, one of
the gods of the ocean, or of Benten or Kompira, Buddhist divin-
ities imported from India and adopted by Shintoism? Here,
there can be no question of civic honors, and it is impossible to
connect those ceremonies with the loyalty due to the Emperor.
The names just quoted are only samples of the eight hundred
gods of the Shinto religion.
Let us examine more closely the so-called civic honors
paid to the heroes of the country in temples erected for that
1920.] THE NATIONAL RELIGION OF JAPAN 75
special purpose in every garrison city. Here is the programme
of the ceremonies to be performed in each instance : 1. Exor-
cisms and purifications by sea water; 2. Evocation of the spirits
to receive offerings and prayers; 3. The offerings of rice, fruit,
meat presented; 4. Liturgical prayers by the chief priest;
5. Reading of a litany by a distinguished member of the con-
gregation, a general or a governor; at Tokyo this reading is
done by a representative of the Emperor. The meaning of
those invocations is invariably the same; let the soldiers con-
tinue to be for all eternity the protectors of the country. After
the prayers the person who recited them deposits on the altar
a branch of Sakaki, the sacred tree of the Shintoist religion;
6. All the assistants come in turn to make a profound bow be-
fore the altar; 7. Finally the offerings are removed from the
altar and the soldiers' spirits are requested to return to their
abodes.
This programme leaves no room for doubt that we are in
the presence of religious worship, despite assertions of the Jap-
anese authorities to the contrary. A civic service does not call
for evocation of spirits, offerings of food, exterior acts of wor-
ship, nor the belief that the soldiers' spirits have power to pro-
tect the country. Furthermore, why should it be obligatory in
conscience for all citizens to participate in such services? The
administration is daily becoming more urgent on this point
which is a cause of anxiety to the Christians.
At present there is being built in a suburb of Tokyo a
temple in honor of Meiji, the Emperor of the Restoration of
1868, who died in 1912. Seven millions of yens (about
$3,500,000) have been collected for the purpose to date, and the
contributions were not all spontaneous. Shintoism will nat-
urally be the form of religion practiced in that temple, and
all the school children will certainly be invited to go there and
pay homage to the name of Meiji, and the teachers or pupils
who decline the invitation will be branded as unworthy
citizens.
The "New Shinto" aims at presiding over all the important
events of the citizens' lives. For over a thousand years, ex-
cept in one or two provinces, Ruddhist priests were the only
ones to preside at funerals. Now they have to compete with
Shinto priests, who have been greatly encouraged by the
example of the imperial family.
76 THE NATIONAL RELIGION OF JAPAN [April,
The Shintoists have gone further and have copied several
forms of blessings from the Catholic ritual. In the shipyards
of the Japanese navy, as well as in private shipyards, the keel
of a new boat is never laid without exorcisms and prayers by
a Shinto priest. The same ceremonies are performed for the
construction of public buildings, of water works, even of a
temporary ring for boxers; the ground must be purified and
blessed. When there is question of erecting a Shinto temple
the ceremonies are multiplied; the ground, the air, the water,
the materials, the workmen and their tools must be exorcised
and blessed. Mr. Tokutomi, whom we have already quoted,
states further:
"Worship of the Emperor and of the Japanese motherland
is a science in itself superior to all other sciences, a philosophy
superior to all other systems, a religion far above all other
religions. With us all scientific and religious teaching must
rest on the worship of the country personified by the Emperor.
The imperial family is the origin of the Japanese nation; this
is the principle of our fealty to the sovereign; this is what
distinguishes our race from all other races."
Viscount Oura, Secretary of Agriculture and Home Min-
ister in 1911, wrote: "That the majesty of our imperial
house towers high above everything to be found in the world,
and that it will endure as long as heaven and earth, is too well-
known to be demonstrated. ... If it is deemed necessary for
the people to have a national religion, let it be the religion of
patriotism and imperialism, in other words, let us all worship
the sacred person of the Emperor."
In a subsequent article we will describe the man-god of
Japan, his religious duties, and how his worship is willingly
practiced by the Japanese people.
THE CHILDREN OF SHAKESPEARE'S DRAMAS.
BY R. J. GRADWOHL.
E do not think of Shakespeare as a portrayer of
children. We know him as the great painter of
men and women, the creator of characters
which, if not always in the fullness of maturity
as counted by years, are, at least as in the case
of Juliet, possessed of a passion and power that place them
beyond the stage of childhood. In truth, when we consider
the characters he has made immortal, his Hamlet, Lear,
Othello, Macbeth, Desdemona, Portia and others equally hu-
man and almost as great, present themselves before us. Rare-
ly, with the exception, possibly, of Prince Arthur in King
John, are we aware that on his great canvas of humanity
there are child figures.
Nevertheless, the careful student will find, and the dis-
covery will bring a feeling of rare pleasure, that Shakespeare
has drawn with fine, delicate touch a number of youthful por-
traits, and furthermore, that these pictures, though often mere
sketches, are, in their way, as complete as the more elaborate
ones of his people of mature growth.
All of Shakespeare's children, with the exception of the
pages, are of noble birth, and consequently subject to the try-
ing and often tragic conditions that surround those who aspire
to, or wear the crown. Yet they are types common to ordinary
childhood, and have the traits familiar to those who have
observed child-life. Moreover, as showing the results of
heredity and environment, they are of special interest to the
child psychologist, while to the general reader they are another
evidence of the dramatist's wonderful knowledge of life, and
the depth of his understanding of humanity small as well as
great.
There are not many children in Shakespeare's dramas, and
most of them are overshadowed by the great figures about
them. But they are by no means obscured, and careful read-
ing reveals that these little figures stand out distinct; that a
few lines, like a mere stroke of the pencil by a great artist,
convey a most vivid picture.
78 CHILDREN OF SHAKESPEARE'S DRAMAS [April,
In one of Shakespeare's earliest plays, Titus Androni-
cus, that awful, harrowing drama, where "one sups on hor-
rors " the Stygian darkness is relieved by the tender, bright
little figure of Lucius, grandson of the great Roman general.
The boy is first brought forward in the awful scene when
the lovely and chaste Lavinia appears before her father in all
the shame and agony that have been inflicted upon her by t
brutal and lustful enemies of her father. The art of the gre:
master is nowhere better displayed than in bringing the inno-
cence and joyousness of childhood before the reader at such
a moment. It would seem as if only the presence of one un-
tutored in life and grief could lift a pall of such misery.
When Titus Andronicus gives vent in maddened misery t
his tortured emotions, and his words move Lavinia, "the cor-
dial of his age," but to further confusion, the boy with a wis
dom beyond his age, exclaims,
Good grandsire, leave these bitter deep laments;
Make my aunt merry with some pleasing tale.
And yet the boy is not insensible to his aunt's terrible
plight, nor his grandsire's sorrow. His childish heart
breaking.
Alas, the tender boy in passion mov'd,
Doth weep to see his grandsire's heaviness.
But the boy had imbibed a love of reading from his
mother, who had given him Ovid's Metamorphosis. And we
infer from the text, that after her death the unfortunate La-
vinia had taken her place, and that many a happy hour had
he spent with her when she had read to him "sweet poetry
and Tully's orator. These diversions had cheered him in his
loneliness and soothed his childish sorrows, therefore his first
thought had been that some "pleasing tale" might lighten the
stupendous agony he witnesses.
But the boy is more than a book worm. He is valiant as
becomes the son of a soldier, and grandson of a warrior of
forty years. When there is talk of revenge, he no longer
weeps, but steps manfully forward and is ready, "Ay, with my
dagger in their bosoms." He goes alone and unafraid into
the presence of the enemy, dropping crafty words of pre-
tended conciliation, but leaving behind the weapons sent by
1920.] CHILDREN OF SHAKESPEARE'S DRAMAS 79
his frenzied grandsire. Young as he is, Lucius understands the
situation, and deep in his heart nurses the desire for revenge.
The figure of this child is like a ray of sunshine pene-
trating a charnel-house of horrors. It seems to make endur-
able even the closing scene of the play where "on horror's
head horrors accumulate." When the murdered Titus lies
cold in death, Lucius, the elder, calls the boy to weep over his
grandsire's body in these beautiful lines :
thy grandsire lov'd thee well.
Many a time he danc'd thee on his knee,
Sung thee asleep, his loving breast thy pillow;
Many a matter hath he told to thee
Meet and agreeing with thine infancy.
What a truly Shakespearean touch is here! What a con-
trast between a past of peace and joy, and a present of treach-
ery, rape and murder. What a picture of a day when, in the
respite from war, the great general, untouched by domestic
griefs, had brought himself to the level of a little child. And
that child remembers and in exquisite words of love and de-
votion bewails his loss:
O grandsire, grandsire! even with all my heart,
Would I were dead, so you did live again!
Sweet, tender and brave, amid the horrors that cannot be
kept from him, the picture of young Lucius is the only one we
care to preserve in our remembrance of Titus Andronicus.
The ill-starred young princes in Richard III., whose paths
are crossed by the crafty Gloster, are portrayed with all the
attributes that should pertain to the sons of a monarch. The
elder, the Prince of Wales, who but for the murderous Gloster
would have come to the throne, cherishes lofty ideals. His
hero is Julius Caesar. Because, as he proudly avers,
Death makes no conquest of this conqueror;
For now he lives in fame, though not in life.
The manly boy would be a soldier as well as a king and
proclaims,
An' if I live to be a man,
I'll win our ancient right in France again.
80 CHILDREN OF SHAKESPEARE'S DRAMAS [April,
Yet with all his ambition and show of fearlessness, he is
still a child, rather dismayed at being left alone in London;
inquiring plaintively for the kind uncles in whom he has
faith; and longing for the presence of his mother and younger
brother. This brother, the little Duke of York, is evidently the
petted younger child. He is happy when told that his height
is almost that of his older brother. What a touch of childish
pride is here! A noble pride, though, for in all his eagerness
to be as tall as his brother, he resents the insinuation implied
in Gloster's words, "Small herbs have grace, great weeds do
grow apace."
The Little duke is bright, precocious, and quick-witted.
Unlike the young Prince of Wales, who veils his distrust of his
uncle in carefully measured phrases, he gives vent under the
guise of childish humor to his feelings of dislike; and ap-
parently in innocence lets fly many a barbed arrow that but
increases his uncle's hatred.
"Bold, quick, ingenious, forward, capable," the scheming
Richard characterizes the boy, and ascribes his conduct to the
mother who had doubtless reared him in distrust of wicked,
aspiring kin. Through it all, however, one sees the bravado
of a child in whose heart there is fear and natural shrinking
from the tower where his uncle Clarence had been murdered,
and whose ghost might linger there. "I shall not sleep in quiet
in the Tower," he says, pathetically, as he and his brother are
led away. Only one scene and part of another are devoted to
these young princes, yet their noble aspiring souls are as
clearly revealed, the beauty and innocence of their characters
struggling vainly against the forces of sin and duplicity are as
clearly depicted, as the overtowering wickedness of Richard
himself.
We hear no more directly of them, until we are told of
the "tyrannous and bloody act" that brought to a close their
brief lives. In their beauty and innocence, asleep in each
other's arms, clinging closely the one to the other, as if for
greater safety, the Bible on their pillow to which in faith and
hope they had doubtless turned for comfort ere they had com-
mitted themselves to slumber, they were found murdered,
brutally murdered at the instigation of the fiend-like Richard
by those who, "although fleshed villains, bloody dogs," wept
as they told of their death.
1920.] CHILDREN OF SHAKESPEARE'S DRAMAS 81
Of all Shakespeare's pictures of children, the most com-
plete, as well as the most pathetic, is that of Prince Arthur in
King John. One cannot think of a single charming trait
of childhood that is not found in the character of this gentle,
unfortunate claimant to the throne of England. Shakespeare,
whether intentionally or not, has given us in this early drama
a complete portrait of childhood beautiful, innocent, and ap-
pealing, but made tragic by the events of a turbulent time.
The first glimpse of Arthur is in the stormy scene between
Constance, his mother, and his grandmother, the strong-
minded Elinor. When his mother franctically asserts his
claim to the throne of England, and his grandmother violently
urges that of her son John, the gentle boy shocked and grieved
by the bitterness displayed, says entreatingly, with no
thought of his right or the glory of kingship :
Good my mother, peace.
I would I were low-laid in my grave;
I am not worth this coil that's made for me!
He is the timid, shrinking child, not born to rule; one who
would have been happy in peaceful obscurity, and who would
never of himself have asserted his claim to the kingdom. He
is in complete contrast to the two young princes in Richard
HI., neither of whom, had he been so placed, would have
quietly acquiesced in the usurpation of his rights.
Furthermore, when Arthur is borne away to prison, his
thoughts are not of the loss of the throne, but of the effect of
his banishment on his mother, now more than widowed. His
loving heart cries out, "O, this will make my mother die with
grief!"
In the solitude of the Tower, he is still the gentle boy,
pensive, but never rebellious. He remembers when he was
in France that he saw gentlemen who would be "sad only for
wantonness," and he marvels at this. Were he at liberty, and
a keeper of sheep, he would be content; indeed, even in the
dreadful solitude of the Tower, but for fear of what might
come to him, he could still be happy.
His bearing toward Hubert, the keeper, is consistent with
his character. There is no display of the superiority of rank,
nor the haughtiness of royal birth. Hubert had been ill, and
Arthur had waited on him, held his hand, and bound his
VOL. CXI. 6
82 CHILDREN OF SHAKESPEARE'S DRAMAS [April,
head with his handkerchief. And the heart of the keeper is
not of stone; at the risk of a king's wrath he spares the pretty
child.
But alas! terror has seized the timid boy. To avoid death
within the Tower, he scales the outside walls, and meets a
more merciful end upon the stones below. There that "ruin
of sweet life" is found, that "beauteous clay" that once had
been young Arthur.
Falstaff's page in Henry IV. is a product of wrong envi-
ronment. In a waggish mood, Prince Henry had given the
boy, because of his diminutive size, to Falstaff, and the portly,
jolly knight declares he is fitter to be worn in his cap than
to wait at his heels. The boy is inducted into a world of ale
houses and then* unsavory habitues, and these leave their
mark upon him. He imitates his master's manners, reflects
his wit and takes delight in assuming a wisdom beyond his
years. In attendance upon the witty but none too virtuous
knight, he often hears the chimes at midnight, and the effect
on him of this mode of life leads Prince Henry to remark:
"And the boy I gave Falstaff, he had him from me Christian,
and see if the fat villain have not transformed him ape."
Nevertheless, Shakespeare portrays the boy as knowing,
intuitively, the difference between the pranks of his master
and the depravity of his followers. When death conquers the
inimitably witty knight, his little page scorns to follow the for-
tunes of "those three swashers," as he terms Bardolph, Pistol
and Nym, who would make him "as familiar with men's
pockets, as their gloves and hankerchers" and seeks his for-
tune elsewhere.
Lucius, page to Brutus, plays but a small part in the trag-
edy of Julius Csesar, yet in the brief space allotted him he is
exquisitely limned as a boy faithful so far as the limits of
childhood permit him, to a great and beloved master.
The affairs of Brutus, often extending far into the night,
requires Lucius to be in attendance at an hour when youth
naturally calls for repose. In these late vigils, sleep often
overcomes the boy, yet never does Brutus display harshness
or impatience. He disturbs him reluctantly, ever bidding him,
his duty done, to sleep again.
With memories, doubtless, of his own childhood, he looks
down on the sleeping boy and says softly:
1920.] CHILDREN OF SHAKESPEARE'S DRAMAS 83
Enjoy the honey-dew of slumber;
Thou hast no figures nor no fantasies,
Which busy care draws in the brains of men;
Therefore thou sleep'st so well.
Shakespeare's tenderness toward children is voiced in the
attitude of Brutus toward the boy an attitude that never
changes. When Portia is gone, and the tide of affairs is all
against him, he is still the kind, gentle, thoughtful master.
"If I do live, I will be good to thee," are almost the last
words of Brutus to the boy, and we are prone to think that the
faithful page was among those of whom, after Brutus' death,
Octavius said : "All that served Brutus, I will entertain them."
In Macbeth, that great play of "vaulting ambition," one
scarcely looks for a childish figure; yet tucked away in one
short scene is the little son of Macduff, the man whom, alone,
Macbeth feared.
When Macduff has fled to England for assistance in sav-
ing his country, his wife, left to the mercy of the tyrant, be-
wails her fate to her little son.
"Sirrah," she says to the child, "your father's dead; and
what will you do now? How will you live?"
With child-like faith the boy quickly responds, "As birds
do, mother."
Like all of Shakespeare's children, he is quick-witted and
worldly-wise. To the question, "What wilt thou do for a
father?" comes the shrewd reply: "If he were dead, you'd
weep for him, if you would not, it were a good sign that I
should quickly have another."
Most loyal is he to that father, and brave as becomes the
son of the great Macduff. Attacked by murderers, who call his
father traitor, he hurls at them the defiant and significant
words, "Thou liest, thou shag-ear'd villain."
In the little son of Coriolanus, we have the silent, but po-
tent influence of a little child. When the mighty Roman,
stung to bitterness by the attitude of his country toward him,
determines to march against it, the mother he reveres, finding
him deaf to her entreaties, puts the boy in his path. Wisely
she urges, "Speak thou, boy, perhaps thy childishness will
move him more than can our reasons."
The boy is silent, but keenly conscious of the situation and
84 CHILDREN OF SHAKESPEARE'S DRAMAS [April,
the need of his intervention. He kneels before his seemingly
obdurate father, and Volumnia, in a burst of passion, cries :
This boy that cannot tell what he would have,
But kneels and holds up hands for fellowship,
Does reason our petition with more strength,
Than thou hast to deny't.
This is true; the heart of Coriolanus is touched by the
unspoken persuasiveness of his young son; his iron will yields
to the silent eloquence of a child's presence. He becomes "of a
woman's tenderness;" renounces vengeance upon his country,
and thus saves his name from undying shame.
In Winter's Tale, Shakespeare, in the words of Polixenes,
voices in no uncertain tones his love of children, and their
power to lighten the cares that often lie heavy on the hearts of
men.
The king of Bohemia, the innocent cause of Leontes'
jealousy and Hermione's disgrace, speaks thus of his son :
He makes a July's day short as December,
And with his varying childness cures in me
Thoughts that would thick my blood.
Leontes finds the same joy in the young Mamillius, his
own son, yet the boy's life is blighted by the father's jealous
passion.
The play is classed among the comedies, yet it includes
the tragedy of a gentle, loving child who, like Arthur in King
John, succumbs to unfortunate circumstances.
Mamillius, "a gallant child, one that indeed physics the
subjects, makes all hearts fresh," is pictured as a genuine boy,
always at play, yet with an undercurrent of seriousness even
in his sportive moments.
When Leontes becomes a prey to maddening thoughts, the
boy, playing carelessly about, rushes to his father at the psy-
chological moment in a burst of tenderness, and exclaims:
"I am like you, they say." And, for the moment, at least,
Leontes is cheered and he answers: "Why that's some com-
fort."
One of the most charming scenes of the drama is that of
the gentlewomen and the boy. They flatter him and would
1920.] CHILDREN OF SHAKESPEARE'S DRAMAS 85
play with him, but his attitude toward them is proudly dis-
dainful, because one of them had kissed him hard as if, in-
deed, he were a baby still. Could anything be truer of the
growing boy than this desire to be thought too big for caresses?
He wants to be manly, and in response to his mother's
request for a merry tale, tells her that "a sad tale's best for
winter; I have one of spirits and goblins." And with an air
of bravado he begins one of "a man that dwelt by a church-
yard." He tells it softly so that "yon crickets," as he terms the
chattering gentlewomen, shall not hear it.
But, alas! though a mere child he is too sensitive and too
sympathetic to stand the strain of his mother's disgrace and
banishment. We are told that
He straight declined, drooped, took it deeply,
Fasten'd and fix'd the shame on't in himself.
Threw off his spirit, his appetite, his sleep,
And downright languished.
Finally, "his thoughts too high for one so tender" bear
him under entirely, and he is swept unto death by the current
of his father's unreasonable jealousy.
Such are the pictures of childhood that Shakespeare has
drawn for us brave, manly, loving, winsome, little princes;
faithful, precocious, wordly-wise little pages. Some the creat-
ures of heredity, but most of them delicate instruments played
on by circumstances and environment, glad or serious, happy
or unhappy, accordingly as events touch them. Never mere
puppets, but as real and as true to life as the men and women
his genius has immortalized. True studies of the inward char-
acter of childhood, they are deserving of consideration in any
investigation of child life, and are a phase of the great
dramatist's universality that has been almost entirely over-
looked.
THE LOYALIST.
BY JAMES FRANCIS BARRETT.
CHAPTER VIII.
UT Marjorie did not return the note. For with the
commotion of the departure of the guests, all
thought of the note within her bodice vanished
for the remainder of the evening. Only when she
had returned home that night, fatigued and almost
disgusted with the perfunctory performances of
the entertainment, did she discover it, and then not until she
removed the garment within whose folds it lay concealed. It
fell to the ground; she stooped to pick it up.
"Oh, dear! I forgot it. I must attend to it the first thing in
the morning." And she placed it on the dresser where it could
not escape her eye. Then she retired.
But she did not sleep. She lay wide awake and tossed ner-
vously to and fro. She tried to close her eyes only to find them
wandering about the room in the obscure dimness, focusing
themselves now on the old mahogany dresser, now on the little
prie-dieu against the inner wall with the small ivory crucifix
outlined faintly above it, now on the chintz hangings that covered
the window. She could hear her heart pounding its great weight
of bitterness against the pillow, and as she listened she thought
of Stephen's arrest and its thousand and one horrible conse-
quences. She tried to congratulate herself on her sweet serenity,
yet the serenity mocked her and apprehension loomed as fiercely
as before.
The next she knew was a quiet awakening, as if her mother's
hand had been put gently on her arm. Outside ten thousand light
leaves shivered gently and the birds were calling to one another
in melodious tones. This was her first glimpse of the day and it
sent her suddenly to her knees.
Stephen came late that afternoon. He had not been expected;
yet she was happy because he came. She had done little during
the day; had not left the house, nor dressed for the occasion.
The note was where she had left it, and all reference to it buried
with the rest of her thoughts of the evening.
"I cannot yet tell how it has been decided. They went into
executive session at once."
1920.] THE LOYALIST 87
"But . . . Surely . . . They could not find you guilty?"
"Oh, well."
"Please . . . Won't you tell me?"
"There is little to tell. It was very brief." He could not
become enthusiastic.
"There you were put to trial?" she asked.
"Yes."
"Go on. Tell me."
He was silent. He desired to withhold nothing from her,
yet he could not find the words.
"What happened?" she persisted.
"Well I don't know I soured on the whole proceeding.
The court-martial met, the Regimental Court-Martial, with
three members. This was permissible. They began by
reading the charge as preferred by Colonel Forrest, which was to
the effect that I had been guilty of striking my superior officer,
Colonel Forrest, by attempting to choke him. To this was added
the accusation of abusive, threatening language as well as a threat
of murder. I, of course, pleaded not guilty; nor did I prepare
any defence. The affair was so trivial that I was surprised
that it was ever brought to trial."
"How long did the proceedings last?"
"They were very brief. Several witnesses were examined,
the chief one being Mr. Anderson."
"I know him," remarked Marjorie.
"You know him?"
"I met him last evening at the Shippen's."
"Did he say aught about me?"
"Not a word."
"Well, he appeared against me. After a few more prelim-
inary questions I was put on the stand in my own defence. I
told briefly the circumstances which led to the incident, (I would
not call it an assault, for I continually maintained it to be of a
trivial nature and worthy only of an explanation). I told how
the Colonel had used certain derogatory remarks against the Faith
that I believed and practised, which occasioned a violent argu-
ment. This, I think, was the great mistake I made, for it ap-
peared to make an unfavorable impression upon the Court. In
this regard they were unquestionably on the side of Forrest.
Then I related the remark incident to my action, and announced
that I would repeat the deed under similar circumstances were
the same disrespectful language directed against the Commander-
in-Chief. This, I fear, made little impression either, since I was
already attached to the staff of General Washington, and a
88 THE LOYALIST [April,
jealous rival general was about to decide my guilt. That ended it.
I was excused and the court adjourned." He paused, then con-
tinued: "For these reasons I have serious misgivings as to my
fate."
"What can happen to you?"
"I do not know. It may result in a suspension, and it may
result in a verdict of 'Not Guilty.' "
"Will you know very soon?"
"I shall be summoned before them."
Neither spoke for a time.
"Do you know," observed Marjorie, "I greatly mistrust Gen-
eral Arnold and I fear that he already has decided against you."
"What causes you to say that?"
"Well I don't know I just think it. While listening to
him last evening I drew that impression."
"Did he say anything against us?"
"He is enraged at Congress and he has long felt persecuted
and insulted by the people. He desires a command in the navy
and has already written Washington to that effect; and. again
he would petition Congress for a grant of land in New York,
where he would retire to private life, for he vows he never will
again draw sword on the American side."
"Did he say this?" asked Stephen.
"He did."
"Do you think that he was sincere?"
"I really do. He talked with all the earnestness of a man of
conviction. Somehow or other I greatly mistrust him. And he is
extremely bigoted."
"I rather suspect this, although I have had no proofs of it.
If he is, it will out very soon."
"And you may be assured, too, that he will have an able
adjutant in Peggy. She is his counterpart in every particular."
He looked at her as she spoke, and was amazed by the excite-
ment in her face. She talked excitedly; her eyes, those large,
vivacious, brown eyes that looked out of her pretty, oval face,
were alight, and her face had gone pale.
"I was interested in them last evening, and with the apparent
zeal displayed by Peggy's mother in favor of the match, I would
not be surprised to hear of an announcement from that source
at any time."
"Has it reached that stage?"
"Most assuredly. I decided that they already are on terms
of intimacy, whose secrets now obtain a common value."
"You think that?"
1920.] THE LOYALIST 89
"Well, I do. Yes. I know, for instance, that he had
a letter in his possession which was addressed to her, which let-
ter had its origin in New York."
"How came he by it?"
"She must have given it to him. I have it now."
"You have it?" He sat up very much surprised. "Where
did you get it?"
"I found it."
"Did you read it?"
"No." She smiled at him, and at his great perplexity over
the apparent mystery.
And then she told him of the little party; of herself and Mr.
Anderson, and their intrusion upon General Arnold and Peggy;
of their conversation and the falling of the note; of her subse-
quent return for it together with the placing of it within her
bodice, and the state of temporary oblivion into which the incident
finally lapsed.
"You have that letter now?" he asked with no attempt to con-
ceal his anxiety.
"Yes. Upstairs."
"May I see it? Really, I would not ask this did I not think
it quite important."
"Very well." She left to fetch it.
"Who is this man, Anderson?" Stephen asked upon her re-
turn. "Do you know him?"
"No. But he is very impressible. He was my partner during
the evening."
She did not deem it wise to tell him everything; at least not
now.
"How long have you known him?" he inquired impatiently.
She smiled sweetly at him. "Since last night," was the brief
response.
"Where did he come from?"
"I scarce know. You yourself mentioned his name for the
first time to me. I was greatly surprised when presented to him
last night."
"Did he come with General Arnold's party, or is he a friend
of Peggy's?"
"I don't think Peggy knew him before, although she may
have met him with some of the officers before last evening.
I should imagine from what you already know that he is ac-
quainted with the Governor's party and through them received
an invitation to be present."
90 THE LOYALIST [April,
"Did he say aught of himself?"
"Scarcely a thing. He has not been a resident of the city
for any length of time, but where he originated, or what he pur-
poses, I did not learn. I rather like him. He is well-mannered,
refined and richly talented."
"I sensed immediately that he was endowed with engaging
personal qualities, and gifted with more than ordinary abilities.
I have yet to learn his history, which is one of my duties, not-
withstanding the unfortunate state of affairs which has lately
come to pass."
He stopped and took the letter which she held out to him.
He opened it and read it carefully. Then he deliberately read it
again.
"Did you say that no one knows of this?"
"I am quite sure. Certainly no one saw me find it, although
I am not certain that I alone saw it fall."
"You are sure that it was in the Governor's possession?"
"Quite. I saw it distinctly in his belt. I saw it fall to the
ground when he caught hold of the sword knots, which caused
it to fall."
He leaned forward and reflected for a moment with his eyes
intent on the note which he held opened before him. Suddenly
he sat back in his chair and looked straight at her.
"Marjorie," he said. "You promised to be of whatever as-
sistance you could. Do you recall that promise?"
"Very well."
"Will you lend your assistance to me now?"
She hesitated, wondering to what extent the demand might
be made.
"Are you unwilling?" he asked, for he perceived her timid
misgiving.
"No. What is it you want me to do?"
"Simply this. Let me have this note."
She deliberated.
"Would not that be unfair to Peggy?" She feared that her
sense of justice was being violated.
"She does not know that you have it."
"But I mean to tell her."
"Please! Well! Well! Need you do that immediately?
Could you not let me have it for a few days? I shall return it
to you. You can then take it to her."
"You will let no one see it?"
"Absolutely."
"Very well. And you will return it to me?"
1920.] THE LOYALIST 91
"I promise."
And so it was agreed that Stephen should take the letter
with him, which he promised to return together with the earliest
news of the result of his court-martial.
Stephen went out the little white gate, closing it very de-
liberately behind him and immediately set off at a brisk pace
down the street. Every fibre in him thrilled with energy. The
road was dusty and hot, and his pace grew very strenuous and
fervent. There was no breeze; there was no sound of wheels;
all was quiet as the bells tolled out the hour of six. Nevertheless,
he trudged along with great haste without once stopping until
he had reached the door of his lodgings.
He turned the key and entered, closing the door behind him
and taking the greatest of care to see that it was properly bolted.
Flinging his hat into a chair as he passed, he went immediately
to the table, which served as his desk. While he pulled himself
close to it, he reached into his pocket for the letter. He opened
it before him and read it. Then he sat back and read it again;
this time aloud:
Co. 13. Headquarters, New York.
15 July, 1778.
MADAME :
I am happy to have this opportunity to once again express
my humble respects to you and to assure you that yourself,
together with your generous and hospitable friends, are causing
us much concern separated as we are by the duress of a merci-
less war. We lead a monotonous life, for outside of the regulari-
ties of army life, there is little to entertain us. Our hearts are
torn with pangs of regret as we recall the golden days of the
Mischienza.
I would I could be of some service to you here, that you may
understand that my protestations of zeal made on former occa-
sions were not without some degree of sincerity. Let me add,
too, that your many friends here present unite with me in these
same sentiments of unaffected and genuine devotion.
I beg you to present my best respects to your sisters, to the
Misses Chew, and to Mrs. Shippen and Mrs Chew.
I have the honor to be with the greatest regard, Madame, your
most obedient and most humble servant,
Miss PEGGY SHIPPEN, W. CATHCART.
Philadelphia.
His face was working oddly, as if with mingled perplexity
and pleasure; and he caught his lip in his teeth, as his manner
was. What was this innocent note? Could it be so simple as it
appeared? Vague possibilities passed through his mind. The
92 THE LOYALIST [April,
longer he gazed at it the more simple it became; so that he was
on the point of folding it and replacing it in his pocket, sadly
disconcerted at its insignificance. He had hoped that he might
have stumbled across something of real value, not only some
secret information concerning the designs of the enemy, but also
some evidence of an incriminating nature against his acquaint-
ances in the city.
Suddenly he thought he saw certain letters dotted over, not
entirely perceptible, yet quite discernible. He turned the paper
over. The reverse was perfectly clear. He held it to the light,
but nothing appeared through.
"By Jove!" he exclaimed softly.
He looked closely again. Sure enough there were faint
markings on several of the letters. The "H" was marked. So
was the "V" in "have," and the "A" and the "L." Snatching a
pencil and a sheet of paper he made a list of the letters so
marked.
HVANLADERII'GAERODIRCUTN
This meant nothing. That was apparent; nor could he
make sense out of any combination of letters. He knew that
there were certain codes whereby the two progressions, arith-
metical and geometric, were employed in their composition, but
this answered to none of them. He went over the list again,
comparing them with the marked letters as found in the note.
Yes, they were identical. He had copied them faithfully. He
sighed and ran his fingers through his hair.
"So this was sent to Peggy from New York," he muttered to
himself. "I strongly suspected that she was in communication
with her British friends, although I never came in contact with
the slightest evidence. This certainly proves it."
He held the letter at a distance from him, attentively sur-
veying it.
"And General Arnold has been interested, too. Very likely,
Marjorie's hypothesis is the true one. They had been reading
the note when the newcomers arrived on the scene and he stuck
it in his belt until their greetings had been ended. Neither of
them now knows of its whereabouts; that much is certain.
He stood up suddenly and strode about the room, his hands
clasped behind him. Going to the window, he peered out through
the small panes of glass of the uncurtained upper half. There
burned the light across the dusk a patch of jeweled color in
the far-off western sky. Yet it awakened no emotion at all.
His mind was engaged in the most intricate process of
thought. He deduced a hundred conclusions and rejected them
1920.] THE LOYALIST 93
with equal promptitude. He greatly admired General Arnold
as the bravest leader in the line, whose courage, whose heroism,
whose fearlessness had brought him signal successes. There was
no more popular soldier in the army, no one more capable of
more effective service. To have his career clogged or goaded
by a woman, who when she either loves or hates will dare any-
thing, would be a dreadful calamity. Yet it seemed as if he had
surrendered his better self.
This man Anderson puzzled him. Personally he was dis-
posed to dislike him, that being the logical effect of his relations
with him. At the Coffee House, where he had met him, and
where he had suffered his better judgment to become dormant,
it was this man who had brought him to the pitch of irritation
by means of a religious argument, while at the trial it was the
same Anderson who appeared as an excellent witness and who,
by his clever, deliberate and self-possessed manner, made a strong
point for the Colonel in the minds of the Court.
What was his origin? That he might never know, for of all
subjects, this was the most artfully avoided. In the capacity of
a civilian, he was engaged in no fixed occupation so far as could
be learned, and it was commonly known that he was a frequent
visitor at the Governor's Mansion. That he did not belong to the
service, he knew very well, unless the man was affecting a dis-
guise; this, however, he thought highly improbable. The French
Alliance had been further confirmed by the arrival of the fleet,
which brought many strangers to the city. Now, as he thought
of it, he had a certain manner about him somewhat characteristic
of the French people, and it was entirely possible that he might
have disembarked with the French visitors. He was a mystery
anyhow.
"Strange I should stumble across this chap," he mumbled to
himself.
Stephen awoke with a start. Just what the hour was, he
could not know, for it was intensely dark. He reckoned that it
could not be long after midnight, for it seemed as if he had
scarcely fallen asleep. But there was a wonderful burst of light
to his mind, a complete clarity of thought into which those often
awake, who have fallen asleep in a state of great mental conflict.
He opened his eyes and, as it were, beheld all that he was about
to do; there was also a very vivid memory of his experience
of the evening.
He arose hurriedly and struck a light. He seized the letter
in search of the momentous something that had dawned upon
94 THE LOYALIST [April,
him with wonderful intensity, as often happens when reflection is
allowed to ebb.
"Company Thirteen," he remarked with deliberate empha-
sis. "That must be the key."
And seizing a paper he wrote the order of letters which he
had copied from the note a few hours before. H V A N L A D
E R I I G. He stopped at the thirteenth, and began a second line
immediately under the line he had just written.
AERODIRCUTN.
It inserted perfectly when read up and down beginning with
the letter "H." He completed the sentence: HAVE ARNOLD
AID RECRUITING.
He could not believe his eyes. What did it all mean? What
regiment was this? Why should this be sent from a British
Officer to Peggy Shippen? There were mixed considerations here.
There was a satisfaction, a very great satisfaction in the
knowledge that he was not entirely mistaken in his suspicions
concerning Peggy. She was in communication with the British and
perhaps had been for some time. This fact in itself was perfectly
plain. The proof of it lay in his hand. Whether or not his Ex-
cellency was involved in the nefarious work was quite another
question. The mere fact of the note being in his possession sig-
nified nothing, or if anything, no more than a coincidence. He
might have read the note and be, at the same time, entirely
ignorant of the cipher, or he might have received this hidden
information from the lips of Peggy herself, who undoubtedly had
deciphered it at once.
Yet what was the meaning of it all? There was no new call
for volunteers, although, heaven knows, there was an urgent need
of them, the more especially after the severe winter endured at
Valley Forge. Recruits had become exceedingly scarce, many of
whom were already deserting to the British Army at the rate of
over a hundred a month, while those who remained were with-
out food or clothing. And when they were paid, they could buy
only with the greatest difficulty a single bushel of wheat from
the fruits of their four months' labor. Should it prove to be true
that a new army was about to be recruited, why should the enemy
be so much interested? The new set of difficulties into which he
was now involved were more intricate than before.
He extinguished the light and went to bed.
The next day a number of copies of the New York Gazette
and Weekly Mercury of the issue of July 13, 1778, found their
way into the city. They were found to contain the following
advertisement :
1920.] THE LOYALIST 95
FOR THE ENCOURAGEMENT OF ALL
Gentlemen Volunteers,
Who are willing to serve in his Majesty's Regiment of
Roman Catholic Volunteers,
Commanded by
Lieutenant-Colonel Commandant,
ALFRED CLIFTON
During the present wanton and unnatural Rebellion,
AND NO LONGER,
The sum of FOUR POUNDS,
will be given above the usual Hounty,
A suit of NEW CLOTHES
And every other necessary to complete a Gentleman soldier.
Those who are willing to show their attachment to their
King and country by engaging in the above regiment, will call
at Captain M'Kennon, at No. 51, in Cherry-street, near the Ship
Yards, NEW YORK, or at Major John Lynch, encamped at Yel-
low-Hook, where they will receive present pay and good
quarters.
N. B. Any person bringing a well-bodied loyal subject to
either of the above places, shall receive ONE GUINEA for his
trouble.
God Save the King.
CHAPTER IX.
It was not until the following Wednesday night that John
Anderson was ready to pay his respects to Miss Marjorie.
He had worked on the miniature since Saturday, and had
regarded his finished product with eminent satisfaction. He
had drawn her as she appeared to him on the night of the re-
ception in the pose which he had best remembered her during
the interval when she sat out the dance with him; her head
turned partly towards him, revealing her small oval face sur-
mounted by a wealth of brown hair, powdered to a gray; her
small nose, with just a suggestion of a dilatation, lending to the
face an expression of strength that the rest of the countenance
only gave color to; the mouth, firmly set, its lines curving up-
ward, as it should be, to harmonize with her disposition; the
eyes, a soft brown, full of candor and sincerity, delicately shad-
owed by slender and arched eyebrows on a smooth forehead.
Marjorie could not conceal her enthusiasm as he handed
it to her. Unable to restrain her curiosity, she arose hurriedly
and went to the window to benefit by the less obscure light.
"Is? am I as pretty as that?" she exclaimed from her van-
tage point, without lifting her eyes from the portrait.
96 THE LOYALIST [April,
"Only more so," responded Anderson. "My memory poorly
served me."
"Lud!" she remarked, holding it at arms length from her,
" 'tis vastly flattering. I scarce recognize myself." She returned
to her chair.
"I swear on my honor, that it fails to do you full justice."
She continued to study it, paying but little heed to his re-
mark. It was a water-colored portrait done on ivory of the most
delicate workmanship and design, set in a fine gold case, deli-
cately engraved, the whole presenting an appearance of beauty,
richly colored. She turned it over and saw the letters J. A. M. A.
interlaced over the triplet:
"Hours fly; flowers die;
New days, new ways,
Pass by. Love stays."
"It is very pretty," was her only comment.
"Hast no one told thee how well thou might appear in a
ball gown?"
"I ne'er gave thought to such."
"Nor what an impression thou wouldst make at Court?"
"Hast thou seen court beauties?"
She resolved to learn more about him.
"Aye! Oft have I been in their company."
"At St. James?"
"No! Much as I would have been pleased to. I know only
Versailles."
So she thought he must be a French nobleman, who, like La
Fayette, had incurred the royal displeasure by running away from
court to fit out a vessel at his own expense in the hope of further-
ing the cause of the Colonists. The great impulse given to the
hopes of the disheartened population by the chivalrous exploit
of the latter, the sensation produced both by his departure from
Europe and his appearance in this country, might behold a
glorious repetition in the person of this unknown visitor. Her
interest grew apace.
"It was magnanimous of His Majesty to take our cause to
his heart. We can never fail in our gratitude."
"It is only natural for man to resist oppression. It has been
written that it is only the meek who should possess the land."
"An ideal which is often badly shattered by the selfish am-
bitions and perverse passions of godless men."
"You are a Catholic?" he asked suddenly.
"I am proud of it."
1920.] THE LOYALIST 97
"And your fellow patriots are of the same form of worship?"
"A goodly proportion of them."
"How many might you assume?"
"I scarce know. We have no method of compiling our num-
bers, not even our total population."
"Surely there must be a great percentage, if one considers
the influx from France and England, not to mention Ireland,
whence many fled from persecution."
"I once heard Father Farmer say that there must be over
seven thousand Catholics in Pennsylvania, while Maryland has
about fifteen thousand. Whatever there remain are much scat-
tered, except, of course, New York with its thousand."
"I never dreamt they were so numerous! So great is the
spirit of intolerance that the wonder is that a single Catholic
would remain in the Colonies."
"I know it. Formerly Maryland and Pennsylvania were the
two only colonies where Catholics were allowed to reside, and
even there were excluded from any civil or military office. And
the time has not yet arrived for complete religious freedom,
though the arrival of the French fleet, with its Catholic army and
Catholic Chaplains, will make a favorable impression upon our
less enlightened oppressors."
"It seems strange that you should throw in your lot with
a people who prove so intolerant."
"Father Farmer, our pastor, says that no influence must
ever be used except for the national cause, for we must be quick-
ened by the hope of better days. He pleaded with his people to
remain faithful and promised the undivided sympathy of his
fellow priests with their kinsmen in the struggle. For these
reasons I hardly think that many Catholics will desert the cause."
"Yet you must know that it was England that bestowed the
most liberal grants to the inhabitants of the Northwest territory."
"You mean the Quebec Act?" she asked.
"Yes. And you know that Canada would be allied with you,
heart and soul, were it not for the intolerant spirit of your fellow
colonists."
"Perhaps it would."
"But would it not be better"
"Do you mean to suggest to me that we turn traitor," she
interrupted, as she turned full upon him, her eyes flashing and
betraying intense feeling.
"No pardon I meant no offence. The fact is I was
only remarking on the sad plight of our co-religionists."
"I fail to perceive how ill we fare. Our compatriots render
VOL. CXI. 7
98 THE LOYALIST [April,
us honor and as Father Farmer says, we may cherish the hope
of better days, which are inevitable. You must know that one
of the signers of the Declaration of Independence is a Catholic;
that a goodly number are to be found in the Congress; and that
the army and navy each have a considerable quota."
"Are there Catholic votes in Congress?"
"Assuredly. The Declaration of Independence was first read
to the public by a Catholic, and you must know that Washing-
ton's 'Life Guard,' a choice body of men, is largely Catholic,
and Captain Meagher, whom, perhaps, you know," and she
glanced at him with a merry twinkle, "is of our way of believing
and General Washington's Aid-de-camp."
And so they talked. Marjorie was absorbed in her subject,
once her religion became the topic, and she almost forgot her
game in regard to her visitor. She desired to appear to the best
advantage, for which purpose she talked freely, in the hope of
extracting some information from him concerning himself and
his intents. Still, however, there was another extreme which,
though apparently less dangerous, was to be avoided. The imag-
inations of men are in a great measure under the control of their
feelings, and it was necessary for her to abstain from giving out
too much information that might deflect from its purpose the
very object she sought to attain.
And yet there was a subtle influence about him, an adroitness
of speech, a precision of movement which, unless sufficiently
guarded against, was insidious. He had the most wonderful
way of getting one's confidence, not only by reason of his genial
and affable disposition, but also by his apparent and deliberate
sincerity. And while it was true that she had determined upon
a method which was originally intended to redound to her own
advantage, she soon learned that she was playing with a boom-
erang which put her upon the defensive against the very strategy
she had herself planned.
He was not sincere in his protestations of admiration; that
she perceived immediately. But she was resolved to let him
think that she believed him in order that she might discover his
real intents and purposes. Her knowledge of human nature was
sufficient to enable her to conclude that one cannot unite the in-
compatible elements of truth and deception, the discernment of
reality and the enjoyment of fiction for any great length of time.
The reality is bound to appear.
For this reason she was not disposed to dismiss him at once,
but rather to allow him to call and see her frequently, if need
be, until she had been thoroughly satisfied as to his true character.
1920.] THE LOYALIST 99
Nevertheless, she sensed, at this very moment, that she was play-
ing with a skillful adversary, one thoroughly versed in the game
of diplomacy, against whom she would be called upon to employ
every manner of weapon at her command. She realized the
weight of the foe, and thought she understood her tactics. So
she accepted the challenge.
"You are interested in Captain Meagher?" he asked serenely.
There was a pause. Marjorie looked slightly perturbed.
"Well, she confessed, "there is this much about him. I
chanced to know the details of the offence with which he has
been charged and I am naturally interested to learn the result
of his trial."
"He may be found guilty," he quietly announced.
"Why do you say that?"
"The evidence was wholly against him."
"And there was no testimony to the effect that Colonel For-
rest was somewhat intoxicated, or that he spoke disparaging
words against the captain's co-religionists, or that he attacked the
character of the Commander-in-chief?"
"There was to some extent, but it did not seem to make any
impression."
"I presume that you know the reason." Her eyes gleamed a
little.
"Why?" There was a pause. "The verdict has not been
given. I shall be pleased to inform you of it at the earliest
opportunity."
"Thank you. I shall be delighted. But lets not talk about
it any more," she added. "Let's leave it."
Mr. Anderson smiled.
It was perhaps an hour after dawn that Stephen awoke for
about the third or fourth time that night; for the conflict still
surged within him and would give him no peace. And, as he
lay there, awake in an instant, staring into the brightness of the
morn, once more weighing the mysterious disclosures of the
evening, swayed by the desire for action at one moment, over-
come with sadness at the next, the thought of the verdict of his
trial occurred to him and made him rise very hurriedly.
He was an early arrival at the Headquarters. There had
been several matters disposed of during the preceding day and
the verdicts would be announced together. The room where the
Court was being held was already stirring with commotion; his
judge-advocate was there, as was Colonel Forrest, Mr. Anderson,
several members of the General's staff, and Mr. Allison, who
100 THE LOYALIST [April,
had sought entry lo learn the outcome of the trial. Suddenly
a dull, solemn silence settled over all as the members of the Court
filed slowly into the room.
They took their places with their usual dignity, and began
to dispose of the several cases in their turn. When that of Cap-
tain Meagher was reached, Stephen was ordered to appear before
the Court and hear the sentence.
He took his place before them with perfect calmness. He
observed that not one of them ventured to meet his eye as he
awaited their utterance.
They found that he was not justified in making the attack
upon a superior officer notwithstanding the alleged cause for
provocation, and that he was imprudent in his action, yet be-
cause of his good character, as testified to by his superior officers,
because of the mitigating circumstances which had been brought
to light by the testimony of the witnesses during the course of
the trial, and because the act had been committed without malice
or criminal intent, he was found not guilty of any violation of
the Articles of War, but imprudent in his action, for which
cause he had been sentenced to receive a reprimand from the
Military Governor.
Stephen spoke not a word to any one as he made his way
back to his seat. Why could they not have given him a clear
verdict? Either he was guilty or he was not guilty. He could not
be misled by the sugary phrases in which the vote of censure
had been couched. The Court had been against him from the
start.
At any rate, he thought, the reprimand would be only a
matter of form. Its execution lay wholly with him who was
to administer it. The Court could not, by law, indicate its sever-
ity, nor its lenity, nor indeed add anything in regard to its exe-
cution, save to direct that it should be administered by the com-
mander who convened the Court. And while it was undoubtedly
the general intention of the court-martial to impose a mild pun-
ishment, yet the quality of the reprimand must be left entirely
to the discretion of the authority commissioned to utter it.
When Stephen appeared before the Military Governor at the
termination of the business of the day, he was seized with a great
fury, one of those angers which for a while poison the air with-
out obscuring the mind. There was an unkind look on the face
of the Governor, which he did not like and which indicated to
him that all would not be pleasant. He bowed his head in
answer to his name.
"Captain Meagher," the Governor began. "You have been
1920.] THE LOYALIST 101
found guilty by the Regimental Court-Martial of an action which
was highly imprudent. You have been led, perhaps by an in-
fatuate zeal in behalf of those whom you term your co-religionists,
to the committal of an offence upon the person of your superior
officer. It is because of this fact that I find it my sad duty to
reprimand you severely for your misguided ardor and to ad-
monish you, together with the other members of your sect, of
whom an unfair representation is already found in the halls of
our Congress and in the ranks of our forces, lest similar out-
breaks occur again. Did you but know this eye only lately
saw the members of that same Congress at Mass for the soul of
a Roman Catholic in purgatory, and participating in the rites of
a Church whose anti-Christian corruptions your pious ancestors
would have witnessed with their blood. The army must not
witness similar outbreaks of religious zeal in the future."
He finished. Stephen left the room without a word, turned
on his heel and made his way down the street.
Nature is a great restorer when she pours into the gaping
wounds of the jaded system the oil and wine of repose. Divine
grace administers the same narcotic to the soul crushed by tor-
ture and anguish. It is then that tears are dried, and that afflic-
tions and crosses become sweet.
Desolation, a very lonely desolation, and a deep sense of
helplessness filled the soul of Stephen as he retraced his steps
from the court room. His life seemed a great burden to him,
his hopes were swallowed up in his bereavement. If he could
but remove his mind from this travail of disappointments and
bitterness, if his soul could only soar aloft in prayer to the
realms of bliss and repose, he might endure this bitter humilia-
tion. He felt the great need of prayer, humble, submissive prayer.
Oh! if he could only pray!
He was invisibly directed into the little doorway of St.
Joseph's. His feeling was like that of the storm tossed mariner
as he securely steers for the beacon light. The church was nearly
empty, save for a bare half dozen people who occupied seats at
various intervals. They were alone in their contemplation before
their God, without beads or prayer book, intent only upon the
Divine Person concealed within the tabernacle walls, and an-
nounced by the flickering red flame in the little lamp before
the altar. Here he felt himself removed from the world and its
affairs, as if enclosed in a strange parenthesis, set off from all
other consideration. And straightway, his soul was carried off
into a calm, pure, lofty region of consolation and repose.
102 THE LOYALIST [April,
To the human soul prayer is like the beams of light which
seem to connect sun and earth. It raises the soul aloft and trans-
ports it to another and a better world. There, basking in the
light of the Divine Presence, it is strengthened to meet the im-
pending conflict. Nothing escapes the all-seeing eye of God. He
only waits for the prayer of his children, eager to grant their
requests. Nothing is denied to faith and love. Neither can
measure be set to the divine bounty.
"Miserere mei, Deus; secundum magnam misercordiam
tuam Have mercy on me, O God, according to Thy great mercy."
Stephen buried his face in his hands, in an agony of conflict.
The tone of the Military Governor's reprimand had left no
room for speculation as to his true intents and purposes. What-
ever rebuke had been administered to him was intended for the
Catholic population, otherwise there was no reason for hold-
ing up to reprobation the conduct of the body governing the
Republic. The mere fact that the Governor despised the Con-
gress was an unworthy, as well as an insufficient, motive for the
attack.
The humiliated soldier felt incapable of bearing the insult
without murmuring, yet he willed to accept it with perfect resig-
nation and submission. For a time he had fought against it.
But in the church he felt seized by an invisible force. On a
sudden the invisible tension seemed to dissolve like a gray mist,
hovering over a lake, and began to give place to a solemn and
tender sweetness.
"Miserere mei Deus."
He sought refuge in the arms of God, crying aloud to Him
for His mercy. He would give his soul up to prayer and commit
his troubled spirit into the hands of his intercessors before the
throne of heaven.
"Accept my punishments for the soul who is about to be
released."
All his life he had an ardent devotion to the suffering souls
in purgatory. Years before he had made a voluntary offering of
all his works of satisfaction done in this life, as well as all the
suffrages which would be offered for him after his death in favor
of the Holy Souls. This heroic act of charity he had never with-
drawn. For he believed firmly, as he had been taught
by his Church to believe, that the penalty of sin was not entirely
remitted with the guilt, and that there existed a place of purga-
tion for the souls of the just who were not entirely purified at the
time of their departure from this life.
To them, then, he poured forth the bitterness of his heart,
1920.] THE LOYALIST 103
offering in their behalf, through the intercession of the Virgin
Mary, the cross which had been imposed upon him. The injus-
tice of his trial which he knew, or thought he knew, had been
tempered by the spirit of intolerance, was brought home to him
in full vigor by the severity of his reprimand. He did not deserve
it, no he could not force himself to believe that he did, yet he
accepted it generously though painfully, in behalf of the suf-
ferings of his friends.
He besought them to pray for him, that he might the more
worthily endure his cross. He prayed for his tormentors that
they might be not held culpable for their error. He intrusted
himself entirely into the hands of his departed friends and re-
newed with a greater fervor his act of consecration.
"I beseech Thee, O my God, to accept and confirm this
offering for Thy honor and the salvation of my soul. Amen."
He arose from his pew, made a genuflection before the Blessed
Sacrament saying as he did so, "My Lord and My God," blessed
himself with the holy water, and left the church.
In the meantime an event of rare importance had occurred
in the garden of the Shippen home. There, in the recesses of
the tulips sheltered behind the clustering hydrangeas, Peggy ac-
cepted the fervent suit of the Military Governor and gave him
her promise to become his bride. A few days later the world
was informed of the betrothal and nodded its head in astonish-
ment and, opening its lips, sought relief in many words.
The wheels of destiny began to turn.
[TO BE CONTINUED.]
\
flew Boohs,
THE CECHS (BOHEMIANS) IN AMERICA. By Thomas Capek.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. $3.00.
This book fills a gap in the history of immigration to this
country. Irish, English, French, Spaniards, Dutch immigrants
have valuable historical records as to the origin and development
of their colonies in the United States. But the races, whose im-
migration goes back only a short distance, such as the Southern
Slavs, Hungarians, Finns and Italians, lack such records. It is
therefore to be hoped that Mr. Capek will find imitators among
the other races. Books like his, so filled with data and statistics,
not only enrich the history of an expanding people, but throw in
high relief the spiritual contribution of the various ethnical ele-
ments of Europe to the building up of greater America. They
are most serviceable in the wide campaign for Americanization.
In 1890, Peter Hronst published a solid volume on The Cech
Catholic Settlements in America (1890), and in 1910 E. B. Balch
(Our Slavic Fellow Citizens'), and John Habenicht (History of the
Cechs in America) gathered interesting historical material on
the Bohemian immigrants. These books dwelt upon the eco-
nomic life of the immigrants rather than upon their cultural de-
velopment. Mr. Capek aims to complete the work of these his-
torians. He throws light upon the various manifestations of the
activity of his countrymen in the United States. His picture
leaves no detail obscure so long as he writes without religious or
political preconceptions.
But he seems anxious, at times, to give prominence to the
wrongs suffered by Protestants in Bohemia, or to their ephemeral
growth in this country. The first chapter, for instance, is the
history of the Catholic reaction in Bohemia in the first quarter
of the seventeenth century. We fail to see the logical connec-
tion between that chapter and the subject under treatment. This
emerges at page twenty-nine, where the statistics of Bohemian
and Moravian immigration from 1850 to 1860 are to be found.
The most important sections of the volume are devoted to the
literary and the religious history of the Bohemians in America.
The religious life of Bohemians is treated in two distinct chapters.
The one entitled "Rationalism" is a sad picture of the decay of
Bohemian Catholicism in America. "It is perhaps not too much
to say that fifty per cent of the Cechs in America have seceded
1920.] NEW BOOKS 105
from their old-country faith." Our author is convinced that "the
strength of the secessionists is nearer sixty or seventy per cent
than fifty" (p. 119). A shameful press, filled with sarcastic
venom towards the Catholic faith, has done its utmost to mislead
Catholic Bohemians into rationalism, and unfortunately suc-
ceeded. Anti-Catholic propaganda was supported by some ex-
priests, who, led astray by nationalistic aims, renounced their
faith. This was also, of course, aided by a strong Protestant
proselytism. Statistics show how strong this proselytism grows.
The Jan Hus Presbyterian Church alone in New York has a Sun-
day school frequented by 1,057 children. Hence it follows that
Rationalism and Protestantism little by little are choking Bohe-
mian Catholicism. There is much talk about the Italian religious
problem in the American Catholic Press, but no attention is paid
to the dangers threatening the faith of Catholic Slavs.
The writer devotes twenty-five pages to the lives of the lead-
ers of anti-clericalism, anti-Catholicism, and Protestantism among
his countrymen, and only one to the Catholic apostolate. This
partiality deprives his book of some highly interesting pages as to
the apostolic zeal of Monsignor Joseph Hessoun, the Benedictines
of Chicago, the Bohemian Catholic Press. Fortunately, the notice
of J. Sinkmayer in the Catholic Encyclopedia balances this omis-
sion, and shows that Catholicism produces everywhere the same
fruits of zeal and holiness.
The copious bibliography in this volume deserves special com-
plimentary mention.
SCHOOLS OF TOMORROW. By John Dewey. New York: E. P.
Dutton & Co. $2.00.
Dr. Dewey has done a considerable service for the world of
education, in this, his latest book. The Schools of Tomorrow
indicate the real weakness of the present American educational
conditions. By this means the author opens up to the thinking
portion of those, to whose trust the future welfare of the rising
generation has been enjoined, a fertile field for investigation.
Not only has John Dewey helped by this process of negation to
point out the shortcomings of our common schools, but he has
cleared the way to begin a positive, constructive work of better-
ment.
By a judicious use of sound epistomology, the educators of
today can now take up this work, begun by Dewey, and lift our
American school theory out of its arid and lifeless state into one
that is sound and healthy, one that will produce for us results
such as were produced by the schools which preceded us.
106 NEW BOOKS [April,
Abstracting from the incorrect criteriology and baseless as-
sumptions, such as were made on pages 11, 26, 31, 115, 134, 135,
138, 160, 232, 304, 306, and 315, which mar to no little extent this
volume and its influence, Schools of Tomorrow is a strong de-
fence of the concepts of education, given us by the Divine Teacher
and now jealously guarded by the Church which He came on
earth to found. The function of Christian elementary educa-
tion has always been to develop the tools and powers by means of
subject-matter, adapted to the capacity of the pupil. To learn
by doing, has ever been the basal concept of education as carried
out by those, who still maintain that all truth is one. "Not every-
one that saith, Lord, Lord shall enter the kingdom of heaven,
but he who doth the will of My Father, he shall enter the king-
dom of heaven."
The principles, which Dewey points out as fundamental, are
not something new, as the title and presentation of the subject-
matter of this book would lead the reader to suppose. They are
the principles, championed by the leaders of Christian education,
in every age; principles which, if followed, would remove the
baneful influence of political corruption and return the educative
process to its natural and proper position, viz.: one primarily
under the parent and secondarily belonging to the State. Until
this is done, the schools of tomorrow, will not produce the citi-
zens of character and utility, which our country sorely needs.
For special notice and usefulness we commend to all teachers
Chapters III., IV. and VIII.
THE STATE AND THE NATION. By Edward Jenks, M.A., B.C.L.
New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. $2.00.
This book is an expansion of the author's earlier work, A
Short History of Politics. About one-half the text is in the field
of history factual and more or less hypothetical. There are
chapters on primitive institutions, patriarchal institutions, the
birth of the State, and feudalism. In the latter part of the book
the State is discussed in relation to public order, political repre-
sentation, legislation, property and industry.
Although the average man makes little or no distinction be-
tween the State and the nation, the majority of writers on political
science do distinguish between them. However, their distinc-
tion is not the one adopted by Mr. Jenks. As a history of social
institutions on their political side, the book has very considerable
value. The final chapter, "Proposals of Change," is an inter-
esting summary, but the judgments that it contains will not com-
mand universal assent.
1920.] NEW BOOKS 107
THE HISTORY OF THE YANKEE DIVISION. By Harry A. Ben-
well. Boston: The Cornhill Co.
Any division that has accomplished so much as did the
Twenty-sixth is deserving of some lasting record of its achieve-
ments. Few can claim so many noteworthy distinctions as this
New England unit, organized, equipped, trained and led in battle
by its beloved leader, General Clarence Edwards.
While other divisions were still in training, even while public
attention was focused on the Rainbow, the boys of New England
slipped away from Hoboken and Canada and instead of being in
training at Camp Greene, North Carolina, were actually the first
National Guard Division in the fighting area, and fired the first
divisional shot in the War.
The rest of the division's work was marked by the same
eagerness to do the impossible and an esprit de corps that sus-
tained it to success. The book pays a wonderful tribute to Gen-
eral Edwards and his men a tribute in every way deserved.
The author in doing this necessary service for the New Eng-
land fighters has written a chapter of American history that will
never cease to inspire future Americans.
DUST OF NEW YORK. By Konrad Bercovici. New York: Boni
& Liveright. $1.60.
"New York is an orchestra playing a symphony," says Konrad
Bercovici in the opening sentence of this unusual and fascinating
volume. And, as the book proceeds, you are convinced that he is
right. It is a vast symphony, and many of the players are foreign.
Their tune is old Human Nature, albeit set mostly in a minor key.
The book consists of a series of sketches describing the vari-
ous foreign centres of the metropolis. Each has its little, clean-
cut plot, its vivid characters, its daubs of rich, enlivening color.
The author has succeeded in catching some of the constant ro-
mance with which the East Side throbs, and he has set it down
with more than mere journalistic skill. Sketches of our foreign
populace in the metropolis are not uncommon. Writers flock to
that field for inspiration. But few of them actually understand
the life lived in that vast seething section. Bercovici does under-
stand it, and he possesses the added gift of being able to put it into
words. Consequently his stories are vibrant with intense ro-
mance; he crystallizes on his page the humor and tears of a dozen
different nationalities. He has done for New York what Thomas
Burke has done for London in his London Nights, only he has
done it infinitely better. Bercovici is an observer and content to
be that, Burke a romancer with a set formula for finding romance
108 NEW BOOKS [April,
and writing it. In Burke's stories you read a great deal of Burke
and little of London; in Bercovici you learn a great deal about
New York and very little about Konrad Bercovici.
"Because Cohen Could Neither Read Nor Write," an incom-
parable cross-section of Semitic life, tells of the progress of a
young Jew who missed being a synagogue attendant and blos-
somed out into great riches. "All In One Wild Rumanian Song"
reveals a quick, vivid tragedy of the Rumanian section. "The
Little Man of 28th Street," to name just one more of these re-
markable sketches, has a denouement that would have been the
envy of O. Henry.
Here is a modest volume, put out modestly, and not advertised
with vain boastings on its jacket. To those blessed with literary
discernment, it should prove a real find and an amazing treat.
THE TRAGEDY OF LABOR. By William Riley Halstead. New
York: The Abingdon Press. 50 cents.
Private property is essential to human welfare; neither the
wage system nor the system of private capital is essentially un-
just; but the insecurity of employment at adequate wages is a
very great evil feature of the system, and it must be remedied by
society; class combinations, whether of labor or of capital, must
not be permitted to exact unjust tribute from society; Socialism
would not prove a genuine remedy for the abuses of the present
system, but public ownership and operation of all monopolistic
public utilities is desirable and probably inevitable. These are
the main propositions of this little book. They are not startling,
nor even new, but they are set forth in an excellent spirit and in
an attractive style.
THE JUDGMENT OF PEACE. Translated from the German of
Andreas Latzko. New York: Boni & Liveright. $1.75 net.
The author, an officer in the Austrian army, has dedicated his
novel to Remain Holland, whom he calls his great compatriot in
the love of man. It is a powerful and tragic sketch of war seen
from the point of view of a great pianist who volunteers in a fer-
vor of patriotism for the Fatherland, and who comes to feel noth-
ing but hatred for a world which goes about its pleasure and
teaches children fine sounding words about the glory and nobility
of war while their fathers are being disemboweled. He attributes
the War to a lack of high ideals and an inordinate love of power in
individuals. In the mad race for money and success, the victors
never paused to ask how the victims managed to carry out their
broken lives just as he, himself, in the days of his musical
1920.] NEW BOOKS 109
triumphs had never given a thought to the poor shabby fellows
who failed in their ambitions.
One of the characters in the novel is a young German Ensign,
a noble and sensitive personality, who, born into a country where
the greatest virtue is physical bravery, leads a lonely, pathetic
life, sneered at by his comrades, and at last, when he is dying
like a frightened child in the enemy's hospital, finds a sym-
pathetic friend in an old French nun.
The Judgment of Peace appears to be the work of one who
has gone through intense suffering by reason of the War, and
whose life has become permanently embittered. Few writers
equal his descriptions of the bloody agonies of the battlefield
and his pictures of soldiers, but his outlook on life is morbid and
gloomy. The only ray of optimism in the book are in the lines:
"If you must feign a noble cause to lead men into drumfire, to
fight and to die, how can you doubt their power to sacrifice and
endure if you were to substitute a truly noble cause for lies and
crimes?"
HEALTH THROUGH WILL POWER. By James J. Walsh, M.D.
Boston: Little, Brown & Co. $1.50.
On a very difficult and obscure subject, i. e., the relations be-
tween will and vital functions, Dr. Walsh has written a most use-
ful and entertaining book. His main thesis is that men permit
their wills to become atrophied through lack of use. Dreads, fads,
fancies, habits, indolence so inhibit the will, that it is practically
inoperative. And this deplorable condition of will-degeneracy
acts most potently and disastrously on all the organs. He as-
serts that will has far more efficacy than medicine; that patent
medicines as therapeutics are utterly valueless, but derive a sub-
jective efficacy from the will and imagination of the patient. He
maintains also that the smattering of physiology and hygiene
taught in schools has done more harm than good, by directing the
pupils' attention too much to the lapses and defects of their
organism.
On the moot point of the use of alcohol as a medicine Dr.
Walsh's conclusion is noteworthy. The physical effect of alcohol
is depression, the psychic effect exaltation. The drug literally
thus puts heart into the patient, and lessens his fear of evil conse-
quences. "The patient can, with the scare lifted, use his will to
be well, ever so much more effectively, and psychic factors are
neutralized that were hampering his resistive vitality" (pp. 192,
193).
Dr. Walsh proves convincingly that a wise self-denial, a con-
110 NEW BOOKS [April,
scientious discharge of duty, and above all the crushing out of
a morbid sense of self-pity, conduce to excellent health, personal
happiness and in numerous cases to remarkable longevity. This
book deserves nothing but praise. Every line coincides with the
Catholic viewpoint. Every page embodies with the latest con-
clusions of medical science, what is noble, pure and of good
repute.
THE SCIENCE OF EATING. By Alfred W. McCann. New York:
George H. Doran Co. $2.50.
This book is as fascinating as a well-told novel. It is more
important than a whole library of novels. It should be read by
pastors and school teachers, by housewives and fathers of fami-
lies. Mr. McCann is an expert, in the true sense of that much-
abused word. He is an expert in foods, and in food-poisoning to
boot. For more than five years he worked in a food laboratory,
analyzing and experimenting. As the advertising manager of a
food business handling $12,000,000 worth of prepared food-stuffs
yearly, he learned "that no food reform can come through adver-
tising as now conducted."
Urged by a great desire to apply his knowledge to the cause
of food-reform, and keenly aware that a large proportion of the
foods most widely used today are adulterated or weakened, Mr.
McCann obtained the backing of the New York Globe. Forty-one
other newspapers in as many cities joined the Globe in using Mr.
McCann's articles. But the advertising agencies, in the interests
of their clients, the food manufacturers, exerted such pressure
that all these newspapers, except the Globe and the Chicago
Daily News, dropped Mr. McCann and his exposures of the food-
poisoners and food-destroyers. Now, he declares, the only hope of
reform lies in the education of children, and their parents, in the
"science of eating," that is to say, in the practical knowledge of
what foods are truly nourishing and what foods are harmful or
worthless. This book provides the fundamental facts of such an
education. It is worthy of the most serious consideration.
POEMS, 1908-1919. By John Drinkwater. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Co. $2.00.
These are the collected poems to date of the English critic
and playwright whose dramatic portrait of Abraham Lincoln has
of late been attracting large audiences to the English and Amer-
ican theatres. The author scores his best success when he writes
of the English countryside in these poems, but nearly all the
others impress one as of mechanical construction and cold cor-
1920.] NEW BOOKS 111
redness; there is little or no spontaneity or lyric cry here. If
Mr. Drinkwater is a poet at all, it is not so much by the grace
of God as by dint of disproportionately hard labor.
SHORT HISTORY OF HARMONY. By Chas. McPherson, F.R.A.M.
London: Keegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. $1.00.
The growth of harmony from the first crude organum and
discant up to the most elaborate innovations are traced in an en-
tertaining, as well as in a very instructive, manner in this
little work. Teachers of very young children in music in our
schools will find this work an excellent one in opening up the
secrets of harmony to their young minds. Harmony should go
hand in hand with instruction on any instrument of music from
the very beginning, otherwise the pupil is getting but a one-sided
education in the art of music. The author in this work has writ-
ten in a clear and readable style, manifesting skill in the use of
illustration and comparison, which shows him to be a teacher in
the true sense of the word. Though written for the instruction
of the beginner in the art of music, it will greatly interest ex-
perienced musicians, who wish to follow the most recent develop-
ments of harmony and keep pace with the most approved way
of teaching it.
JEREMY. By Hugh Walpole. New York : George H. Doran Co.
$1.75 net.
Mr. Walpole has here given a striking demonstration of
his versatility, as well as his talent. As a successor to that
powerful novel of Russia, The Secret City, he presents the lei-
surely, detailed history of one year in the life of a boy, beginning
on the day that he is eight. Jeremy Cole is the son of an Anglican
clergyman, his home is in a Cathedral town, his surroundings
and circumstances are typically those with which English novel-
ists have made us thoroughly familiar. The book's interest and
individuality are derived from nothing unusual; yet it possesses
those qualities to a high degree. This is due to the elaborate
sympathy and fidelity with which the author interprets the per-
sonality of the boy. We share his likes and dislikes, we return
to our own childhood in reading of the things that give him the
deepest delight, we follow the workings of his acute little brain
in the crude, harsh theology he deduces from his father's preach-
ing. He is not a very good child, nor a prodigy, in any sense; but
he is an engaging young philosopher, who shows the instincts
and promise of a thoroughbred. We are loath to part from him
when, at the end of the year, he is sent away to school. Inci-
112 NEW BOOKS [April,
dentally, nothing in recent fiction is more admirable than the
subtly skillful indications given of the development of character
that twelve months have wrought.
Though Jeremy is the book's centre, he is not the whole.
Mr. Walpole has enriched our acquaintance with a gallery of
vivid characterizations. No less an achievement than the boy
himself is the piteous figure of his younger sister, Mary, who
adores him and passionately desires to entertain and engross
him, yet accomplishes only his utter boredom. So well done is
this that it introduces an almost tragic emotional note. Neverthe-
less, the content is entirely normal, refreshingly free from senti-
mentality on the one hand, or on the other, of the morbid and un-
wholesome.
The book takes rank easily among Mr. Walpole's principal
successes, a remarkably intimate, convincing study of childhood.
It is not, however, appropriate reading for children, and should
not be so represented by its publishers.
BLACK SHEEP CHAPEL. By Margaret Baillie-Saunders. New
York: George H. Doran Co. $1.50 net.
This baffling bit of fiction conveys an inescapable impression
that when its theme first presented itself to the author's mind,
she seized it without taking account of its exacting nature. A
plexus of motives and emotions confronts her, requiring all she
has to bestow of painstaking skill, patient of no compromise;
yet compromise is the keynote of her treatment. The supreme
interest is the deliberate effort of a man, who is not a demoniac,
to detach the soul of a boy, his illegitimate son, from religious
influences and lure him, by means of sensuous and artistic ap-
peals, to a worldly, self-indulgent life. The author has staged this
spiritual drama, for the most part, in an attractively novel set-
ting; she has written the first part with elaborate care: then,
she begins to shirk the issues she has raised, not carrying them
to their logical results. She gives us conclusions, when what
we want, and should have, is analysis of the way in which they
are reached; furthermore, it frequently happens that these con-
clusions are neither consistent with what has preceded them nor
substantiated by what follows. Nevertheless, the inherent
strength of the theme survives the author's vacillating method.
The book is not dull. This is due to recurrent manifestations of
the picturesque and the dramatic which tantalizingly re-engage
the attention, and show that lack of thoroughness, more than
lack of ability, is responsible for the waste of opportunities in a
production that intrigues, but does not satisfy.
1920.] NEW BOOKS 113
THE SOUL OF THE "C. R. B." By Madame Saint Rene Tail-
landier. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. $1.75 net.
Well acquainted as we have been made with the work of
the Commission for Relief in Belgium, and with the conditions
that obtained in that country and in the invaded portions of
France, every fresh account is of interest, provided it is authori-
tative. This quality is indisputable in the present work, Madame
Taillandier's brother having been the French representative on
Mr. Hoover's commission. Thus the book is written from a
standpoint of intimate knowledge that makes it a valuable ad-
dition to the literature of this subject; moreover it has literary
quality, as might be expected from one who is a member of a
group distinguished in both literature and public affairs.
Recognition is due to the clearness and fluency of the trans-
lation by Mary Cadwalader Jones.
JOHN BROWN SOLDIER OF FORTUNE. A Critique. By Hill
Peebles Wilson. Boston: The Cornhill Co. $2.50.
The writer's purpose is to prove that the character of the
famous John Brown as it has been presented for many years by
his admirers, is an historical myth. Because of the years of
political excitement and national unrest during which he lived,
he has been exploited in oratory and poetry to the serious mis-
construction of his acts and motives. His three biographers,
James Redpath, Frank Sanborn and especially Oswald Garrison
Villard, whose work on John Brown has been the authority since
its publication in 1910, have, by suppressing and palliating facts,
described him from a wholly partisan point of view.
According to Mr. Wilson, the real John Brown was a cold-
blooded, thoroughly mercenary, cruel adventurer who craftily
used the guise of religion to further his ends. The crime of the
Pottawottamie was the theft of a large number of horses by
which Brown hoped to retrieve his fallen fortunes. To accom-
plish this, and to safeguard the loot, it was necessary to murder
the owners of the horses. The plans for the killing were accord-
ingly laid several weeks before its occurrence, the principals be-
ing John Brown, his unmarried sons, and four or five other con-
federates. After the murders, the horses belonging to the vic-
tims were run out of the country. This crime the author feels
has been passed over too lightly.
Brown's original purpose in coming to Kansas, according to
his daughter, was to see "if something would not turn up to his
advantage," not the high ideal of freeing the oppressed. The
struggle between the Free State and the slavery party in Kansas
VOL. CXI. 8
114 NEW BOOKS [April,
was increasing in bitterness. When Brown discovered that it was
a money-making proposition to be on the side of the Free State
party, he violently espoused the cause of abolition.
The author states that there is not a scrap of evidence to
prove that prior to 1855 Brown took any unusual interest in se-
curing freedom for the slaves. Before coming to Kansas, he had
been involved in several unsavory financial deals, and he sought
there a new field. Letters and the testimony of witnesses given
in Mr. Villard's book indicate that this interest was shown as
early as 1834. In planning the uprising at Harper's Ferry, he
counted on the cooperation of all the slaves, and hoped that, after
massacring the white slave holders, he would come into a goodly
share of the loot, and could maintain himself by means of the
provisional government that his black army would aid him to set
up. The plan was for the slaves to murder their masters when
they slept, after the fashion of the terrible massacres of Santo
Domingo. A religious hypocrite of the type of some of Crom-
well's marauding soldiers, a swindler, a robber and midnight
assassin such is the man whom his partisans have created one
of our national heroes.
This critique of John Brown would make a better impression
if it were written in a less violent manner; had Mr. Wilson pre-
sented his facts, and he seems to have a good case, in a calmer,
more judicial manner, he would be more convincing to his read-
ers. The biography by Mr. Villard is a most scholarly work, but
his zeal for his hero led him too far, when oblivious to his faults,
he claims his memory is "at once a sacred, a solemn and an in-
spiring American heritage." Mr. Wilson, on the other hand,
gloats over the low character and the crimes of John Brown.
The impression one receives is that this generation is still too
close to the bitterness of the Civil War to make a just estimate of
this curious personality.
VOLTAIRE IN HIS LETTERS. Being a Selection from His Cor-
respondence. Translated with Preface and Forewords by S.
G. Tallantyne. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. $3.50 net.
The letters in this volume have been selected, as the title
attempts to indicate, with a view of displaying autobiographically
salient features in the life and character of the great French deist.
They succeed fairly well in accomplishing the purpose of the
compiler. One may find here justification enough for Joubert's
well-known verdict on Voltaire: "He had correctness of judg-
ment, liveliness of imagination, nimble wits, quick taste, and a
moral sense in ruins. He is the most debauched of spirits, and
1920.] NEW BOOKS 115
the worst of him is that one gets debauched along with him. If
he had been a wise man, and had had the self-discipline of wis-
dom, beyond a doubt half his wit would have been gone; it
needed an atmosphere of license in order to play freely."
His taste was not as unerring as it was quick. His literary
judgments on Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, and the Greek drama-
tists, judgments which are here exhibited in all their original
arrogance, have exposed the arch-mocker to certain little revenges
of Time, which he could not have anticipated. And he admired
Lord Chesterfield! He was indeed capable of generous enthu-
siasms and indignations, and some of his ideas on government
and social justice were ahead of his age. But he is not, on that
account, an oracle, as the compiler of this volume seems to think.
Was it Carlyle who said that "the French Revolution was Truth
dancing in hell-fire?" Why is Truth so often judged uninterest-
ing unless it is recommended by that sinister setting?
THE GREAT MODERN ENGLISH STORIES. By Edward J.
O'Brien. New York: Boni & Liveright. $1.75.
Mr. Edward J. O'Brien has amply acquitted himself as a
critic of the American short story by his yearly anthologies
which he has sedulously, if somewhat arbitrarily, compiled for
the last few years. With the assurance of these successes, he
has turned his hand to the field of British fiction. In a volume
equipped with a readable introduction on the chief exponents
of the genre, and with brief biographical and bibliographical
notes, he gives twenty-eight "great modern English stories."
Twenty-seven writers and the last four or five decades are repre-
sented. Hardy's "Three Strangers," Stevenson's "A Lodging for
the Night," two stories by Kipling, and three or four more by
other figures of the first rank find their place here; "The Fourth
Magus," by R. B. Cunninghame Graham, a story of King Nicanor,
a fourth Wise Man, who came in time to see the Saviour on
Golgotha, is conceived in a genuinely fine spirit; but several of
the selections are frankly jejune pieces by minor writers. One
wonders what Mr. O'Brien's literary norm was in bringing to-
gether stories of such uneven merit. In the introduction he ex-
plains that the anthology is intended to include "a fair cross-
section of the best that is now being done." But how he recon-
ciles this statement with his exclusion of Conrad, Galsworthy,
Jacobs, Merrick, Locke is not easy to see. Surely Conrad's
"Youth," for example, would grace the pages far better than the
dismal "Sick Collier," by D. H. Lawrence, or the strained and
morbid "Birth," by Gilbert Cannan. The inclusion of the latter,
116 NEW BOOKS [April,
indeed, puts Mr. O'Brien's taste, as well as his critical judgment,
in a questionable light. The bed-room theme, of which this is a
variant, has of late been exploited in fiction and drama with a
frequency that is matched only by its grossness. Holland Pert-
wee's "Red and White," another story as objectionable, is de-
scribed in the introduction as a delicate study in adolescence; in-
delicate would be more exact. With so much to select from in
modern English fiction that is wholesome and excellent, there
seems to be no excuse for including such hectic examples of
modernism in a collection which very easily might contain what
really is the best that is now being done.
PEEPS AT PEOPLE. By Robert Cortes Holliday. New York:
George H. Doran Co. $1.25.
This little book is made up of sketches written in an easy
and graceful style, trifles light as air, which seem deceptively easy
to do. Some one has said that there is nothing new under the
sun and the reader of Peeps at People will see in Mr. Holliday
a twentieth century inheritor of La Bruyere and Addison. "The
Forgetful Tailor," "An Old Fogy," "A Nice Man," "Cramis, Patron
of Art," are modernized and lightly done sketches of men whom
the French delineator of the Courtier and the Poet, and the English
creator of Sir Roger de Coverly would study with interest. Per-
haps they might be surprised at the change in the character of
their descendants, and possibly the descendants might be inter-
ested to know that they had so long and honorable a lineage.
The book is marked by a light humor and a boyish enthusiasm
(of which the writer vainly tries to appear unconscious), as de-
lightful as they are welcome. The preface is delectable. Read-
ing between the lines one surmises that these thumb-nail sketches
were firstlings which Mr. Holliday found tucked away in a for-
gotten corner of his desk, and decided to print now that his repu-
tation is established. The decision was wise and the discriminat-
ing reader will not be lacking in appreciation.
JUDITH. A Play in Three Acts. By Arnold Bennett. New
York: George H. Doran Co. $1.00 net.
The fecund and fertile Arnold Bennett has taken time enough
away from his multitudinous tasks of turning out huge novels,
short stories galore and innumerable essays, articles, reports of
prize fights, and other lesser literary jobs, to turn the apocryphal
book of Judith into "realistic" drama. The result will add
another title to the already lengthy list of plays which forms one
of the many subdivisions of Mr. Bennett's varied productions,
1920.] NEW BOOKS 117
but it is not likely to figure very extensively either in actual play
bills or in the literature of the stage.
Arnold Bennett attacks all his subjects with a glibness which
is in many cases a mere mask for flippant incapacity. Looking
upon himself, as he tells us in his own essays, as a completely
formed literary craftsman, competent to do anything in the
writing line from epics to puns, he has turned out the play of
Judith with his customary verbal felicity, but has not succeeded
in convincing us that tragic characters and events, especially
those dealing with great passions and ideals, can be transmuted,
in the shallow alembic of the modernistic mind, into shapes of
enduring or even of temporary beauty.
WHEN THE WORLD SHOOK. By H. Rider Haggard. New
York: Longmans, Green & Co. $1.60.
An author is always taking a gamble when he attempts
to do a good thing twice. King Solomon's Mines and She, which
terrorized and fascinated the childhood of the present generation,
were excellent tales of the wild adventure-mystery sort and the
popularity accorded them was justified. In his latest, When the
World Shook, Rider Haggard has tried to do it again and, it must
be said, puts out a pretty stupid tale.
It tells of the wanderings of a rich man and his two com-
panions, a scientist and a priest, who are thrown up on an island
in the south Pacific during a gale, lose their yacht, and fall into
the hands of the native cannibals. Escaping the cannibals, they
go in search of the native gods, find their resting place in a mys-
terious island in a lake, and rousing the great god Oro and his
beautiful daughter from a sleep of a quarter of a million years
or more, have a hair-raising time in the bowels of the earth.
They learn of the War and see its ravages; they drink of the
Water of Life, and finally come back to England safe and sound.
If there were no other books to read, this might prove a
pleasant diversion, but any grown-up will be skeptical from
almost the first page. One wishes Rider Haggard had stopped
writing tales of this sort twenty years ago.
POETRY AND DREAMS. By F. C. Prescott. Boston: The Four
Seas Co. $1.50.
This is an unpretentious but learned and instructive study-
well supplied with interesting footnotes and references of the
psychology of poetry in the light of the Freudian theory of
dreams. The author, who is a well-known professor of English,
is obviously deeply read in the literature of his subject.
118 NEW BOOKS [April,
THE POLICEMAN AND THE PUBLIC. By Colonel Arthur Woods.
New Haven: Yale University Press. $1.35.
When Colonel Arthur Woods delivered the subject matter
of this small volume in a series of lectures in the Dodge Course
at Yale University upon the "Responsibility of Citizenship," he
spoke from a wealth of experiences gained as Police Commissioner
of New York City. For that reason, if for no other, his words are
authoritative and worthy of attention.
He does not idealize the policeman nor does he paint him as
either an automaton or a scoundrel. Much praise is mingled
with a judicious study of the shortcomings of the city's guardians.
But the faults that exist, both in the individual policeman and in
the entire police regime, the writer lays to a lack of understand-
ing on the part of the people at large of the relationship between
the policeman and his work and the policeman and the people,
with the result that there is a lack of appreciation by the public
of the officers' real merit and a consequent reaction upon the at-
titude of the policeman toward his work.
The former commissioner points out, in a very practical way,
the weakness in the police system, and after showing that most of
it is due to the carelessness and ignorance of the public itself,
strongly urges as a cure a closer rapproachement between the po-
liceman and the people he protects.
The little book is instructive and intensely interesting.
THE BETRAYERS. By Hamilton Drummond. New York: E. P.
Dutton & Co. $1.90.
This historical romance has its mise-en-scene in the conflict
between Pope Innocent IV. and Emperor Frederick II. of the
Hohenstaufen line during the thirteenth century. The author
shows his intense sympathy with the Emperor but, in his enthu-
siasm, he has not done justice to the motives or judgment of the
Pontiff. Innocent had been at one time a warm friend of Freder-
ick, but events gave the Pope excellent reason to withhold con-
fidence in the Emperor. The Hohenstaufen ruler had imprisoned
the prelates, who were journeying to the Council which Gregory
IX. had intended to hold at Rome. He promised Innocent, through
the Papal legates, that the prelates would be released, that the
States of the Church would be restored, and that the allies of the
Pope would receive amnesty. But Frederick's insincerity became
apparent when he secretly incited various tumults in Rome and
refused to release the imprisoned prelates. The Pope, feeling that
his freedom of action was hindered, decided to leave Italy. Has-
tening from Sutri in disguise, he embarked on a Genoese vessel,
1920.] NEW BOOKS 119
which brought him safely to a friendly port. He took up abode
at Lyons for six years, having nothing to fear in residence under
the flags of St. Louis, King of France. At the famous Council
of Lyons, Innocent solemnly excommunicated Frederick, deposed
him, and ordered the princes of Germany to select a new ruler
for the throne.
Mr. Drummond has set his stage with interesting figures and
thrown on his lights strongly, and has succeeded in creating a
dramatic atmosphere; but with all his skill in theatrics he should
be more fair to history. When a writer attempts to use real
men and things, he should not subordinate the smallest fact to
brilliancy of romantic episode and glamour of style.
>
KEEP GOD IN AMERICAN HISTORY. By Harry F. Atwood.
Chicago: Laird & Lee, Inc.
This little messenger speaks with the wisdom of the
ages. It shows that "all through our country's history
there has run, like a golden thread, a deeply religious strain."
It points out the deep religious fervor of Columbus, the intrust-
ment to God of our nation's destiny by our great presidents and
the success that has come because men had faith in the Almighty.
In these irreligious days it calls men back to a new realization of
God's providence. It shows that chaos only can come when re-
ligious ideals are laid aside and lost.
This book is a little treasure that not only should be on every
man's book shelf, but also in every man's heart.
THE BORN FOOL. By John Walter Byrd. New York: George
H. Doran Co. $1.50.
Environment and fate are strong factors in the life of Kirk
Clinton, the central figure of this novel. Kirk is a sensitive and
finely tempered young man, who from his earliest years has been
a dreamer like Richard Jeffries, and, like him, a lover of the
rich natural scenery about his home in the south of England.
So vitally does his environment take hold of him that, when
suffering under the restraint of a peculiar and unsympathetic
father he leaves home and seeks work in a Yorkshire milling
district, he finds it almost impossible to become inured to his new
surroundings. Because he has left his father's home, fate de-
cides that he must also bid farewell to the warmth, the beauty
and the poetry of the country that he loved, and it seals his per-
manence in the cold, repellent district in the north by his mar-
riage with a working girl. The tragedy of Kirk's life is that he
not only loathes his new home where he is obliged to remain,
120 NEW BOOKS [April,
but that he finds it impossible ever to love the coarse factory girl
whom he has married through a sentiment of pity. The narrative
element in the story, however, is less impressive than the atmos-
phere and background. Throughout the hook the harsh indus-
trial life and moorland scenery of Yorkshire are contrasted with
the pleasantness of Southern England, and the fashioning of
human life and character under natural influences is strongly
accentuated.
TALKS TO PARENTS. By Joseph P. Conroy, S.J. New York:
Benziger Brothers. $1.25 net.
This little volume of short "talks" is full of good sense and
good counsel, presented so informally and pleasantly that no
impression of preachment is conveyed. Father Conroy has a keen
eye for parents' faults and mistakes, and his reproofs are un-
sparing; but he is equally cognizant of the problems and diffi-
culties that beset the parental relation, and is most kindly sym-
pathetic in dealing with them. It is a book for the people, prac-
tical and helpful, and should have a place in all parish libraries.
THE BUSINESS CAREER OF PETER FLINT. By Harold White-
head. Boston: The Page Co. $1.50 net.
Many youths do not know what it means to make their way
in a large city far away from the encouragement and stimulation
of home life. But many do know. And they will read with a
somewhat more intimate interest Harold Whitehead's story of
Peter Flint's search for success. Peter is not a choice and master
spirit. He has his failings; but he finally learns the way of
"making good." And while we cannot say with the old poet
that the leader in the deed was of the feminine gender, still it
must be admitted that the lady he is to marry in the chapter
following the last, probably deserves some credit for his ambition
and his will to do.
SUNRISE FROM THE HILL-TOP. By Beatrice Barmby. New
York: George H. Doran Co. $1.50 net.
Though not remarkably original, the initial situation of this
Anglo-American novel offers possibilities for original observation
and fresh writing. The young English heroine gives up her
middle-aged and titled fiance for the American lover who comes
into her life in all the glamour of youth, ambition and boundless
energy. The rest of the tale treats of her adjustment to Amer-
ican conditions, and the final success of their marriage. The
author seems to have written too hastily to work out the vein
here with anything like convincingness.
1920.] NEW BOOKS 121
THE BOOK OF A NATURALIST. By W. H. Hudson. New York:
George H. Doran Co. $3.50 net.
The title of this book contains no suggestion of its charm.
Mr. Hudson humorously explains in his preface, "all possible
changes had been rung on general titles of a Naturalist," and,
"in sheer desperation I took this title which would fit any work
on Natural History ever published."
We trust it will not frighten away those not acquainted
with Mr. Hudson's work as an author and a naturalist who
fear a scientific study or are only mildly interested in nature and
her secrets. For one need not be a "naturalist" or a student of the
subject to enjoy Mr. Hudson's book thoroughly. It is a series of
delightful chapters: short, intimate stories of birds, beasts, and
flowers, the fruits of observation of a man who has spent long
years close to nature in many climes, and who combines with a
deep affection for the things of which he writes, the gift of literary
genius.
THE FIFTH STATION. By Thomas F. Coakley, D.D. Pitts-
burgh: The Catholic Truth Society of Pittsburgh. $1.00.
Only seven pages suffice for the content of this publication.
Dr. Coakley, who was for sixteen months with the American
Army in France, tells the story of a soldier who was for a long
time grievously troubled because he could not say, from his heart,
the words of the Fifth Station, "I accept in particular the death
Thou hast destined for me," yet achieved a happy death while
in the act of repeating those same words of submission and resig-
nation. The little tale is told simply and touchingly, and is issued
in a form so attractive as to be a veritable edition de luxe.
THE FUTURE LIFE IN THE LIGHT OF MODERN INQUIRY. By
Samuel McComb, D.D. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co. $1.50.
This book aims to set forth in their proper perspective the
arguments for the survival of the soul after death. It enumerates
the ideas of immortality prevalent in various schools of thought,
tells how the modern world envisages the problem, traces the
causes of the waning belief in a hereafter, and states the positive
arguments for the future life the desire for immortality, the
moral argument, the proof founded on Christ's teaching and
Resurrection and then, something one would hardly look for in
such context, an argument from Spiritualism. The book em-
bodies the reflections of many years, and contains a great deal of
valuable matter presented in an interesting form.
122 NEW BOOKS [April,
In dealing, however, with materialism the author gives per-
haps too much quarter to the stupidities of Haeckel, McCabe and
Clodd whose assumption that the life of the soul ends with the
life of the body has well been called "the most colossal instance
of baseless assumption known to the history of philosophy." The
argument from the unstilled desire of immortality is rather
weakly presented, and at one point the moral argument hardly
receives full justice at the author's hands. Dr. McComb leaves
one under the impression that he judges the value of an argument
not by its intrinsic validity, but by its fitness to beget conviction
in minds of widely different calibre.
On page 31 we read that "the metaphysical theories and ec-
clesiastical doctrines that satisfied our grandfathers are as broken
reeds today." This statement is doubly strange in view of some
evidence which, in the concluding chapters, Dr. McComb pre-
sents for the survival of the soul. Two defunct English scholars,
Professors Verrall and Butcher, both eminent classicists, combined
to signal to their living friends proofs of their survival. For
this purpose they dictated to an automatist "fragmentary quota-
tions and scattered classical allusions." These bits of learning
of a nondescript character drifted through casually, and were
pieced together and presented as evidence that the professors
were "breathers of an ampler air." When we recall the splendor
and solidity of reasoning with which the great metaphysicians
and religious teachers of the past formed the faith of the world,
and contrast it with the proof which Dr. McComb deduced from
"the ear of Dionysius," we are inclined to regret that our author
abandoned what he calls "broken reeds."
A SINGER OF PALESTINE. By Armel O'Connor. Ludlow:
Mary's Meadow Press. 2 s.
Into this most slight and most modest of volumes, dedicated
by Armel O'Connor to those "friends of the Field Ambulances"
whom he served in Palestine, there has gone a message heavy
with love and consecration. Its lyrics show the reactions of a
Franciscan spirit brought face to face with the horrors and the
heroisms of the recent War; and in their steadfast, open-eyed
hold upon the beauty of Faith where neither Faith nor beauty
can be easy of hold they offer a heartening commentary upon
modern Catholic manhood. Like everything that comes from
Mr. O'Connor's hand, the pages are impressed with fastidious
literary taste, with an often exquisite sensibility, and with the
mystical insight of the truly Christian poet.
1920.] NEW BOOKS 123
EUROPE: A BOOK FOR AMERICA, by Samuel Roth (New
York: Boni & Liveright. $1.25), is a volume of rather wild
denunciation of the Old World and equally wild apostrophes to
the New, put into prose and very free verse by a young Jewish
radical.
THE FOUR SEAS CO., Boston, publishes Poems, by Edwin
Curran ($1.00 net), a reprint, with additions, of Mr. Curran's
interesting and vigorously imagined verses, formerly published as
First Poems; and The Soothsayer ($1.25 net), a one-act drama in
classical manner centring about the theme of divided allegiance,
by the Scandinavian author, Vernon von Heidenstam, who won the
Noble Prize in 1916.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF CONFLICT, by Havelock Ellis. (Bos-
ton: Houghton Mifflin Co. $2.50.) Of the twenty-four es-
says in this volume some twelve deal with questions of history
and literature, and range from Luther to Rodo, from Cowley to
Baudelaire. These literary essays are too short to add anything
new to the question under consideration, nor do they embody
any novel or striking viewpoints. The remaining essays deal
with moral and social problems. The author's theories and sym-
pathies give evidence of a mind not only diseased but rotten.
A MERICAN MARRIAGE LAWS, by Fred. S. Hall and Eliza-
I\ beth W. Brooke, is one of a series of pamphlets planned and
published by the Russell Sage Foundation in the interests of
social reform and family betterment. Social workers have found
that, although many troubles are of people's own making, yet not
a few are the result of unwise or badly administered laws. The
first part of the present work (pp. 1-26) summarizes desirable
reforms in marriage legislation. Part II. (pp. 29-48) is devoted
to Marriage Laws by Topics. Part III. (pp. 51-132) to a com-
pilation of the numerous and intricate marriage laws that obtain
throughout the different States of the Union. Oftentimes the
laws of one State are entirely opposed to those of another; and
numerous loopholes exist that evil astuteness may take advan-
tage of. The publication condenses a lot of information in a
small compass. It will be serviceable to students of social and
economic problems, and even to jurists.
A TIMELY volume which will increase the Devotion of the Holy
Hour, is that entitled Holy Hour Manual, by Rev. Patrick
J. Sloan and published by the Magnificat Press, Manchester, N.
124 NEW BOOKS [April,
H. ($1.00). It is attractively presented in flexible leather and
good type. Father Sloan has put into its writing his own devoted
love of our Blessed Lord, and as a result the book has that per-
sonal note which will make it most helpful. To every month a
chapter is allotted that will enable the individual to fill his Holy
Hour with profitable meditation or to unite with the priest who
conducts the Hour. The appendix includes appropriate prayers
and litanies. The book is an especially serviceable one.
THE PRIEST'S VADE MECUM of the Rev. Pierre Bouvier, S.J.,
has been put into English, and will prove valuable to the
English-speaking priest as a guide and a stimulant in the fos-
tering and maintenance of his high vocation, and the solution of
its many problems and difficulties. It is well equipped with
authoritative notes. Some of these include rulings in French
dioceses not obtaining here. These might have been omitted
with benefit. The Auxiliary Archbishop of Birmingham says
truly in his preface: "The book is not one of law and theory
alone, but of theory tested by experience and of law illumined
by life." (New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons. $1.00; postpaid,
$1.04.)
A CHARMING series of spiritual essays is entitled Months and
A\ Days: Their Silent Lessons. The author, an Irish parish
priest, Rev. Joseph Guinan, has conned the book of nature well,
gleaning everywhere and at all seasons the truths of God written
on His handiwork. His thought mounts and glows with the cres-
cendo of color and life of the advancing season, then dies away
with the waning year into a soft amen. Unfortunately his ex-
pressions miss, at times, something of nature's great simplicity.
This little volume is published by the Catholic Truth Society of
Ireland.
STRAY LEAVES (San Francisco: Paul Elder & Co. $1.00),
a little volume of devotional poems, published anonymously,
suggests the authorship of a cultured and delicately imaginative
religious. It presents much matter suitable for Lenten reading
arid meditation.
A LITTLE compilation of prayers admirably adapted to foster
and increase virile devotion to the Blessed Sacrament is
The Armour of God. It is primarily intended for the use of the
"Knights of the Blessed Sacrament," and the prayers, many
drawn from the liturgy, are directed towards the cultivation of
1920.] NEW BOOKS 125
the knightly attitude of loyalty and service. We recommend it
to all lovers of the Eucharistic King. (London: Burns & Gates,
Limited.)
PAMPHLET PUBLICATIONS.
Three important pamphlets come from the Catholic Truth Society
of Ireland: How Far May a Catholic Agree With Socialists, by Rev. J.
S. Canavan, S.J., gives very accurately and explicitly the pronounce-
ments of the Church in regard to Socialism and shows in what and
why it is condemned; Between Capitalism and Socialism and The
Social Question In Ireland, both by Rev. P. Coffey, Ph.D., the well-
known author and lecturer at Maynooth College, are especially in-
tended for the right orientation of Irish Catholics in the vital work
of reconstructing an Irish nation on the basic principles of Catholic
teaching. They are a valuable contribution to an essential work, and
offer, moreover, to all Catholics a clear, fair, succinct discussion of
ways and means of reconstruction and their relative values. We
recommend these pamphlets most earnestly. A devotional publication
from the same source is Watching With Jesus, an attractive little
manual for the Holy Hour, which cannot fail to promote familiar and
fruitful visits to Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament.
The Catholic Truth Society (London), in St. Francis As Social
Reformer, by Father Thomas, O.S.F.C., makes a contribution to the
literature of reconstruction. St. Francis undermined with his prin-
ciples the great feudal system and built up a new order by winning
men's hearts. What The World Owes the Papacy, by Rt. Rev. Mon-
signor Grosch, among other pregnant thoughts has this timely one:
"Shut the Pope out from the councils of the nations and you shut out
the only moral force which ever has or ever can unite the people of
the world." Other publications of the Catholic Truth Society are
Home and the "World Conference," by Rt. Rev. Monsignor Moyes, D.D.,
showing the necessarily unvarying attitude of the Church to Christian
unity; and How to Serve Mass, a very clear and handy little manual
for the server.
The Journey Home, by the Rev. Raymond Lawrence (Ave Maria
Press), is a very beautiful story, told with great simplicity and hu-
mility, of a convert's journey "to the Patria of the human race . . .
through strange ways and over stormy and tortuous paths . . . straight
on to His (God's) own dwelling." It is a real addition to the literature
of conversions. Along this line we have also a reprint, revised by Rev.
William B. Hannon, of The Trials of the Mind, the story of the first
bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in America, L. Silliman Ives,
who found his way home into the Catholic Church.
A useful contribution to the history of the Church is The Infal-
libility of the Church and Her Teaching Authority, by Very Rev. J.
Sullivan, S.J. (Melbourne, Australia: Catholic Truth Society.) And
the International Catholic Truth Society has published in pocket size
The Lenten Gospels, so fruitful for spiritual reading and meditation.
126 NEW BOOKS [April,
From The Mission Press, S. V. D., Techny, Illinois, comes a stirring
appeal for the missionary spirit, entitled: America Must, addressed
primarily to the youth of America, that harvest land for the future
of missions. The author, P. I. Sontag, S.J., evidently knows his
world of boys and how to catch and fire them.
Mother Catherine McAuley and the Beginning of the Works of the
Sisters of Mercy, by Sister Mary Fidelis, is a pamphlet designed to ac-
company an illustrated lecture. A notice informs the reader that this
booklet "was printed, engraved and bound by St. Mary's Training School
Printing Department, Des Moines, Illinois." And very creditable work
it is, and particularly the numerous portraits of the Foundress, which
fully bear out the assertion that she possessed an exceedingly beautiful
and attractive personality.
The account covers the early days of this heroine of charity, the
rise and progress of her early works for the poor, in Dublin and other
towns of Ireland and of England, until the Order was introduced into
the United States. The marvelous progress of its schools, hospitals,
refuges, is a most striking and interesting fact.
The Government Printing Office publishes The Life of Henry
Barnard, one of America's great educators who, with Horace Mann,
contributed largely to the development of the common school in the
United States. This pamphlet, by Bernard C. Steiner, takes up the
youthful efforts of Barnard in the Connecticut Legislature, his work
with the Connecticut School Board, his achievements as Superintendent
of Schools in Rhode Island and later in Connecticut, his labors as
editor of the American Journal of Education, his influence as President
of St. John's College at Annapolis and, the culmination of a calm but
powerful life, the commissionership of education.
The Department of the Bureau of Education performs a real serv-
ice in thus presenting Barnard's life distinctly and clearly, and free
from the excessive adulation that most biographers are inclined to
indulge in.
Also An Educational Study of Alabama a survey made under the
direction of the Commissioner of Public Education at the request of
the Alabama School Commission contains a wealth of information con-
cerning the public schools of Alabama and the problems which the
people of that State face in the education of their children, forty-two
per cent of which are colored. The book is of interest and value to
all students of education.
And the Schools of Scandinavia, Finland, Denmark and Holland,
by Peter Pearson, a pamphlet showing the effects of the War on the
schools of Scandinavia, Finland and Holland and the general charac-
teristics of the school system in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Hol-
land. It treats specifically of school gardens; care of the pupils'
health; religious instruction in the elementary schools; obligatory
continuation school; school excursions; teachers' training, salaries,
and status and general conditions in Holland and Finland.
TRecent Events,
On March 13th the Government of Fried-
Germany, rich Ebert, the Socialist President of the
German Republic, was temporarily over-
thrown by a military coup d'etat. Dr. Wolfang Kapp, a prom-
inent member of the Pan-German Party and general director of
the agricultural societies, ousted Gustave Bauer, the Chan-
cellor, and for the time assumed supreme direction of af-
fairs. Associated with him was General Baron von Luettwitz, one
of the leaders of the military party which was opposed to the
Versailles Peace terms. General von Luettwitz was appointed
Commander-in-chief of the army, and the National Assembly was
dissolved.
The revolt was effected without bloodshed or disorder, troops
of the Doeberitz garrison, composed chiefly of former Baltic
troops, simply marching on the capital and taking control of the
situation, while Herr Ebert and most of his Cabinet fled to Dres-
den. A proclamation was issued by the new Government stating
that the overthrow of the Ebert regime must not be looked on as
reactionary or militaristic. The manifesto charges the Socialist
Government with overburdening the people with taxation, failing
to create conditions for an increase of production in all lines,
suppressing papers which criticized it, and otherwise interfering
with personal liberty, and with refusing to dissolve the National
Assembly and issue writs for new elections. Despite their dis-
avowal, however, the revolt was generally considered as of Junker
origin and monarchist objective, though neither the former Em-
peror nor the Crown Prince was implicated in the movement.
President Ebert and his Cabinet offered no armed resistance
to the revolution, but, on fleeing from Berlin, issued a proclama-
tion calling on all workers for a general strike throughout Ger-
many, to which there was an effective response. It is the
general opinion that the new Government will not last long, both
because of the strike threat and because recent reports indicate
that Herr Kapp has not been able to form a ministry, and that
not only are the Democrats, Majority Socialists and Centrists
against him, but the reactionaries themselves are weakening in
their support. Negotiations have been going forward for the last
few days between the two Governments, and latest advices state
that an agreement has been reached between them and that the
128 RECENT EVENTS [April.
crisis is over. A new Government for Germany will be con-
stituted under the agreement between the old Government and
the new. Herr Ebert is to remain as President, but a new Cabinet
is to be formed, composed of experts.
The plebiscite in the second Schleswig zone, including the im-
portant port of Flensburg, has just been held and, according to
late but unofficial returns of the balloting, the figures show the
population overwhelmingly in favor of German nationality. With
four districts still to be heard from, 48,148 votes were cast for
German control and 13,025 for Denmark. There were originally
three zones in the Schleswig region, in which the inhabitants were
to decide their future nationality by plebiscite. The vote in the
first zone was cast in February and was in favor of reunion with
Denmark. The vote in the second zone, just taken, shows a large
German majority and will end the voting on the question, as the
Denmark Government of its own accord requested that, on ac-
count of the obviously preponderant German population in the
third zone, no vote should be taken there. The loss of the im-
portant city of Flensburg in the second zone is a severe disap-
pointment to the Danes, as, prior to the War of 1866, it was
entirely Danish. The elections just concluded show that the city
is now almost completely Germanized.
Before the recent coup in Berlin, while the Ebert Government
was still in control, much comment was aroused in Germany by
the resignation from the Cabinet of Mathias Erzberger, Minister
of Finance, and one of the Centrist leaders. Herr Erzberger's
resignation came as the result of sensational testimony in the
course of his libel suit against Dr. Karl Helfferich, former Minister
of the Treasury. The testimony is said to have shown that Herr
Erzberger had smuggled large amounts of his private funds to
Switzerland, and that he was involved in numerous questionable
transactions in connection with the issuance of import and export
permits, and otherwise misusing his official position and influence
in the furtherance of ventures in which he had a personal inter-
est. The libel suit itself, which was the occasion of this testi-
mony and which has been a centre of interest for some weeks, has
since been decided against Dr. Helfferich, who was fined three
hundred marks.
As a result of strong protests by the German Government,
the Allies finally consented to the trial of German war criminals
before a German tribunal. The Allied extradition list has been
submitted to the supreme state's attorney at the Imperial Court at
Leipsic, so that the requisite measures may be taken in accord-
ance with the law for the prosecution of war offences. Luden-
1920.] RECENT EVENTS 129
dorff, von Tirpitz, von Falkenhayn, von Kluck, Admiral von
Schroeder and numerous other high army and naval officers who
were listed by the Allies, have signed a declaration expressing
their willingness to appear before the Imperial Court at Leipsic.
On her side Germany has a list of Entente war criminals,
comprising three hundred and twelve pages of indictments
against French individuals and sixty-nine against British. The
data has been officially corroborated according to the German
Foreign Minister Mueller, but he considered that the present time
was not an auspicious moment to make the list public, and the
Government would reserve its decision as to publication for a later
day.
With respect to the extradition of the Kaiser, the Netherlands
Government in a recent reply to a note from the British Premier,
still maintains a firm stand on its refusal to comply with the
Allied demands, and repeats its former arguments about Holland
not being a party to the Peace Treaty, her traditional right of
asylum, etc. The reply states, .however, that the Dutch Govern-
ment will take all the precautionary measures necessary to
subordinate the liberty of the ex-Emperor and ex-Empress. This
means that the ex-Kaiser will, to all intents and purposes, be in-
terned at his new residence at Doom. It is hoped in Dutch Gov-
ernment circles that this will be the last note on the question.
Though fighting has been going on in
Russia. various sections of Russia during the
month, it has been chiefly of a local and
sporadic character. The most important military movement oc-
curred in the early part of March when, in a series of engagements
with the Polish Army, the Bolshevik forces were decisively de-
feated. The Bolsheviki, while carrying on peace negotiations with
the Poles, had concentrated large forces on both sides of the
Priapet region, but their plans for an attack were forestalled by
the Poles, who were the aggressors. The Poles had no intention
of concerted action against the Bolsheviki, but when informed
that they intended to attack along the whole front, the Poles be-
gan three operations at strategic points, which resulted in the
taking of the lateral railway from the Bolsheviki and breaking
up their plans.
According to military experts, White Ruthenia is now effec-
tively cut off from Moscow, as the railway which has been seized
by the Poles comes down to Kolenkovitz, which is the crossing-
point of the important Gomel-Pinsk Railway. By reason of the
capture of Kolenkovitz, the Bolsheviki will be forced to send their
VOL. CXI. 9
130 RECENT EVENTS [April,
supplies by a round-about way, involving much loss of time. It
is also believed that that part of the Ukraine on the right bank
of the Dneiper River will now be free from the Bolshevik menace.
On the other fronts the Bolsheviki seem to be meeting with
no effective resistance. Their recent successes near the Crimean
Isthmus apparently open a way for them to enter the Crimea.
This would be of considerable advantage, as valuable stores and
other war materials are there. General Denikin, the anti-
Bolshevik leader, who in last month's dispatches was reported to
have fled the country, is again trying to make headway in the
South, but with indifferent success. Green Guards are causing
trouble on his rear, while the Bolshevik are active along the whole
of his front. According to British military experts, recent opera-
tions have practically brought about the complete elimination of
the Denikin forces.
The Denikin collapse, according to British War Office re-
ports, has revived the fear of a menace to the British Mid-Asian
interests. Additional cause for alarm is the fear that the Bol-
sheviki may undertake aggressive steps in Persia. This alarm
arises from the reports of the new Bolshevik Administration at
Merv, Transcaspia, under General Kuropatkin. This Administra-
tion is considered uncomfortably near the troublesome elements
in Afghanistan.
Another former Tsarist commander, who is reported to have
appeared at the head of Bolshevik forces, is General Brusiloff,
former Commander-in-chief of the Russian armies. He is said to
be at Skobeleff, operating against the Ferghana insurgents. At the
outbreak of the World War, Brusiloff commanded the Russians
in their attacks on Galicia.
A large detachment of the Russian Volunteer Army, under
General Bredow, has reached the Polish lines near Kamenetz-
Podolsk, says a dispatch from Warsaw. These forces are the re-
mains of General Denikin's Corps from west of the Dneiper,
which have been without a base since the Bolshevik occupation
of Odessa. The detachment numbers six thousand men, mostly
of the cavalry, and is accompanied by as many women and
children.
The Bolsheviki are making vigorous preparations to equip a
fleet in the Volga for use in the Caspian Sea as soon as the ice
breaks up. At present they have a force facing the Rumanians
along the Dneister River, but they have not yet attacked, nor is
there any evidence that they intend to do so. The Rumanian
forces are expected to be out of Hungary by April 1st.
The fate of the Russian Army in the north is not definitely
1920.] RECENT EVENTS 131
known. Its remnants have been driven into the desolate country
between the Onega River and the Murman Railway, and it is as-
sumed that the army is being dispersed or that it has perished.
General Semenoff, who is now in control of the anti-Soviet troops
in Eastern Siberia, has lost the support of the Buriat tribesmen.
He has always counted upon their support and the loss may mean
an irreparable blow. Exactions of his subordinates, as well as
alleged abuses and brutality, have alienated all races from
Semenoff. The Japanese have also turned their backs upon him,
it is declared, but no reputable Russian is willing to take
Semenoff's place.
Meanwhile various peace proposals have been made by the
Soviet Government, both to the Great Powers and to the Baltic
States. In its proposals to the larger nations, Soviet Russia
pledges the establishment of democratic principles in Russia and
the calling of a Constituent Assembly. It promises further to
withdraw the decree annulling Russia's foreign debt, restoring
sixty per cent of the liability, and also to pay arrears of interest,
giving as a guarantee for the fulfillment of its obligations consid-
erable mineral concessions of platinum and silver to an Anglo-
American syndicate. In return, and in addition to the formal
Peace Treaties, the Soviet Government would require Great
Britain and other countries to abandon all intervention in Rus-
sian affairs. It also proposes that the United States allow a credit
to Russia, conditioned upon considerable concessions to this
country.
To date no definite response to these advances has been made
by the Allied Governments, though, as stated in last month's
notes, a complete change in Allied policy is in process. At pres-
ent the Allies are slowly feeling their way to a new adjustment.
The American State Department is reported to be considering
the proposal to the Supreme Council at Paris of the withdrawal
of wartime restrictions on trading between the United States and
Allied countries, and Soviet Russia. Such a policy would enable
American exporters to undertake trade relations with anyone in
Soviet Russia, even with the Soviet Government itself, but it
would be at their own risk. No trade licenses would be issued by
this country, as this Government does not intend to place itself
in a position that might warrant the claim that it had recognized
Soviet Russia, with which it maintains no relations, and, it is
reiterated, has no intention of entering into any.
As for the Baltic States, they have been more or less adrift
in their dealings with the Bolsheviki peace offers because of the
indefinite policy of the Allies, from whom they must necessarily
132
RECENT EVENTS [April,
take their lead. Nevertheless, a formal conference was recently
opened at Warsaw to frame the answer of Poland and the border
States to the Soviet peace proposals. Finnish, Lettish and Ru-
manian delegates are already in attendance, and the Ukrainians
are expected soon. There is a possibility that Lithuania, and
eventually Esthonia, which has already concluded peace with the
Soviet Government, will participate in the consultation, which
it is generally believed will determine Poland's next move in her
stand against Bolshevism.
Diplomats say that the opening of negotiations between
Poland and the Soviet Government hinges on the Polish demands
for restitution and damages since the partition of her territory in
1772. An unofficial dispatch from Moscow says that the Bol-
sheviki have already intimated that they have no desire even to
open negotiations if Poland demands the frontier of one hundred
and forty-eight years ago, as outlined by the Polish Diet's foreign
commission. Should Poland insist on the demand and the Bol-
sheviki refuse to acquiesce, it would mean a continuance of the
present situation.
It is understood that the peace programme of the Baltic
States will be submitted to the Allied Powers for approval. The
border States are said to be eager to reach a decision, particularly
because of the approach of spring, when the long-advertised Bol-
shevik offensive against them is due to commence. The Lettish
Foreign Minister has announced that unless the Warsaw Confer-
ence reaches a decision, the Letts and the Finns and possibly the
Lithuanians will consider a separate peace with Russia.
The chief questions before the Supreme
France. Council during the month have been the
Turkish situation, the Allied policy
toward the Soviet Government, and the proposal to ease the terms
of reparation imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles.
On all three matters there has been a sharp cleavage of Allied
opinion, with England and Italy for the most part standing to-
gether and France taking up an attitude of strong protest.
The Council has been working at the final draft of the Turk-
ish Treaty for some time, but recent atrocities by the Turks in
Cilicia have brought matters to a head, and served to make the
peace provisions more severe. By the reported terms of the
Treaty, Turkey will be reduced to a mere phantom of her former
self, with a population of only six millions instead of thirty mill-
ions. She is likely to occupy, in addition to the city of Constanti-
nople, only the Asiatic province of Anatolia, and she will lose
1920.] RECENT EVENTS 133
what remains of her navy, being permitted to retain nothing larger
than a few revenue cutters. Thrace has been awarded to Greece,
but the recent conference of foreign ministers and ambassadors is
charged with the task of working out plans whereby the Turks
will keep control of the holy places and of Adrianople. Smyrna
will be placed under Greek control.
As a direct result of recent Armenian massacres (18,000
people were murdered at Marash alone), the Allies propose to take
drastic measures against Turkey. These will consist of the disci-
plinary cooccupation of Constantinople, as it may be called, to
distinguish it from the ordinary occupation which followed the
conclusion of the armistice, and the exercise of Allied control over
all telegraphic communications. For the present the Allies will
post contingents at strategic points of the city on both sides of the
Golden Horn. There has of late been a wide popular demand in
most countries, especially in America, for the absolute ejection of
the Sultan from Constantinople, but there are two chief obstacles
in the way of such an action the negative attitude of America
towards the acceptance of a Turkish mandate, and the reluctance
of England to force the issue against the strong protests of her
Moslem subjects in India, to whom, moreover, she had given as-
surances at the beginning of the War that the Sultan would not
be removed from Constantinople.
As to the Allied policy toward the Bolsheviki, the nearest
approach to a definite step (if anything can be called definite
where all is vague and confused) has been the agreement to re-
sume trade relations with Russia. The Soviet Government is
asked, on its part, to abandon propaganda and to recognize exist-
ing loans, while the Allies do not propose to encourage border
States to make further war on the Bolsheviki. Resumption of
political relations between the Allies and Russia was not pressed
in the Supreme Council, owing chiefly to the determined opposi-
tion of France. Thus the real difficulty of the Russian situation
recognition of the Soviet Republic still remains unsolved.
As a further step toward a solution of the Russian problem
the Supreme Council of the Allies, several weeks ago, addressed a
communication to the Council of the League of Nations, asking the
latter to consider the appointment of a commission with the view
of obtaining impartial and authorized information concerning the
present situation in Russia. The Commission is to consist of
eleven members. United States Ambassador Wallace has been
invited to attend the meeting of the Council of the League of
Nations at which the Commission will be named, but has declined.
The Allies, however, will probably extend a formal invitation to
134 RECENT EVENTS [April,
the American Government to send an agent to accompany the
Commission in order that he may report to his Government, should
America not see fit to name an official member of the Commission.
Because of the serious economic plight of Germany, the Su-
preme Council, at the beginning of March, consented to a consider-
able mitigation of the Versailles Peace terms. This mitigation
took two principal forms. Germany was to be permitted to float
a large international loan in neutral European countries and
South America and, if possible, in the United States, the negoti-
able securities which the Berlin Government would put up being
guaranteed exempt from the reparation claims of the Allied
Powers. Secondly, the Allies were to help Germany rebuild her
merchant marine, at least up to a certain point. This aid to Ger-
many, to enable her to pay her war debts to the Allies, was to be
given by easing up on the enforcement of the portion of the Treaty
that provided for building, in German ports, merchant tonnage
to be handed over to the Allies. The Allies have come to the con-
clusion that Germany cannot at present, nor in the near future,
fulfill this provision, if strictly enforced, and at the same time
build ships enough to meet her own essential needs for shipping
tonnage.
These two modifications of the Treaty, however, aroused pro-
test from the French Government, which declared its inability to
accept in its entirety the proposed economic declaration of the
Allies, particularly the proposition that a loan be made to Ger-
many guaranteed by German assets in priority to reparations pay-
ments. As a result of Premier Millerand's attitude, the Supreme
Council agreed to a change in their new economic programme,
whereby the devastated areas of France are to receive priority in
the matter of reconstruction, and the question of a German loan
is left to the League's Reparations Commission on which France
has strong representation.
With the official notification, recently announced, of the ac-
cession to the League of Nations of Switzerland, Denmark,
Sweden, Norway and Holland, all but two, namely Salvador and
Venezuela, of the thirteen nations, non-signatories of the Ver-
sailles Treaty, invited to become original members of the League,
have definitely accepted. Salvador has signified its intention of
joining the League, but Venezuela has not yet declared its in-
tention.
On the last day of February a general strike on all the rail-
roads of France was called by the National Federation of Rail-
way Workers, with the object of forcing nationalization of the rail-
roads. The strike was originated by a radical minority among
1920.] RECENT EVENTS 135
the workers, and represented not so much an attempt at better
working conditions as a political move against the existing Gov-
ernment. Owing to the disaffection of the larger part of the rail-
road employees, and to the firm attitude of the Government, the
strike, which was confined chiefly to Paris, lasted only two days.
While technically the strike was ended by an arbitration agree-
ment, the question of nationalization of the roads, which was the
big demand of the strikers, is not to be arbitrated. The ques-
tions to be arbitrated relate chiefly to the coordination of salary
schedules. The breaking of the strike is considered a signal vic-
tory for the French Government and a sharp rebuke to the radi-
cal element who have more or less openly espoused Bolshevism.
The month has been a record of inter-
Italy, change of notes between President Wil-
son and the Allied Premiers on the
Adriatic Question. The Allied Premiers, as a result of the Presi-
dent's firm stand, have withdrawn their ultimatum to the Jugo-
slavs, and in general have adopted an extremely conciliatory atti-
tude towards the President's position. The President has insisted
on the complete abandonment of the Treaty of London, a secret
agreement between Great Britain and Italy, of which the United
States was not informed on her entry into the War, and a return
to the joint memorandum of December 9th last in which England,
France and the United States agreed on a plan for the settlement
of the Adriatic problem. The President reiterates his willing-
ness to accept any settlement "mutually agreeable" to Italy and
Jugo-Slavia, provided such agreement is not the basis of compen-
sation elsewhere at the expense of a third party. In consequence
of this last proposal, which the Allied Premiers agreed, was "the
ideal way" of settling the question, negotiations were entered into
between Premier Nitti of Italy and Foreign Minister Trumbitch
of Jugo-Slavia, but have since been broken off.
Meanwhile, as regards Fiume itself, a stringent blockade has
been instituted by the Italian Government against all commodities,
including foodstuffs. D'Annunzio's forces have been consider-
ably diminished by desertions, and efforts made to replenish his
forces by conscription of Fiume citizens have been unsuccessful.
Former annexationists express despair over what they term the
failure of d'Annunzio's occupation of Fiume. The long sliain of
five months of isolation has apparently worn out the population,
and the people would welcome the occupation of the city either by
an American or a British garrison.
As for Italian internal affairs, reorganization of the Cabinet is
136 RECENT EVENTS [April,
occupying public attention to the exclusion of virtually all other in-
terests. All the members of the present Cabinet have placed their
portfolios at the Premier's disposal, in view of the political and par-
liamentary situation. Premier Nitti has not yet announced the for-
mation of the new administration, but he will be much more free
in the selection of its members. It is reported they will include
Signor Meda, the Catholic leader, and Bisolati and Bonomi, Inde-
pendent Socialists.
Strikes and other disturbances have occurred in various parts
of Italy during the month, but they were sporadic and merely
local. Strikes among peasants in Northern Italy have come at a
most inopportune time, as this is the sowing season, which is ex-
ceptionally favorable this year. In some instances the strikes are
said to have a distinct political character, and in certain places acts
of vandalism have been committed.
Four persons were recently killed in fighting at Pieve di
Soligo, a village of five thousand inhabitants, eighteen miles from
Treviso. The whole district is reported in disorder, owing to
rival claims of Catholics and Socialists in the work of reconstruc-
tion in the devastated Piave River region. Socialists at Vittorio
attacked the Town Hall and sacked several villas. There have
been more than one hundred arrests in the Treviso district, and
the authorities now seem to have the situation in hand.
Among the drastic measures for coping with the internal
economic crisis is to be the immediate reduction of the national
train service of one-fifth of the local traffic. Most Sunday trains
will be canceled. The scarcity of coal is very severe. The Gov-
ernment also seeks to realize economy by means of a stringent
reintroduction of the rationing system. This will start with
April for all commodities, including coal, under Government con-
trol. The sugar allowance is to be further reduced, and fresh
taxes will be imposed on restaurant meals and hotel bills. New
restrictions will also be placed on the sale of intoxicants, and the
closing of all public resorts will be enforced at 11 P. M.
A new Hungarian Peace Treaty has been
Hungary. definitely agreed upon by the recent
Peace Conference in London and placed
in the hands of a drafting committee, which has gone to Paris.
The territorial terms against which Hungary protested so vigor-
ously remain unchanged, but various economic concessions have
been granted. It is stated that in refraining the economic clauses,
particularly regarding the reparations to be demanded, the Con-
ference took a much more lenient attitude than prevailed in Paris.
1920.] RECENT EVENTS 137
The Conference is represented as being influenced by the recent
trend of events, which prompted its economic conclusions and
caused it to deal with the Treaty from a changed viewpoint.
At a meeting of the Hungarian National Assembly on the
first of March, Admiral Nicholas Horthy was elected by a substan-
tial majority to be Protector of Hungary, an office newly created.
Admiral Horthy made a distinguished record during the War and
later, during the armistice period, he founded the national army
which marched into Budapest when the Rumanians evacuated
that city. This was the national army which has since achieved
notoriety as the army of reaction. Horthy's main political object
is Hapsburg restoration. Hungary is overwhelmingly monarchist,
and the appointment of the Protector is merely provisional until
after the Peace Treaty has been signed. Indeed, Horthy stands
resolutely for the restoration of former King Charles or his eldest
son, Otto. Such a policy is, of course, diametrically opposed to
that of the Allies, who have expressly forbidden any Hapsburg
restoration.
Towards the end of February the Rumanian Army units final-
ly began to evacuate the front which they had been occupying
along the river Thiess, thus holding one-third of Hungary through
no right recognized by any other power, and in defiance of seven-
teen separate Peace Conference ultimatums. They have now
withdrawn to a line fixed by the Peace Conference from sixty to
eighty miles east of the river Thiess. The Rumanians went into
Budapest after the fall of Bela Kun and the breaking up of the
Hungarian Army. Late in November they withdraw to the Thiess
River, where they have since remained. Allied missions visiting
Hungary, which until the present time has been closed to them
by the Rumanians, have found that by the Rumanian system of
"requisitions" the occupied portions of the country have been
pretty thoroughly despoiled. There was much pillage and the
homes of the people were burned by the invading forces. Seed,
grain, and agricultural machinery, as well as railway supplies,
were carried off into Rumania. In addition to holding Hungarian
territory without title, the Rumanians have also seized Bessarabia,
which they tried in vain to have awarded to them by the Peace
Conference. This they are still holding.
March 17, 1920.
With Our Readers.
IT is impossible to forecast the far-reaching consequences of the
Surveys of Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Pittsburgh and
the Archdiocese of New York, both of which were made recently.
A Brief Summary of the Final Report of the latter Survey has
just been made public under the direction of the Most Reverend
Archbishop Hayes. Although we cannot forecast in detail the
advantages which are sure to follow, the immediate consequences
of these thoroughgoing studies may be hinted at in a way to arouse
interest and enthusiasm for our Charities in general.
Steps will be taken in New York to create a central organiza-
tion of Catholic agencies whose purposes will be as follows:
"It will rearrange and coordinate the functions of various
activities in order that they may serve more people and serve them
better."
"It will point out weaknesses in existing organizations, and
help overcome them by supplementing their resources, giving
expert advice and encouraging higher standards."
"It will promote the extension or establishment of agencies
to cover fields where Catholic interests are at present neglected."
"It will present reports of their work to the general public
and represent them at conferences."
"It will serve, while leaving special works autonomous, to
unify Catholic Charities."
* * * *
THE organization will be known as The Catholic Charities of
the Archdiocese of New York. The Most Reverend Arch-
bishop will be President and his Secretary for Charities will be
Executive Director. An Executive Council composed of men and
women experienced in charity work, will meet regularly and
advise with His Grace on matters of general policy. In addition
there will be an Advisory Council representing each Catholic or-
ganization and the Catholic body in general. Under the Arch-
bishop's Secretary for Charities the work will fall into six prin-
cipal divisions, each subject to a Director devoting full time to
supervision, coordination and extensions of agencies operating
under him. The following are the divisions:
General Administration; Children; Health, Relief; Protective
Care, and Social Action.
Work has been already begun on the formation of the Arch-
1920.] WITH OUR READERS 139
bishop's Committee of the Laity, a permanent organization of not
less than twenty thousand members. This Committee will under-
take during the week of April 18th to 24th, the financing of the
six great Bureaus of Catholic Charities, whose creation was
recommended by the Survey Commission.
* * * *
THE Survey of the New York Catholic Charities was conducted
under the supervision of His Grace, Archbishop Hayes, by a
body of experts whose plans were carefully prepared in advance.
Searching studies were made of agencies, their problems and re-
lations. The enthusiastic cooperation which these agencies gave
in the course of this study was most gratifying. The reorganiza-
tion contemplated will promote a sense of solidarity among Catho-
lic works, and will bring a refreshing sense of support and en-
couragement to the many heavily burdened agencies that have
been doing the work of Catholic charity with unparalleled de-
votion and courage. Extension of activities, improvement of
methods and the introduction of new works, cannot fail to result
from the study made by the Survey Commission, and from the
enthusiasm which its work has developed on all sides.
* * * *
BUT the benefits to be expected from the New York Survey will
not be confined to the Archdiocese. We may expect similar
studies and equally gratifying promise in many sections of the
country in the near future. The Pittsburgh Survey was com-
pleted recently. Its results will be made known in the near
future. Inquiries are being made from many parts of the coun-
try as to organization and methods followed. The Bureau of
Social Action of the National Catholic Welfare Council announces
its readiness to furnish full information and advice on the con-
ducting of surveys of Catholic Charities. The tentative programme
of the September, 1920, meeting of the National Conference of
Catholic Charities will include papers on the methods and cost
of conducting surveys of our charities. We are warranted, there-
fore, in looking forward to rapid development of Catholic Works
and to notable extension and strengthening of them in the near
future.
* * * *
ALL of this gives promise of adding to our charities, the best
in modern relief work without in any way abating the funda-
mental conviction that charity "begins and ends in God," and
"finds its source in the Divine example of Him Who went about
doing good." All Christians must regret the tendency of modern
charity to break away from the spirit of the Gospel. Our Divine
140 WITH OUR READERS [April,
Lord's example and teaching are so explicit in respect of this, that
one wonders at the complacency with which many Christians view
this unchristian tendency. Even the word "charity" is regarded
as a "liability rather than an asset by the societies particularly
concerned with it." These words are taken from the new pub-
lication, The Family, issued by the American Association for
Organizing Family Social Work. Its first issue contains a list
of nine organizations which have abandoned the word charity
in their official titles.
IF one states as a fundamental proposition that humanity through
its long centuries of existence has made no progress, it is hard
to see what warrant he has lhat it will make progress now. We
are the children of yesterday: never of tomorrow. If hope and
knowledge have not dawned for these thousands and thousands of
years, one is not to be blamed who thinks there is no reason that
its first flush will be seen now.
* * * *
ALBION W. SMALL writing on the large and presently impor-
tant subject of Democracy in the November Journal of
Sociology, opens with this serious and thoughtless indictment
against all human progress. "If it were not commonplace it
would be astonishing that after so many thousands of years of
human history, we have no consensus as to why we are living at
all." Dr. Small has no hesitation in making the editorial "we"
synonymous with all humanity. Or further reading may show
this to be an exaggeration and the "we" is limited to "the social
scientists." As to how great their number or who they are, the
reader is left uninformed. In any case their real knowledge of
life, its purpose, its end is far superior to that of any other group,
and indeed all other groups collectively. They form an exclusive
aristocracy of wisdom: they are the gifted teachers of the new
Israel: the self-appointed saviours of a people's hope. Dr. Small
speaks of the "we" as "a commission" teaching "ideas" that "are
breath and blood and food of better life for all the people."
* * * *
DEMOCRACY is a form of government we all love, but, accord-
ing to Dr. Small, we, that is all those outside of "the social
scientists," are grossly ignorant. Up to the present time "very few
individuals have tried to take knowledge of life in a large con-
nected way." On the whole men have pursued relatively trivial
purposes. When one considers the centuries swept by Dr. Small's
eyes and the record of sacrifices he manages not to see, one must
marvel either at his celerity or his blindness of vision.
1920.] WITH OUR READERS 141
The power that will prevent future centuries and generations
from registering such a desert history: which indeed will flower
both with deeds of brotherly love and charity is a "purely secular
ethic" (italics are Dr. Small's). This secular ethic will not inter-
fere with religious conceptions in which, says the learned Dr.
Small, mundane life is merely incidental! (exclamation ours) un-
less religious conceptions assume an authority inimical to the
secular ethic. And this is Dr. Small's picture of the clean-cut
morning star, herald of the dawn, deliverer from the night wherein
but very few pursued any large purpose.
A purely secular ethic, that is, a comprehensive notion of
what human experience is all about, what it is making for at its
best, and how this conception of it becomes a test, and a measure
and a guide for all the conduct of life which is continually putting
itself under judgment as promoting or retarding this largest con-
ceivable best.
WITHOUT this ethic so simple, so easily understood, so easily
applied even by the ignorant without this Dr. Small says
"life is sure to be confused at best." Heretofore men have ac-
cepted "someone's guesswork" (italics Dr. Small's) and have
called it a divine guide. But now the overwhelming defmiteness of
this "ethic" excludes all guesswork; its application to all social
needs, duties, obligations, problems of life is so crystal clear that
hesitation, doubt and scruple are excluded. The "conceivable
best" is the "self-realization" of human beings: this is the thing
toward which, so far as human insight has thus far been able to
make out, "the whole creation moves." God, therefore, is ex-
cluded. Self-realization of persons is "our supreme working cri-
terion of morals." "The utmost that could be hoped of the older
types of morals was the production of a few self-conscious, indi-
vidualistic prigs." Thus does Dr. Small sweep aside the history
of Christian heroism and Christian sanctity. We are pleased and
not surprised to read of this ethic "that it can hardly be said to
have made much impression on Americans at large." Americans
after all have given to the world the best working illustration of
democracy, in spite of its many and evident faults, and their un-
willingness to accept an ethic that would tear down all they have
built and hand over the civilized world to physical and material-
istic slavery is not inexplicable.
* * * *
IT is not needful to pursue this self-sufficient article any further.
It is published in a reputable, university organ. If it means
anything, it means that man is better off without God and religion
142 WITH OUR READERS [April,
than with them. This is its important thesis in spite of its depre-
cation of injustice and the inordinate seeking after money. Some
of its readers will, no doubt, looking at the minor theses, condone
the greater one. The plea for human justice will for them ob-
scure the practical denial of God.
Moreover, as it rings so many changes upon the word "com-
munity" it will have its part in promoting a tendency already all
too common of emptying community work of all religious motive :
of not allowing religion to have any voice therein. Protestantism
is reconciling its differences by keeping silent about them. It
denies the necessity of anything like definite, positive religious
faith. It has divorced religion from life. It sees no need of the
religious spirit, the religious motive. Community work therefore
may be colorless: uninspired: godless.
Such a position is absolutely un-American; it is the beginning
of giving over our country to those who admit of no rule other
than their own; no eternal law by which for the sake of human
justice all human laws should be guided.
* * * *
A PAPER like Dr. Small's is, in spite of its dignified and scholar-
ly clothes, just as truly a contribution towards anarchy and
Bolshevism as many of the pamphlets more honestly labelled.
EVERY week adds to the output of books on Spiritism and
spiritualistic experiences; and such is the demand for ouija
boards that factories are speeding up to meet it. It is inconceiv-
able, as Miss Repplier so ably suggests in this issue of the CATHOLIC
WORLD, that Catholics brought up in the Communion of Saints
should resort to commerce with spirits. Nevertheless, planchette
and ouija boards are found in Catholic homes and Catholic
schools.
* * * *
SINCE the positive, spiritual motives of trust in God and accept-
ance of His will are not sufficient deterrents, it may be
well to reprint from the April Tablet of February 14th the testi-
mony of an English neurologist as to the fatal physical, mental
and moral consequences of dabbling in Spiritism : "Spiritism," he
said, according to the report given by the Morning Post, was
spreading like an infectious disease, and it had ceased to become
a science, and had become in the hands of Sir Conan Doyle more
or less a religion. As a science it already had a long roll of mar-
tyrs, and no medium existed who did not suffer before long, either
physically, mentally, or morally. . . . These dangers began
with the planchette and with table turning, and consisted in the
1920.] WITH OUR READERS 143
gradual loss of protective will-power, which was our divine guard
against devil possession. In one case of devil possession which
had come to his own notice the patient required a resident physi-
cian and two male trained nurses, but after a week the nurses
gave notice. They thought they had heard every form of im-
possible language, but that of the patient came straight from the
pit, and nothing would induce them to stay with him. There was
no doubt that the end of Spiritism was possession by an evil spirit.
.... No one, he concluded, could touch Spiritism without being
lowered in their mental and moral tone. He had himself known
many cases of insanity come from Spiritualism."
EDITOR OF THE CATHOLIC WORLD :
I have been a constant reader of your magazine for many years
and have always admired the accuracy in the articles published
therein. However, I must demur to a statement made by Mr. Carl
Holliday in "St. Patrick's Folk in America." The article is well writ-
ten and intensely interesting, but in one particular instance is histor-
ically incorrect. He says on page 792 of the March issue that among
the five Irish Generals who crossed the Delaware with Washington
was Greene. General Greene was not an Irishman nor the son of an
Irishman nor the descendant of one. His ancestor and mine came
from Dorsetshire, England, in 1635, and was known as "John Greene,
Gentleman and Surgeon." The Greenes are an old Northamptonshire
and Dorsetshire family, a branch of which settled in Ireland in the
days of the Invasion. General Greene was not of that Branch. I am
proud to say that in my line, which is the same as General Greene,
and I am near akin to him, I am the first male Catholic since Henry
VIII.'s time. This I owe to my Irish mother. And lest I be misunder-
stood, I wish to state that I am Secretary of Robert Emmet Branch
Friends of Irish Freedom and Vice-President of Division 2, A. O. H.,
here in Newport. I believe that the cause for which Greene fought
in the days of the Revolution is identical with the cause of Sinn Fein,
and in the spirit of my forbears, who left England because of the
persecution of High Church and who fought England in 1776 and 1812,
I am proud as an American to write and to speak in the cause of
Liberty. A statement like the above might lay my cause open to
needless ridicule on the part of the enemies of Justice and Freedom.
The greatest thing the Irish have ever done for America, and
I mean the Catholic Irish, is the bringing of Holy Church into promi-
nence and influence, and there is many a man of ancient American
lineage who today lives to bless the Irish mother who brought him
into the pale of Rome.
Sincerely yours,
JOHN H. GREEN, JR.,
Deputy Collector Internal Revenue.
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THE
Catholic &(orld
VOL. CXI.
MAY, 1920
No. 662
FREDERICK J. KINSMAN'S "APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA."
BY HENRY A. LAPPIN.
N the twenty-fourth day of last November the
Right Rev. Frederick Joseph Kinsman, D.D.,
Protestant Episcopal Bishop of Delaware,
having resigned his See and severed his connec-
tion with the Communion in which he had lived
for almost half a century, made his renunciation of heresy
and was formally reconciled to the Catholic Apostolic and
Roman Church. Ten days before that date he wrote the clos-
ing pages of this book, 1 which he now offers to the world as a
complete and candid record of his ecclesiastical experience
and of those changes in his ecclesiastical opinions which led
him ultimately to seek admission to the Church. Salve Mater
has little in common wi 'h the usual, more or less stereotyped,
narrative of conversion. Its human touches and humors are
many. Clearly the work of a passionately earnest and sincere
seeker after the truth, it is nevertheless imperturbably serene,
urbane, and charitable. Dr. Kinsman writes an admirable
English terse, lucid, and vigorous. He has as pretty a wit
as the author of A Spiritual jEneid (which is saying a great
deal), and his historical learning is obviously much more pro-
found. In short, for learning, brightness, and charm, no apo-
*Salve Mater, by Frederick Joseph Kinsman. New York: Longmans, Green A
Co. $2.25.
Copyright. 1920. THE MISSIONABY SOCIETY OF ST. PAUL THE APOSTI.B
IN THB STATE OF NEW YOBK.
VOL. cxi. 10
146 FREDERICK J. KINSMAN'S "APOLOGIA" [May,
logia that has been published for years past may be compared
with this book.
The conversion of a Protestant bishop to Catholicism is
an extremely rare occurrence in our day. But Dr. Kinsman
is not the first man in America to resign the episcopate of his
Communion and take the well-worn path to Rome. In 1852,
the Right Rev. Levi Silliman Ives, Bishop of North Carolina,
became a Catholic, and, in a document which animadverted
upon "the impious pretensions of the Bishop of Rome to be
the Vicar of Christ," was solemnly deposed by his fellow-
bishops as "an absconding and apostate delinquent from his
See . . . and his office and work in the ministry." Bishop
Whittingham of Maryland accounted for this, in his opinion,
extraordinary aberration on the part of Dr. Ives, as a "de-
rangement of mind," and thought it imperative that "steps
should be taken toward procuring a thorough investigation
into his mental conditions." Since history is amazingly prone
to repeat itself, it is not surprising that one of Dr. Kinsman's
Episcopalian correspondents should have attributed his recent
change of creed to ill-health and unbalanced judgment. (We
speak more mildly than our fathers of seventy years ago!)
Dr. Kinsman's conversion is doubtless the most important
having regard to the position of the convert in his former
Communion since James Kent Stone (in his subsequent
Catholic life, Father Fidelis, Passionist), the President of
Hobart College, found the Treasure hidden in a field, and for
joy thereof sold all he had and bought that field. 2 There are
surely many worldly reasons against a bishop's changing his
religion. There is the difficulty and distress in realizing the
result of his defection upon his spiritual subjects, clerical as
well as lay; there is almost always the certainty that he will
cause the greatest pain to those he loves and who love him.
And no man can be indifferent to such considerations; no man
can contemplate with equanimity the prospect of scorn, oblo-
quy, misapprehension, estrangement, loss of comfort, of sta-
tion, of the very means of life. Surely those who have em-
braced the Faith under these circumstances have received, as
Wiseman once said, a merit little short of what belongs to its
holy confessors. Yet there are incalculable compensations
1 Father Stone, we understand, is preparing a new edition of his famous volume,
nntitled The Invitation Heeded.
1<J20.J FREDERICK J. KINSMAN'S "APOLOGIA" 147
which outweigh utterly the bitterest sacrifices demanded from
the convert. There is the knowledge that he has on him the
blessing of Christ's Vicar, the blessing of the Fisherman's
Successor; that the truth or error of doctrine is no longer a
question of geography or jurisdiction; that he is at last in the
unity of God's Mystical Body. Laqueus contritus est, et nos
liberati sumus.
At seven and twenty [wrote the most learned Catholic
convert layman of the nineteenth century, T. W. Allies]
worldly honor and official rank seemed to open to me as
an Anglican Bishop's chaplain, and at seven and thirty
all seemed sacrificed to becoming a Catholic; and now at
forty I have started afresh as a species of clerk in a city
office. What is this, O Lord, to Thy shed at Nazareth,
and how proud am I to shrink from a scratch of the nails
which pierced Thy Hands and Feet.
That, indeed, is a thought to heal and strengthen and nerve
every convert in the first sharp griefs of separation and
change !
There was nothing in Dr. Kinsman's ancestry or upbring-
ing which savored even remotely of Roman Catholic influences.
My family [he writes] belong to the Connecticut West-
ern Reserve in Ohio with a background of Connecticut and
Massachusetts; they were members of the Episcopal
Church into which two generations had come out of New
England Congregationalism. Our earliest American an-
cestor came to this country in the Mayflower in 1620; none
from whom we derive descent came over later than 1680.
Along every line we are descended from the New England
Puritans. ... In our world the Roman Catholic Church
did not exist save as a phenomenon in European travel,
a bogey in history, and an idiosyncrasy of Irish servants.
As a normal youngster of twelve or thereabouts he saw
that the religion around him seemed chiefly a matter of study-
ing the Bible; "and I found American history much more
interesting." At St. Paul's School, Concord, N. H., he passed
under the ferrule of Dr. Henry Augustus Coit, who seems to
have counted for much in upbuilding the character of the
future bishop, and who taught him "the doctrine of the Real
148 FREDERICK J. KINSMAN'S "APOLOGIA" [May,
Presence," even if he failed, after many doctrinal discourses,
in explaining to young Kinsman's satisfaction why he was an
Episcopalian rather than a Presbyterian. From these days,
however, dated Dr. Kinsman's interest in the work of "the
Church," and his recognition that his "standard of interests,
if not of values, is strictly ecclesiastical ecclesiastical as dis-
tinct from intellectual, moral, or spiritual." (One suspects
that certain reviewers of Salve Mater will raise their blunder-
busses and take careful aim when they come to this avowal.)
In due time young Kinsman crossed to England and went into
residence for three years at that stronghold of Tractarian
Anglicanism, Keble College, Oxford, spending a postgraduate
year of study at Pusey House. These four years, he declares,
were the happiest of his life. One may well believe it, for the
third chapter, in which is described his life at Oxford and in
the Somersetshire rectory of Shepton Beauchamp under the
pastoral and paternal supervision of that stanchest of High
Churchmen, Vincent Stuckey Stratton Coles, is a pure delight
from the first word to the last. At Keble, he had for tutor the
learned Walter Lock, biographer of Keble and contributor to
Lux Mundi.
The young American divine was living in those days "in
the concentrated atmosphere of the Oxford Movement, regard-
ing Keble and Pusey with filial loyalty as the embodiments of
sound Church principles and sound learning, and hearing and
knowing much of those who were their most direct successors."
Liddon had died a year before young Kinsman came to Ox-
ford, but the influence of his life and teaching was still pro-
foundly felt in Keble and at Pusey House. In the Pusey House
Library he read proof copies of Liddon's famous Bampton
Lectures on the Divinity of Christ, with Pusey's marginal com-
ments upon and his letters about them; and the neophyte
was "amazed to learn that Pusey did not approve of them as
'Germanizing' in tendency!" (This is very interesting in view
of the belief of some Oxford men that Pusey was not less, but
rather more, "liberal" than Liddon. Gore, whose essay in
Lux Mundi alarmed Liddon, was in his turn perturbed by the
Foundations of a later group of young Oxford clerical dons.
And so, as Canon Adderley said recently, "the story of theology
is marked by shaking milestones!")
In those days of the early nineties, the contributors
1920.] FREDERICK J. KINSMAN'S "APOLOGIA" 149
to Lux Mundi "were regarded as constituting an inner circle
of the elect, the most stable element in the Church of Eng-
land's present, and safest guarantee of its future." J. R.
Illingworth in whose delightful Life by his widow the cur-
ious may read the story of the Lux Mundi sessions year by
year was probably the deepest thinker of the group; one of
his two papers in Lux Mundi, "The Problem of Pain," belongs
no less to English literature than to Anglican theology. Dr.
Kinsman went to Illingworth's Bampton lectures on "Person-
ality," and was assiduous in his attendance at the lectures and
sermons of Gore, at that time Principal of Pusey House.
"Not having had any training in philosophy," he laments,
"I did not know enough to take in the subtler points in their
theology and apologetic."
Doubtless, he realizes by now the wisdom of the Church
of his new allegiance in insisting that aspirants to her priest-
hood should be thoroughly grounded in philosophy before
proceeding to their theology. Nemo potest theologus per-
fectus evadere, remarks Suarez, nisi prius firma fundamenta
jecerit philosophise.
Looking back over those years, Dr. Kinsman may well
smile whimsically when he remembers, as he tells us, "having
the feeling that the annual gatherings at Longworth [of the
Lux Mundi writers at Illingworth's vicarage], of which I had
been told, represented a chief safeguard of Christian civiliza-
tion!" He was much influenced by Gore, who emerges today
as the most distinguished and devoted clerical member of the
whole Anglican Communion. From William Bright, the Regius
Professor of Ecclesiastical History, he also learned much,
deriving special benefit from that illustrious scholar's lec-
tures on the General Councils though later on coining to
recognize how much Bright missed or misunderstood because
of his undue concentration upon the patristic and literary
documents to the ignoring of "much evidence of monuments,
local traditions, and existing institutions which bore directly
upon subjects he had in hand." Bright, as was naturally to
be expected, taught his students that the claims of the modern
Papacy were unhistorical, and unconsciously emphasized
"everything in conciliar history that tells against them." W.
J. Birkbeck, that distinguished authority upon the Russian
Church, and Dr. F. E. Brightman, the most erudite of Anglican
150 FREDERICK J. KINSMAN'S "APOLOGIA" [May,
liturgiologists, both served the young man's culture and pro-
gress. And, in vacation-time, he wandered through Cathedral
towns, into ancient college chapels and village churches, satur-
ating himself in the spirit of Anglican tradition and devotion.
Under Vincent Coles' rectory roof he "learned what clerical
life and parochial work should be. . . After seeing the ordered
life of the clergy-house, the careful provision for services,
instructions, parochial calls, rescue work, and healthful amuse-
ments of the small community, all arranged with such conse-
crated common sense, it was impossible ever to be satisfied
with the average clergyman's life of intense domesticity inter-
rupted by Sunday services and many social calls. The stand-
ard was emphatically that of priests. . . ."
And then, as the day of his diaconate drew nigh, Vincent
Coles wrote him these moving and beautiful words : "Did you
ever think that Our Lord went from the Cross 'to preach to
the spirits that were in prison?' And this is a description of
all our preaching more or less. The words with which He
went are a summing-up of the past and consecration of the
future, 'Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit.' What
better words can you have in mind as you pass out into the
unknown life of the ministry?"
There was a time of conflict awaiting Frederick Kins-
man in the years ahead, a time of spiritual storm and stress,
though, looking out upon life with eager eyes of youth, he
knew it not: a time of inner strife to which no term might
be put, from which he might attain no rest nor any peace
until his will should be conformed to God's Will as simply as
a little child.
For two years after his ordination to the Anglican minis-
try, Dr. Kinsman worked as a master in his old school at
Concord. Then for three happy, hard-working years he was
Rector of St. Martin's Church, New Bedford, Mass. He left St.
Martin's to become Professor of Church History at the Berkeley
Divinity School, whence, three years later, he was called to
the Chair in the same subject at the General Theological Sem-
inary, New York City, a post which he occupied with distinc-
tion for five years. During all this time he apparently expe-
rienced no weakening of confidence in Anglican Catholicity.
(Once, however, some time before his ordination, he was
troubled in mind by a canon of the Episcopal Church,
1920.] FREDERICK J. KINSMAN'S "APOLOGIA" 151
which forbade "any act of adoration of or toward the Ele-
ments in the Holy Communion, such as bowings, prostrations,
or genuflexions," which "symbolized erroneous or doubtful
Doctrine." Bishop Niles to whom at the time he made declara-
tion of his belief in the Real Presence "and in the consequent
duty of Eucharistic Adoration intended to conform with the
teaching of Mr. Keble" (our italics) made response that while
he would hold neither himself nor any standing committee
"competent to waive the utterances and rulings of a Canon
like that any Canon" he did "not suppose that it was in-
tended to oppose any doctrine of the Real Presence which
you have been taught." "The incident merely confirmed
my belief," says Dr. Kinsman, "that the doctrine of the Real
Presence with Eucharistic Adoration of Our Lord as a log-
ically consequent duty, was the true doctrine of the Anglican
Church, no matter how many of its members failed to under-
stand it" (italics ours again).
In 1905 Dr. Kinsman spent the summer in Europe seeing
Oxford again, and on the same journey, visiting Constanti-
nople and Asia Minor, exploring the hills and ruins of Ephesus,
briefly glimpsing Athens and Corinth, and paying his second
visit to the Eternal City, which seems to have left his Protes-
tantism intact. Eight years later he was once more to indulge
his enthusiasm for Christian archaeological studies, in a so-
journ at Tunis, whence he repaired daily to the site of Carth-
age and looked upon the amphitheatre hallowed by the mar-
tyrdom of St. Perpetua and her companions.
On SS. Simon and Jude's Day, 1908, he was consecrated
Bishop of Delaware.
In looking back [the ex-Bishop remarks wistfully] it
seems to me that the Episcopal Church gave me everything
I could most wish. I had a special ambition to teach
Church History, and two opportunities were given me; of
all the parishes I have ever known, the one I should pick
for myself would be St. Martin's, New Bedford: in recent
years the only post I could possibly wish was that of
Bishop of Delaware ... I had plenty of difficulties and
disappointments, but knew of no other Bishop who had so
few . . . The surroundings and conditions of my work
satisfied me; so far as they were concerned I ought to have
been, and was, quite happy. That was all on the surface.
152 FREDERICK J. KINSMAN'S "APOLOGIA" [May,
Below the surface, during almost my whole episcopate,
I was increasingly troubled, passing through successive
stages of disappointment, disillusion, doubt, and disbelief,
owing to the waning of faith in the church system which
I was set in Delaware to represent.
It is quite likely that Frederick Kinsman would never
have abandoned the church of his fathers had he not been
raised to the episcopate. But it was the office and work of
Episcopal Bishop of Delaware which tested his conception
of Catholicity and found it painfully wanting.
The day of my consecration [he declares incisively]
sealed my doom as an Anglican. While it was possible to
maintain a purely theoretical view of the Anglican posi-
tion, it was possible for me to believe in the essential
catholicity of its inner spirit, of its tendencies, and of its
ultimate achievements. As Seminary professor or rector
of a "Catholic parish" I should probably never have had
misgivings, much less doubts. Most Anglicans assume that
the special atmosphere about them represents the breath
of the Church's truest life; and this is especially true of
Catholic-minded Anglicans. They are themselves Catholics
and their special task is "to Catholicize the Church." This
feeling I shared until as Bishop I felt the necessity of a
Church to Catholicize me! The theories did not stand the
test of a bishop's varied experience of the system's actual
workings, his necessary contact with and share in all
phases of the Church's life. Eleven years in the episcopate
convinced me against my will, and in spite of knowledge
that other like-minded Bishops did not agree with me,
that the work with which I was identified was merely the
propagation of a form of Protestantism; that belief in it as
a Liberal Catholicism was but an amiable delusion. Aban-
donment of work did not signify in my case repudiation of
Protestant principles, for these I had never held, but the
loss of belief in the Catholic interpretation of the Anglican
position.
There is Dr. Kinsman's story in a nutshell: the story of
a discovery that men will constantly be making, the discovery
that Anglicanism is only thinly-disguised Protestantism. At
first, Dr. Kinsman equated "Protestant Episcopal" with "Non-
Roman Catholic."
1920.] FREDERICK J. KINSMAN'S "APOLOGIA" 153
When I felt forced to admit that "Protestant" applied to
Episcopalians meant essentially the same as when applied
to other religious bodies, I gave up. I think now that
Episcopalians who know themselves to be Protestants,
are the ones who rightly interpret their position. . . "Prot-
estant Episcopal" represents a contradiction in terms.
Protestantism overthrew priesthood and especially the
chief-priesthood, the episcopate; no real Protestant be-
lieves in priests or bishops.
Admirably and wittily, Dr. Kinsman sums up thus :
Protestant Episcopalians must choose between their
adjective and their noun; and whichever choice they make
involves mental reservations as to the other half of their
official title. I was one of those who stuck to the noun
and let the adjective shift for itself. I now think that,
however much the noun expresses the Anglican theory, it
is the adjective which describes the working facts.
Although from the hour of his consecration the Bishop
was never wholly satisfied with the position in which he found
himself, a great deal of water rolled under the bridges before
the stark reality of his ecclesiastical position began to trouble
him seriously and fundamentally. He passed through many
stages of increasing indecision and perplexity before the final
despair came. He was never blind to the fact that the mem-
bers of his flock took three distinct and mutually antagonistic
attitudes toward the Church. But at first he disposed of these
"apparent contradictions" by deciding that "the three schools
of thought simply divided the Creed between them, and that
each needed the others to supplement and develop its own
special position." (An argument of which the late J. N. Figgis
was much enamored.) Thus, "the Fatherhood of God, the
foundation of all theology ... is the basis of all Broad
Church preaching. The heart of the Creed, belief in the Di-
vine Son ... is the basis of the Evangelical appeal. The
High Church, emphasis on Church, and Sacraments is nothing
but practical belief in the Holy Ghost. . . " Bring them to-
gether in the Protestant Episcopal Church and you have the
Holy Catholic Church! (But to use the laboratory termin-
ology a mechanical mixture is a vastly different thing from
154 FREDERICK J. KINSMAN'S "APOLOGIA" [May,
a chemical compound.) Nor was the Bishop blind, either, to
the fact that what his Church tolerated in the way of doctrinal
vagaries, he, as its official, was also bound to tolerate, for he
had sworn a solemn oath to do so. As an interpreter of the
Doctrine, Discipline, and Worship of the Episcopal Church
he "had to be guided by general custom, not by personal pref-
erence." It was a great relief to him that none of his clergy
attempted publicly to deny a fundamental article of the creed;
but, he mournfully admits, "had there been one I should have
felt bound to allow what was notoriously allowed elsewhere"
(italics ours). Moreover, his experience had driven home to
him that "there is often more tenderness for those who deny
than for those who uphold the Faith in our Semi-Arian paci-
ficism." The history of modern Anglicanism, one may insist,
is a continuous demonstration of the truth of this: Oxford,
in the early days of the Tractarians, suspends Pusey for
preaching the Real Presence, and in the commemoration of
that same year decorates Everett, an American Socinian, with
an honorary degree. Hampden, whose Bamptons were of-
ficially condemned as heretical by the University, is promoted
to that storm-centre, the See of Hereford; Arthur Stanley is
given the Deanery of Westminster, and Arthur Tooth is given
a term in jail. Hensley Henson, who, whatever his creed may
be, could never, in any strict use of the term, be called a Chris-
tian, is made Bishop of Hereford and occupies unmolested that
ancient diocese, while Wason of Truro is brutally ejected from
his vicarage for "Reservation of the Blessed Sacrament."
The time came when Dr. Kinsman realized fully that the
Catholic interpretation of Anglican formularies, although it
had never lacked its defenders in the Anglican Church "in-
cluding the most learned and holy divines in the Church of
England and some of the most able men of the Church in
America" was only one view among others of which one
directly opposes it. "It is distinctly exclusive," writes Dr.
Kinsman, "whereas Anglicanism, in this country as well as in
England, is notoriously inclusive of all who approach it from
the Protestant side. . . The policy of comprehension com-
plaisant toward all Protestants, is the antithesis of the other
policy of rigid loyalty to the principles of the historic Catholic
Church." And the melancholy conclusion is that "the Lati-
tudinarian lion will only lie down with the Catholic lamb in-
1920.] FREDERICK J. KINSMAN'S "APOLOGIA" 155
side if it bleats!" And so we come to one reason the Bishop
assigned for leaving Delaware :
After long struggle against the conviction, I have been
forced to admit that this toleration of doctrinal laxity seems
to me to indicate that the Church's Discipline fails to ex-
press and defend its Doctrine, and creates an insuperable
difficulty for those who believe in the fundamental im-
portance of the historic doctrine of the Incarnation.
And there came a time, too, when he ceased "to believe in
ambiguity of statement as the one mode of preserving balance
of truth." Out of which arose another reason for his resigna-
tion:
The Episcopal Church permits and encourages a variety
of views about Sacraments. Its standard, however, is de-
termined by the minimum rather than by the maximum
view tolerated, since its official position must be gauged not
by the most it allows, but by the least it insists upon. Its
general influence has fluid qualities, always seeking the
lowest possible level. The stream of its life cannot rise
higher than its source in corporate authority. Individual
belief and practice may surmount this; but they will ulti-
mately count for nothing so long as they find no expression
in official action; nor can the Church be judged by the
standard of individual members acting in independence of
it ... Although there has been marked advance among
some of our people owing to deeper hold of sacramental
truth, there has been even greater retrogression among
others towards rationalistic skepticism. On the whole, the
Church seems to be swayed by the tendencies of the age
opposed to the supernatural owing to ambiguities inherent
in its system, always subject to an intellectual law of gravi-
tation.
At this stage Dr. Kinsman had arrived in 1919. It was a
goal for which he had been unconsciously headed for seven or
eight years; years in which he had been, one by one, shedding
his illusions about Anglicanism and getting down nearer and
nearer to the bedrock of reality. The proof of his ecclesias-
tical pudding was in the eating. Anglo-Catholicism was all
very well on paper or in the professor's seminar-room. In the
highways and hedgerows of Delaware the thing refused to
156 FREDERICK J. KINSMAN'S "APOLOGIA" [May,
function. In the working-out it became poignantly evident
that Episcopalianism was "merely a form of Congregational-
ism to which 'the historic episcopate' forms an anomalous
adjunct. If a minister is personally agreeable, a congre-
gation is disposed to follow his lead in thought and parochial
action; if his successor is also personally agreeable, they will
with equal readiness follow him along quite different lines.
The important thing is not church principles, but ministerial
manners."
As early as 1912 he thought of resigning at the General
Convention of 1913, and he took his troubles to his brethren
in the episcopate, Bishops Hall of Vermont and Brent of the
Philippines (now of Buffalo) . To the former he wrote : "The
older I grow, the more I feel that the ideals of Anglican Catho-
lics are the noblest things I know; but I have ceased to feel
that they can be regarded as those of the Church or much
more than the aspiration of a party using its Protestant private
judgment in a Catholic direction. But for effective action we
must have the Church, not merely a party within the Church,
behind us." And to Bishop Brent he was able at that time to
make this unequivocal disclaimer : " I have not the least
touch of Roman fever. Actual Rome repels me." What he
was really suffering from, he adds quippishly, was Protestant
chills! Protestantism, he is frank to confess, is drearily un-
Christian.
It was now that he turned to reconsider the history of the
English Reformation settlement, no longer as a college lec-
turer, but as a bishop who had seen the practical working-out
of that system in its principles and fruits in an American dio-
cese in the twentieth century. Here Gairdner and Gasquet
were his chief illuminations. "It seems to me," he writes with
touching earnestness at this point, "that in my historical work
I have always had a sincere desire to get at the truth. I have
wished to avoid the blinding influence of prejudice and
frankly to admit everything that told against my own conten-
tions. I am quite certain of the honesty of my motives; but
I have come to see that in many things I have been mistaken
and that, without knowing it, I have let prejudice cover my
view of facts." One main result of this review of Reforma-
tion history in its sources and in the pages of coldly impartial
historians like Gairdner, was to convince Dr. Kinsman of the
1920.] FREDERICK J. KINSMAN'S "APOLOGIA" 157
essential Tightness of the view of the English Reformation
presented in the Cambridge Modern History, i. e., that it was
to be bracketed with the Continental and Scottish. Another
result was his realization of the weakness of the Elizabethan
settlement: it "aimed at comprehension and ended in com-
promise." It was "the ecclesiastical counterpart of the politic
coquetry habitually practised by the Virgin Queen." From the
midst of these investigations Oxford summoned him to receive
an honorary D. D. On this journey he was the guest at Oxford
of his old tutor, Walter Lock, now Warden of Keble, and he
visited, while in England, Bishops Gore, Paget, ;and John
Wordsworth, and the Archbishop of Canterbury.
It was the most interesting three weeks I ever spent, filled
with pleasant experiences, all tending to make me thankful
for my connection with the Church of England, and sug-
gesting possibilities of useful and delightful contact in
future. Yet to this visit, when I was least expecting such
impressions, belonged certain uncomfortable thoughts of
the breaking of Catholic continuity at the English Reforma-
tion. In St. Paul's Cathedral, noting the incongruity of
the surplice as a vestment for a celebrant in such a place,
I was set to thinking of the significance of the abolition
of the Eucharistic vestments; the portraits at Lambeth
set me thinking of the historical significance of the "mag-
pie;" in Lincoln Cathedral and again at York I was struck
by the inadequacy of the modern rite of Holy Communion,
and much more of Evensong, to make use of the magnificent
minsters built by monks for the Mass . . .
And he perceived only too clearly that the change from copes
and mitres to chimeres and balloon sleeves signified a profound
alteration in the conception of the episcopate and the priest-
hood. In spite of all this he was believing, as late as 1914,
that the Anglican Churches constituted a Catholic Communion.
By 1917, however, he was unwilling to place them as hereto-
fore on an equality with Easterns and old Catholics, but rather
ranked them " with the Danish Church and Scottish Kirk, and,
for an especially close parallel, with the Church of Sweden."
In the course of this investigation he found himself at
length in accord with sturdy Cobbett's stentorian verdict that
"the Reformation was engendered in lust, brought forth in
hypocrisy and perfidy, and cherished and fed by plunder, dev-
158 FREDERICK J. KINSMAN'S "APOLOGIA" [May,
astations, and rivers of innocent English and Irish blood."
Reduced to its plainest terms the Reformation had this for im-
mediate result, that "the provinces of Canterbury and York,
under compulsion of the English King, cut themselves loose
from Catholic Christendom, and more and more, partly by
choice, more as victims of violence, assimilated themselves to
Lutheran and Calvinistic standards. The plea of conformity
to primitive standards did not alter the willfulness of the
separation."
Then came the vexed question of the validity of Anglican
Orders. His thought upon this subject passed through four
well-defined stages: "(1) That they were schismatical; (2)
that they were futile to guarantee some of the purposes of
Orders; (3) that they were dubious, and (4) for this rea-
son and because of breaks in Catholic continuity, invalid."
The whole treatment of Anglican Orders in this chapter seems
to the lay student of the question assuredly the most illuminat-
ing discussion in brief space that he has so far read. It is im-
possible to do more than tabulate Dr. Kinsman's conclusions
and quote one or two of his penetrating side-comments. In
effect, he observes, this is what the Anglican Church says:
"We have kept the ancient Orders, Bishop, Priest and Deacon;
we require episcopal ordination for those who minister in
our own churches; but we do not say that it is absolutely
necessary, nor do we require those who submit to it to have
any particular opinion concerning it. It is to be assumed that
our Church has a mind; but on this subject she has no opinion
to express." The official attitude of an Anglican Bishop con-
ferring Holy Orders is therefore: "I perform this solemnity
whereby you may be admitted to minister in our churches;
but as to what it is in itself, or as to what you and others
are to think of it, I have officially nothing to say. Though
personally and privately I and so may you hold Orders to
be a Sacrament, officially I must treat them as doubtfully
sacramental, and merely urge them as non-committally harm-
less." And as to the power of the keys:
If you think this commissions you to hear sacramental
confession, you may hear them as a permissible extra; as
to knowledge of spiritual medicine and surgery, you are
left to your own device. Examination of the canons of
Moral Theology suggests that there is something doubt-
1920.] FREDERICK J. KINSMAN'S "APOLOGIA" 159
ful about a commission which in practice is taken to mean
so little or so much and, often, to mean nothing at all.
Doubt about the Church's doctrine of Confession and Abso-
lution throws analogous doubt on the commission to remit
and retain sins. Doubtful doctrines of the Eucharist and
Penance imply doubtful Orders; and doubtful Orders as
such are not conferred by the Catholic Church.
Slowly, reluctantly, with clinging unwillingness, driven
from point to point, like a fighter falling back before a con-
quering adversary, never yielding in anything until the last
citadel of counter-argument had been stormed and taken and
utter conviction had ensued, this Protestant Bishop made his
painful pilgrimage to the gates of the City of Peace. There re-
mained at last almost the stubbornest obstacle of them all:
his prejudices against Rome. His Connecticut Yankee boy's
mind had fed as a matter of course on the notorious Thousand
and One Protestant Nights Entertainment, as Manning acidly
called it. Until he was sixteen or seventeen he did not know
what the inside of a Catholic church was like. Then one day,
out of curiosity, he went to Mass with his mother at the Cathe-
dral in Cleveland, where he was impressed by the rapt ex-
pression of a young man going to Holy Communion, and
offended by the rather crude peroration of the sermon. His
second contact with Catholicism occurred when at the end of
his first term in Oxford, he went, in January, 1892, to the
lying-in-state of the dead Manning at Westminster. Dr. Kins-
man hints darkly at a strange experience he had there "of
which I have never spoken to anyone but my sister, which
suggested the thought that I might, or even ought, some day
to become a Roman Catholic, in so forcible a way that the
memory was indelible, though there was no practical conse-
quence of any sort." Four weeks of an Italian Lent in 1895
did nothing except convince him that the Roman Holy Week
observances were inferior to the Anglican in their confusion
of the strict sequence of events. Idolatrous superstition was
not nearly as much in evidence as he expected. On the whole
the greater Roman churches "measured up fairly well to the
standard of the Oxford Movement!" When he left Rome this
time it was with the feeling that "Rome was not wholly bad,"
and the conviction that "Roman Catholicism was best for
Italians, Spaniards, and French." (!) A little later, conver-
160 FREDERICK J. KINSMAN'S "APOLOGIA" [May,
sation with a Belgian Capuchin priest gave him his "first expe-
rience of the varied delights and surprises of intercourse with
a well-educated priest." Then he began to read the books of
such men as Duchesne and Batiffol, and came very speedily
to admit that "we had much more to learn from Catholic
writers than from rationalizing Germans, whose authority
was slavishly followed by many in America and England."
With his fundamentally sound Catholic instinct Dr. Kinsman
was able to read Loisy without assent, and to appreciate to the
full Pope Pius X.'s discernment of the character and tendency
of Modernism, and his unhesitating condemnation of it. He
even found himself in sympathy with The Tablet's strictures
on the lack of authority in the Anglican Church. The read-
ing of certain utterances of Cardinal Gibbons and the result
of his determination, thereupon, to follow the Cardinal's re-
marks quoted in the press, and to read his books, demonstrated
to Dr. Kinsman that Cardinal Gibbons was nothing less than
a very great American citizen, as he felt, too, Archbishop Ire-
land was.
The beginning of the end came when "it gradually dawned
upon me that Catholicism coming from Italy by way of Ire-
land, might possibly be naturalized and become as truly and
loyally American as Catholicism from England or anywhere
else: and I had already shrewd suspicions that whatever its
degree and shade of Americanism, it was certainly full as
Catholic!" And when he started out to test the nature of the
influence exerted by Roman Catholicism on American life,
using as his touchstone and text, "By their fruits ye shall know
them," the revelations came fast and furious. He saw, among
many other things, the marvelous record achieved by the
representatives of this alleged alien and un-American faith in
the Great War; he saw the constant and fruitful insistence by
this Church on "the sanctity of marriage and of the home as
the basis of personal and social morality" (of the Anglican
Church, the cynical Lord Melbourne once said that it was the
chief bulwark against Christianity in England) . And, although
his eyes were never closed to the melancholy fact that there are
many who are nominally Catholics but who do not, in the old
Irishman's phrase, "work at it," he could not help seeing also
that "there is no doubt what the Catholic standards are, and
they are nailed to the mast. Against all the evils that
1920.] FREDERICK J. KINSMAN'S "APOLOGIA" 161
threaten America by insidious undermining of the foundations
of the home, there is no stronger or more effective bulwark
than the Roman Catholic Church." One would put it even more
strongly than this. The simple truth today is that the Catho-
lic and Roman Church is the only bulwark, in any serious
and effective sense, against the greatest social evils of today,
race suicide and divorce. The trend of American life will
indubitably reveal this within the next twenty years. As
guardian and guarantor of social morality in these United
States, all other so-called Christian denominations are to
Catholicism as children playing with bow and arrow to trained
soldiers with machine guns.
Rut the Anglican churches were the churches of sound
learning and the fearless quest for truth, and there was little
real scholarship among Catholics. Did not the Catholic sys-
tem suppress honest and candid criticism? Was not Catholic
scholarship really a contradiction in terms? This was another
of the Bishop's notions which went by the board as soon as he
had investigated at first-hand the facts of the case. It "received
a severe shock when I first examined The Catholic Encyclo-
paedia." Dr. Kinsman says a true word when he observes dryly
that "a distinctly sobering effect is in store for any clergyman
of the Episcopal Church who wishes to examine this [Encyclo-
paedia] and then imagine what he and his colleagues would
have made of a similar attempt!" Next Dr. Kinsman famil-
iarized himself with the work being done by the great Con-
tinental Catholic scholars, especially the Benedictines. About
this time he wrote :
Lately I have been reading Roman Catholic writers cover-
ing ground with which I considered myself fairly familiar.
They have shed floods of light: some of them are the best
I know: some do bits of work I longed for in seminary
days and could not find: they have given a sense of free-
dom which I never had in reading only Anglican author-
ities; and by revealing unsuspected abysses of ignorance
they have made me wish to do all my history work over
again. If this were possible, my lectures would have a
fullness, accuracy, and freedom they never before pos-
sessed.
But happiest day of all surely it was? came when Dr.
VOL. CXI. 11
162 FREDERICK J. KINSMAN'S "APOLOGIA" [Mary,
Kinsman discovered what a Catholic nun can do for a good
man. By a fortunate accident he became acquainted with the
Visitation Sisters of Wilmington and with one of them in es-
pecial, and found himself deeply interested to know the man-
ner of life these good women led, and to behold in them a sort
of spiritual power-house in his diocese. "I felt the charm of
their conversation which showed that delicate gayety which
is only possible in consecrated lives." (It would be difficult,
by the way, if not impossible, to put this more felicitously.)
This friendship with the Sisters "gave a touch and a tone"
to the last years of his life as a Protestant bishop. Then he
learned much also from the young Oblate Father, chaplain
to the nuns, concerning the discipline and training of a Roman
Catholic priest, and it occurred to him that his clergy were
amateurs and the Roman clergy professionals.
Of the Petrine claims, his reconsideration led him to be-
lieve that
Our Lord's commission of St. Peter is quite as formal as
that of the Twelve; that, so far as the Gospels record, they
are of parallel importance; and that it is just as reasonable
to take the one set as part of the constitution and charter
of the Church as the other. In any case I can only bear my
witness that, in daring to see special meaning for all time
in Our Lord's dealing with St. Peter without fear of con-
troversial admissions, I have a sense of freedom in reading
the Gospels I never had before. I have dropped fetters, not
assumed them.
Indeed, the whole chapter on the Papacy is one of the best
brief treatments of the subject outside Allies' monumental
dissertation.
* * * *
Throughout this article I have frankly endeavored to per-
mit Dr. Kinsman to speak in his own person wherever possible.
And I have, even at that, been able to give only some of the
general lines of his development and argument. That implac-
able niggard, space, forbids any attempt to present even the
outlines of his gradual change of attitude toward the cult of
the Saints and "new dogmas;" or of how he came to disen-
cumber himself of certain prejudices against the Jesuits; pre-
judice derived obviously from the reading of works hostile to
1H20.] FREDERICK J. KINSMAN'S "APOLOGIA" 103
the largest religious Order in the Catholic Church today; or
of many other deeply interesting and important matters. It
seems to the present writer that it is nothing less than his duty
to urge that every cultivated American Catholic buy, read,
re-read, and inwardly digest this most remarkable work. One
is tempted to affirm without reservation that, in the literature
of its type, it is the most entrancing piece of self-revelation
which has been given to the world since those anxious days of
the early summer of 1864 when John Henry Newman wrote
out of a tremulous agony of soul the immortal pages of his
Apologia. Frederick Kinsman has now been admitted to
fullness of spiritual joy in the True Faith; the tides of grace
and healing are flowing over his soul. He need no longer
agitate himself with the passions of Protestantism, Low
Church or Chasubled, or with the vagaries of the newest An-
glican "Liberalism." He has desisted from the vain task of
"reforming the Church;" he is now going "to let the Church
reform him."
And as we close Salve Mater, we may well be moved to
pray as once upon a time the great Thomas William Allies
prayed in a passage worthy to be set beside the words of
Basil, of Augustine, and of Chrysostom:
l
O Church of the living God, Pillar and Ground of the
Truth, bright as the sun, terrible as an army in battle
array, O Mother of Saints and Doctors, Martyrs and Vir-
gins, clothe thyself in the robe and aspect, as thou hast the
strength, of Him Whose Body thou art, the Love for our
sake incarnate: shine forth upon thy lost children, and
draw them to the double fountain of thy bosom, the well-
spring of Truth and Grace !
JOHN AYSCOUGH, NOVELIST.
BY LEO W. KELLER, S.J.
T is awkward to attempt an appreciation of a
great living author, particularly when the object
of our appreciation happens to be a clever satir-
ist, and to have felt no scruples about exercising
his gift now and then at the expense of "certain
literary critics." But misgivings of this sort may not stop
the sincere admirer, one who thinks that Ayscough deserves to
be known better in this country than he is, through the books
which have earned for him his high reputation as a master
of fiction.
The passing of Canon Sheehan and Monsignor Benson,
with whose names that of Monsignor Bickerstaffe-Drew will
always be closely linked, has left him at the head of the able
and comparatively numerous group of English novelists who
are Catholics. I purposely avoid the expressions "Catholic
novelist" and "Catholic novels." Ayscough himself dislikes
such terms, not because they are objectionable in themselves,
but because they usually convey the impression that Catholic
fiction, Catholic literature, occupies ground distinct and apart
from literature properly so-called, or is to be classified under
it in opposition to what might be denominated mundane liter-
ature. "In one sense," he says, "I would submit that there
is no such thing, apart from such specialized subjects as
theology, as Catholic literature: in another that all literature,
that is true literature at all, is Catholic: that is, that all true
literature is a part of the common inheritance which belongs
to us and to all men."
In his lectures he is fond of developing and emphasizing
this contention, and of proceeding thence to explain why, de-
spite well-meant hints and suggestions, he has written no novel
of an exclusively Catholic appeal. His aim has been to pro-
duce fiction which, Catholic in tone and spirit, should never-
theless find a place on the bookshelves of Protestant and un-
believing homes. There is where it will do most good, and
1020.] JOHN AYSCOUGH, NOVELIST 165
there, obviously, it has little chance of arriving if it carry un-
mistakeable proofs of an ecclesiastical imprimatur on every
page. Hence in none of his novels does he attempt a strictly
Catholic theme, nor obtrude religious lessons liable to repel
any fair-minded person whomsoever. He nowhere preaches,
nowhere strikes the attitude of the avowed apologist or con-
troversialist. His Catholic characters are quite interestingly
human, clerics and religious as well as laymen. Along with
such inspiring and loveable figures as Poor Sister and Father
Ryan and the little Prioress of Jaqueline, he gives us good-
humored pictures of the gossiping Prioress of Marotz, close-
fisted Don Ercole, and loud Canon O'Hirlihy. On the other
hand plenty of attractive non-Catholics are introduced, whom
he handles with respect unmingled with condescension, and he
is not so sanguine as to make the closing chapter of each book
a catalogue of edifying conversions.
I trust no one will gather from this that Ayscough's books
are lacking in spirituality; that they rarely bring home re-
ligious lessons, clear up Catholic doctrines, or dwell on sub-
jects Catholic. Everyone of his readers knows how far this
would be from the truth. A single sentence in "King's Serv-
ants," perhaps his finest essay, which I quote more than once
in these pages, embodies what is the true purport of all his
great novels: "It seems to me that from the pages of high
romance we may draw a more serene patience, and a more
practical remembrance that it is by God, and not by us, that
the world is ruled; that somehow, after all our boggling and
our crossness, His providence unties our knots and may cor-
rect our blunders."
How successful he is in handling purely Catholic themes
may be judged from his portrayal of life in the cloister. A
more ardent champion of the high vocation of contemplative
religious would be hard to find. Yet his books contain little
argument and no controversy on the subject. It is his wonder-
fully realistic pictures of the everyday life these secluded men
and women of prayer lead which win us. We never leave
one of his convents or monasteries or hermitages without a
clearer understanding and deeper appreciation of the sub-
limity, as well as the profound reasonableness, of what those
within its walls are doing. So captivating did George Mere-
dith find the saintly Superioress in Marotz that he wrote the
160 JOHN AYSCOUGH, NOVELIST [May,
author assuring him he had completely "fallen in love" with
Poor Sister. In San Celestino, which has enjoyed the distinc-
tion of being the only book by a living author in the English
course at Oxford, we are led up to a lonely cave on a mountain,
and witness with awe the grim austerities and temptations and
ineffable consolations of a hermit saint. Nor must we forget
the delightful visit of the Ancient and his two English of-
ficers to the Cistercian monastery in French Windows. I doubt
not the old man's answer there to Chutney's, "Tell us what it
means?" has enlightened more non-Catholics as to the sig-
nificance of the contemplative life than anything written these
two decades.
Himself a convert, Ayscough obviously feels that what
his former co-religionists stand in need of is not controversy,
not exhortation, not an elaborated and idealized picture of the
Church militant, which would carefully throw into the blurred
background the weaknesses of her human instruments, but an
honest glimpse or two of her simple, compelling grandeur,
and of God's workings through her on the hearts of her im-
perfect children. His tone is never supercilious, but it has
nothing of shy and timid apology. When occasion offers he
combats boldly those false notions of the Church which are
particularly prevalent in educated circles, that she is, for in-
stance, "merely a feature of the Middle Ages," as one of his
characters put it, "a fine thing out of date like chivalry and
the feudal system: a great idea that made the Middle Ages
more picturesque than our own." Nor can he suffer patiently
the High Church habit of simply ignoring the Reformation
in England. At the same time the good-natured satire he
directs at the oddities and inconsistencies and prepossessions
of the Church by law established is hardly apt to offend, since
it evinces neither ignorance nor malice, and is of a sort not
unfamiliar on the lips of Anglicans themselves.
It may seem superfluous to add that any number of whole-
some lessons of a more secular nature are insinuated into the
pages of Ayscough. Jaqueline emphasizes almost as forcibly
as The Newcom.es "the horrible degradation of marriage with-
out love, as impure, I think, as love without marriage," and
Monksbridge satirizes delightfully the masterful campaign of
Sylvia, the clever, to make "somebodies" of herself and her
family.
1920.] JOHN AYSCOUGH, NOVELIST 167
Though Ayscough's plots are by no means lacking in inter-
est and ingenuity, he is too absorbed in his men and women
to achieve high excellence of technique. His manner has more
in common with that of the old classics, his favorites, Jane
Austen, Emily Bronte, Mrs. Gaskell, Eliot, and Thackeray, than
with current fiction, "if," as he observes, "that can be called
current which loves to crawl and snuff its inspiration from the
dung and slime of a civilization turned rotten." Even his
critical essays would make evident that his concern is with
character rather than action. He has, in fact, but one plot,
which appears, with minor divergencies, in Marotz, Mezzo-
giorno, Faustula, and Jaqueline, from which Hurdcott does
not depart far, and which runs through a goodly part of Dro-
mina. A girl, beautiful, extraordinarily gifted, of odd, fasci-
nating traits, occupies the centre of the stage. The unfolding
of her soul, that critical stage especially at which the untem-
pered girl passes, as by fire, to the maturity of noble, lovely
womanhood, is the heart of the story. The heroine's purgation
is generally effected through a hasty and unhappy alliance
without affection. But in the end the painful bonds are loosed,
and the story closes with the wedding bells of true love.
San Celestino and Monksbridge, it is true, break new
ground. In the former the author is guided by the historical
sequence of events, and as to Monksbridge, its attenuated
framework can hardly be called a plot at all. The book is
strongly suggestive of Cranford, but with a Deborah, instead
of Miss Matty, the central figure.
The critic on the lookout for such things will detect struc-
tural imperfections in all of Ayscough's novels, though they
are rarer in his later works. He himself realizes that he was
too prodigal of material in Marotz and Dromina. The first
carries us down through four generations of the San Vito
family; the other, a stirring, passionate romance, but in point
of technique most open to criticism, pieces together three or
four distinct stories, and shifts its setting from Ireland to
Spain, to France, to California, to Hispaniola. Sometimes
characters in whom our interest has been keenly awakened,
are allowed to drop quietly out of sight. We want to hear
more of Arrigo in Marotz, of Phelim and Con and Agar in
Dromina, of the devoted Arab, Bringali, in Mezzogiorno, of
the Lambs and Hazlitt in Hurdcott. Piccolo's sudden and
168 JOHN AYSCOUGH, NOVELIST [May,
fearful fall taxes our credulity, and the happy ending of Faus-
tula comes as a sort of anticlimax.
Ayscough begins a story in Prodigals and Sons with the
observation that "warnings out of and above the natural order
are given not now and then, but often; if we would only be-
lieve in them, if we would only learn to read and recognize
them." Fortunately, he does not carry this hazardous theory
into his novels as freely as into his short stories. Since Dro-
mina alone, so far as I recall, introduces preternatural agen-
cies in a fashion which might be objected to, it suffices to have
called attention to what seems to be his attitude on the subject.
Beyond doubt it is Ayscough's gallery of female portraits
which gives him his rank among fiction writers. No novelist
of this century has produced a more exquisite group than
Marotz, Gillian, Consuelo, Faustula, and Jaqueline. They
have the natural nobility, the depth, the subtle feminine graces
of the finest female figures in our classics, and they add to this
a further charm, not to be achieved by the unbelieving artist,
which a profound faith lends them, and a familiar love of God,
and a readiness for unbounded sacrifice when His love calls.
The light upon their faces, when the Master's brush has put
the final touches, is the far-off radiance of another world. Yet
they are not cold, passionless, statuesque creatures, these
women of Ayscough. Depth of soul, warm and intensely hu-
man, is their hallmark, and a peculiar loveliness, "of a quality
belonging to those across whose life the shadow of tragedy is
to fall."
There is a similarity about them, it is true, resulting from,
or rather accounting for, the similarity of the romances in
which they live. For Ayscough is not the man to fit his char-
acters into a prearranged story. He builds his story up around
his characters. This resemblance, however, does not approach
that, say, of Harland's heroines, who blend themselves in our
minds beyond recognition a few weeks after we have laid aside
his books. Here there is a genuine and vital differentiation.
Faustula, the proud, fiery little pagan, hungering for love, her
gorge rising against the hollow sham of a vestal's life, is far
removed from Marotz, ever serene and reposeful, "in patience
possessing her soul." Jaqueline is a headstrong English girl,
whose nature would brook neither censure nor contradiction,
till the blow falls which chastens her. There is more stateli-
1920.] JOHN AYSCOUGH, NOVELIST 169
ness, more reserve, about Gillian, more of the dreamer, whom
a life of boredom has brought to maturity before her time.
Consuelo is, I think, the most loveable of them all, a fair, fresh
flower from the South, ablush with the first delicate glow of
unfolding womanhood, interested in everybody, amused by
every oddity and touched by every form of suffering, utterly
indifferent to rank and position, and at the end marrying in
prison the man she loved, though he stood convicted before the
world of vice and murder.
Ayscough, moreover, has plenty of first-rate women besides
his heroines. None of his creations surpass Sylvia, the thor-
oughbred strategist, as ambitious and mettlesome as Becky
Sharp, but too superlatively genteel to descend to cheap, or
compromising, or merely shrewd manoeuvres. He depicts with
equal verisimilitude the simple devout nun, and the vain,
hardshelled, pharisaical vestal. We have masterful Roma,
chattering, worldly ladies Louisa and Caradoc, the mad artist
Adalgitha. Then there is haughty Sabina, Roman matron to
the backbone, and beside her cheerful, unpretentious Melania,
the model Christian mother; crabbed old Zia, ironing the
crumples out of her darling banknotes with repeated ironings,
yet hiding a heart withal under her yellow skin, and stately
Berengaria, gentlest of the sex. Of his peasants the best per-
haps are old Maso, the cobbler's wife, and Mrs. Nadder of
Hurdcott; Norah, the simple, good-hearted girl, who met a
great temptation and fell pitifully, and Jocha, fast and loose,
whose eyes turn wistfully towards the muddy pastures of the
great city. 1
There is much less to be said in praise of our author's
men. To begin with, they are less numerous than his women,
less prominent, and more restricted in range. We naturally
call to mind Gracechurch, where he lived as a boy alone with
his mother in the midst of an overwhelmingly female society,
where "there were four Miss Gibbs, four Miss Shrimptons, four
Miss Trees, and four Miss Fentons, ... all there when we ar-
rived and all there when we left young ladies when we first
saw them and young ladies still when we said good-bye," where
"if half-a-dozen families with four sons apiece and no daugh-
ters had settled in the town it would have been an act of poetic
justice, but nothing of the kind happened." San Celestino is
the only man who dominates a novel.
170 JOHN AYSCOUGH, NOVELIST [May,
When we wander back through Ayscough's romances,
singling out his male characters, we find that the number of
those which have haunted our memories is small, and that
these latter are, with scarcely an exception, odd, perplexing,
exotic figures, like Piccolo, Mudo, Arrigo, Lope, Hurdcott, Mark
Herrick, Count Selvaggio, who have arrested our attention as
much by the strange halo of mystery which surrounds them as
by any depth or power or firmness of outline. Those drawn
in a more realistic spirit lack the vitality and individuality of
his women. Certainly Ayscough's men are not remarkable
for "muscular Christianity." About the only rugged, four-
square male among them is Mark Herrick. French Windows
does give us touching glimpses into the tender hearts of strong,
brave men. But fragmentary sketches of this sort differ wide-
ly, of course, from the full-length, finished portrait of the novel-
ist. One does wish, that one or two of these hearty fellows
had found places somewhere among the author's dramatis
personse.
Ayscough remarks of Mr. Street's style, in his charming
little "Essay on Essayists," that it "is so good there is nothing
good to be said about it, which I take to be a proof of excel-
lence." After much groping to lay hold on just what it is we
admire in his own style, we find relief in ruminating this para-
dox. The vague consciousness at least is never wanting of its
easy, perfectly poised, unobtrusive refinement. We recognize,
too, that exquisite touch, so much admired by Sir Walter in
Jane Austen, "which renders ordinary, commonplace things
and characters interesting, from the truth of the description
and sentiment." Yet he can be ardently imaginative and
picturesque, for though Monksbridge and Gracechurch are de-
lightful achievements in realism, he is at heart a romancer.
His expression is never labored. It flows along, to fall back
on a hackneyed metaphor, in a free, supple, sinuous stream,
here broken all over with glancing ripples of playful humor,
now gliding into brooding depths of silent pathos, pouring at
times with swift precipitancy down abysmal gorges of passion,
but ever breaking into the smooth water below without taking
us through gurgling rapids or over the cataract. We are
tempted to believe that the architectonics of his romances oc-
casioned him no little embarrassment, but we do not picture
him agonizing over individual phrases or sentences.
1920.J JOHN AYSCOUGH, NOVELIST 171
The feature of Ayscough's writing which we most readily
find a name for, though it is withal elusive enough, is his dry,
urbane, British humor. A reviewer of one of his books in The
Month thinks that the "hasty and literal tendency" which Miss
Gibbs discerned in her seven-year-old pupil, suggests a key to
it. Certainly many of those sparkling Ayscoughisms which
tingle our risibles on every page like mild electric shocks,
when the author is writing in his lighter vein, are precisely a
"hasty and literal" interpretation put upon some commonplace
remark or occurrence.
His satire has the pungency and geniality of Mr. Chester-
ton's, though its scope is more limited. It is seldom we miss
the good-humored smile for the foibles he is exposing, and
there are no lapses into Shavian pessimism or Thackerayan
cynicism. That caustic vein, which comes to the surface in
his essays, reveals itself very rarely in his later novels, though
we come across traces of it here and there in the earlier ones.
But it is in scenes of brooding pathos that Ayscough
touches his most stirring chords. Few have known better how
to sound the black recesses of a noble woman's stricken, bleed-
ing heart. Marotz when she learns of Roderigo's double life,
Gillian when she discovers the treachery of Eustachio, Faustula
wandering, a hopeless but defiant prisoner, through the chill
halls and gardens of the Atrium Vestae, Jaqueline, chaining
her proud spirit to the will of a cruel, mad mother whom she
loved, but who hated her even to murder these are pictures
which burn themselves into our imaginations and will linger
there long after the stories are forgotten. Then, too, the whole
pontificate of San Celestino is a wonderful appeal to our com-
passion, and over French Windows hangs a tender, subtle
"mist of tears," a pervading sense of the unspeakable pathos
of it all that here, too, in this wild maelstrom of destruction
sunt lachrimae rerum, et mentes mortalio. tangunt. Yet I dare
not say that our author has a keen appreciation or love of the
dramatic. He frequently mentions as fails accomplis or re-
lates with deliberate suppression of emotion events pregnant
with dramatic possibilities. Rarely is it the action itself
which grips us, but the workings of the soul of the central
actor. In truth, his power lies in situations of thrilling psycho-
logical interest, and not in scenes impressively dramatic.
The casual reader usually pronounces the opening chap-
172 JOHN AYSCOUGH, NOVELIST [May,
ters of Ayscough's novels a bit slow and unpointed, and
grudges the effort required to get a clear grasp on the when
and where of the action. Now and then, too, lengthy passages
of description or character analysis crop up, which only a
sense of duty will prevent him from reading rather perpen-
dicularly. But we still feel justified in saying that the won-
derfully convincing and sympathetic setting of his stories con-
stitutes one of their chiefest charms. The prosiest of us must
own his power of spiriting us away from our dull third-story
walls and rocking-chair into the very heart of the scenes he is
depicting, of making the plains and downs, the villages and
manor houses of rural England, the fairy skies and classic
landscapes of Southern Italy, the rocky coasts of Sicily, the
thick fogs, the icy winds, the naked trees of wintry Flanders
spring up, real and visible, around us. He has the true artist's
eye for beauty and can put upon his canvas "both the loveli-
ness and the significance of it." If I were called upon to ex-
plain to a class in literature the famous formula that "Art is a
bit of nature seen through a temperament," I would not know
where to find a better prose illustration than this passage from
Hurdcott: 1 "Far away the spire of Chalkminster Cathedral
pricked up above the plain, much further away to the north-
west the White Horse seemed to hang in the air. Now and
then a thick cloud of starlings fluttered up, and sank down
again a hundred yards away, as if a handful of titanic black
dust had been flung up from the earth. There was a patch of
ploughed land dotted with the white breasts of plovers whose
bodies were invisible as they sat motionless: perhaps they
knew that the white spots on the dark brown earth looked like
so many flints;" or the description of Hals in Marotz, 2 as "in
the sunset he sat on the broken wall of the Greek theatre, and
looked along to where the lips of Sicily and Calabria all but
meet; looked across the dark iris-blue sea to where the south-
ernmost Apennines wove their incredible mesh of beauty, and
caught his soul in it; looked beneath him at the leaping preci-
pice, that was a steep ladder of beauty at whose summit he
himself was seated."
No appreciation of John Ayscough should close without
a word concerning his healthy, unaffected optimism. It is per-
ennial with him because it has its root in the love and good-
J Page 273. 'Page 7.
1920.] JOHN AYSCOUGH, NOVELIST 173
ness of God. He has that gentle leniency towards sin and folly
in his fellowmen, so peculiar to those who have grown gray in
the care of souls, which knows how to compassionate and for-
give "seventy times seven times," without making us feel there-
by on one whit the easier terms with our own personal failings
and misdeeds. He will not presume to damn a man for any
crime, nor despair of any soil as too hard and dry to bubble
up with sweet wellsprings of good, if delved into deeply
enough. Aunt Zia is simply a ridiculous, sharp-tongued old
miser, till we learn on her deathbed of the cruel secret eating
at her heart and heroically hidden for fifty years from those
around her. Who would have discerned in the early Fergus
of Dromina Castle the timbers of a Christian martyr? Yet we
acknowledge at the end that they were always there. A mir-
acle is performed to prove to her pitiless brothers and towns-
folk that the soul of poor Norah is not, in despite of every-
thing, numbered among the reprobate.
One phase of this kindly optimism is his preference for
happy endings. Both he and Monsignor Benson are full of the
world-old theme that not self-indulgence, but self-forgetfulness
and self-sacrifice are the conditions of true happiness. But
Benson's books seldom leave their leading characters in the
enjoyment of human felicity. He does not stop with disci-
plining them into a manifest disposition to bear crushing tribu-
lation patiently, and even joyously, for love of God. He calls
upon them to do so. Ayscough, on the contrary, is content
with the proved disposition. He knows that God Himself fre-
quently accepts the readiness of His servants to bear their cross
unlightened, in lieu of the actuality. It is his practice to so
manipulate the workings of Providence in his romances that
the hero and heroine, after drinking deep draughts of bitter
waters, are allotted a goodly measure of terrestrial happiness.
And I daresay, being but men, we like him the better for it.
THE BEGGAR-KNIGHT.
BY JAMES J. DALY, S.J.
I AM Our Lady's knight,
Though I have never seen her;
Would that my heart were right,
My mind and fancy keener,
That I might fashion her as she
Was known in far-off Galilee!
A-begging I must wait
Beside the world's broad highways;
I beg at door and gate
And scour obscurest by-ways,
Collecting like a store of pence
Hints of Our Lady's excellence.
All ladies, hear my suit,
Contribute to my treasure
The soft tones of a lute,
Mercy without measure,
The whitenesses of mountain snows,
The fragrance of a June-tide rose.
Sorrow that weaves
The richness of low laughter,
The virgin glance that cleaves
Through time to the Hereafter,
Love that sweeps all flesh aside,
Humbleness that strikes down pride.
And thus I beg a dole
Of every maid and matron,
To help my meagre soul
Image my fair Patron,
Our Lady, once of Galilee,
Now Queen of Heaven's citizenry.
RECONSTRUCTION IN LITHUANIA.
BY THOMAS WALSH,
Commissioner to Lithuania from the National Catholic War Council
of America.
HEN the German Army retired from Kovno, or
Kaunas as the Lithuanians call their ancient city,
now the provisional capital of their new Repub-
lic, they left behind them only the shell of what
was once a prosperous centre of some sixty thou-
sand inhabitants. "When they went," said a prominent citi-
zen, "they took all of Lithuania with them!" So thorough was
their looting of furniture, clothing, food, and live stock. It is
true, the Russians had practised here the direst of their ty-
rannies, forbidding the use of the Lithuanian tongue, and in-
terfering in many ways with the development of trade, educa-
tion and church administration. But towards the era imme-
diately preceding the Great War they had shown themselves
more lenient masters, until, just before his downfall, Tsar
Nicholas had granted the Lithuanians the full measure of their
freedom to use their native tongue. In spite of these conces-
sions there were many Lithuanians who, on the arrival of the
armies of General von Hindenburg, looked for an amelioration
of their native conditions. The realization of the outrages of
the Germans in stripping and destroying the harmless, not-
unfriendly Lithuanian civilization calls for the most profound
reprobation.
But the Lithuanians were accustomed to hardships; they
are a race that thrives and persists in spite of centuries of op-
pression. They are a race whose ruling class has for cen-
turies permitted itself to be estranged through the influences
of Russian and Polish culture, so that a large number of the
historic figures whom we ordinarily consider to be Polish,
prove, on examination, to have been descended from Lithu-
anian ancestors. The traditions of such a race are usually
left as a folk-lore in the mouths of country folk; yet with the
lack of cultivation there persists a primitive quality that is of
peculiar value to the student, and is very often the true poetical
essence that calls forth the admiration of the critic and artist
of later times. The sober judgment of the German philoso-
176 RECONSTRUCTION IN LITHUANIA [May,
pher, Emanuel Kant whom the Lithuanians claim as a fellow-
countryman that Lithuania "must be preserved, for her
tongue possesses the key which opens all the enigmas not only
of philology, but of history," has been taken seriously for
twenty years (1886-1905) by five Lithuanian publishing houses
in the United States. Their work in the preservation of
ancient literature can never be forgotten by the people of Lith-
uania. Nor, on the other hand, can America ever forget the
service rendered in her hour of need by the great Kosciusko
of Lithuania.
Judging from appearances in Lithuania, it would seem to
be the main object of military invaders to destroy the most im-
portant edifices of the towns through which they pass. Every-
where the bombardments resulted in the destruction of the
most solid structures of residence and factory sites, while the
humble dwellings around them were left noticeably intact.
Heaps of bricks and mortar are still standing without roofs or
windows to attest to the industry of Lithuania that has been
destroyed. On the other hand, the small dwellings and barns
are being rapidly repaired from the debris of the more impor-
tant buildings.
In spite of the scarcity of fresh timber there are even new
structures being erected in the country-places. Old materials
and new are being treated in the old fashion, the logs being
sawed lengthways by great saws that are operated on a high
platform, one operator standing above and working against
his fellow who stands underneath. The result is a log house
of a very Russian appearance : squared logs are laid one above
the other, making a solid wall, riveted at the corners in a tidy
manner. There is a small porch and doorway in the middle
flanked by one or two small windows that speak of the severity
of the winter weather, against which these solid homes must
prove a comfortable protection indeed. The same style of
buildings is to be found also in the towns and cities, sometimes
with a second story and ornamented with shutters and carved
cornices.
The sounds of saw and hammers echo over rich fields
and hills and valleys of unusual fertility and beauty. There
are few fences or hedges, but numerous roadside crosses and
rural shrines, for we are in a country that is very devout in its
practices, although the last to relinquish its pagan deities of
1920.] RECONSTRUCTION IN LITHUANIA 177
wood and stream for the religion of the Cross. Here and there
on the pastures are to be seen the herds of cows that are the
remnant of the mighty dairy industries for which Lithuania
has been famous for centuries. The German invaders, in
carrying off the live stock from the country, left a paper re-
ceipt for what they took, and spared one or two of the cows
from each large establishment to provide the necessary ali-
ment for the owner's family. Therefore the butter of Lithu-
ania scarce as it is at present is still the finest in the world.
There has never been known to be richer churning, and it is
to be hoped that these famous dairy-farms will soon be re-
stored to then- former efficiency.
The horses, even now the poor remnant spared to the
natives by the German cavalry, begin to show the fine, sleek
qualities for which Lithuanian stock has always been noted in
Europe. Many of the animals are small, but the vehicles,
droskies and open carts of light, springless construction, are
sturdy and suitable to the native uses.
Driving through the country one remarks large numbers
of boys and girls gathering nuts under the mighty oaks that yet
remain on the hillsides. From the nuts of the acorn they brew
a sort of coffee, bitter but not altogether unpalatable, which is
now the one substitute for coffee. Of tea a passion here as
well as throughout Russia there is nothing left; but the native
housewife has had resort to her herb-gardens, and from the
wild flowers and cultivated blooms she is able to concoct some
very delicious beverages. Thus one encounters all sorts of
flower-teas and tisanes, fragrant and refreshing, with a fresh
odor such as must greet the Chinaman over his own tea freshly
brewed from the growths of his own garden.
As we sat at some choice tables for as foreigners and
especially as Americans we were treated with the finest our
hosts could procure we could not help remarking the freshly
woven linen table cloths and napkins, made of the gray and
golden-toned flax and woven in antique Lithuanian designs.
They are works of a primitive art, long in observance in the
country, and are worth, literally, their weight in gold. They
are too personal and rare to be the objects of barter, and we
could only do reverence to the spirit of the women who wove
them. In several places they also showed us the clothing-stuffs
that are woven around the fireplaces in the Lithuanian kitchens
VOL. CXI. 12
178 RECONSTRUCTION IN LITHUANIA [May,
during the long winter nights; excellent weavings of wool and
flax, dyed in the vegetable dyes procured along the roadsides.
The natural grays and blues of these weavings would delight
the soul of any true artist.
The native tailors have contributed their share in the
restoration of the country. Some of the Lithuanian Commis-
sioners now in this country, are clothed in home-made cloths
made into wearing apparel by cutters whose work compares
favorably with the best that we know. At home they content
themselves for the most part with square-cut garments, the
coats in blouse fashion and the trousers cut straight and roomy,
somewhat in the fashion affected a few years ago in the
Parisian studios. The same industrialism shows itself in the
shoes. The shoemaker has taken good American lasts and
modeled his own tanned leather accordingly. The result is a
good, durable shoe not without style, for the Lithuanian has a
sense of daintiness about his feet that is very noticeable.
The carpenters and cabinetmakers have not been idle, and
examples of their skill begin to appear in beds and tables and
sideboards to take the place of the articles of furniture carried
off by the Germans. These new pieces of household furniture
are quite superior to the ordinary commercial article. They
are constructed in simple, graceful lines and modestly orna-
mented with carved wooden designs that put to shame the
gimcrackery of our wholesale factories.
All this seems to go to show that a people reduced to sup-
plying itself from its own products, is not too hardly off in the
result. An artist and craftsman can but delight in this Lith-
uanian spirit of self -helpfulness, similar to the spirit that must
have prevailed in the old guild days of the thirteenth century,
when all Europe arose and recovered from its period of bar-
barian devastation. Certainly it is a pleasant sight to discover
beds that for years have been without sheets and pillow-covers
now furnished with the new, sturdy linen covers; to see
windows long shattered now with new glass and the curtains
of paper replaced by spotless muslins; to behold the farm
lands beginning to deliver their harvests, in the wake of the
peace and pastoral joys that are spreading over Lithuania.
SOCIAL ASPECTS OF RIGHTS AND OBLIGATIONS.
BY WILLIAM J. KERBY, PH.D.
HE personal pronoun "I," referred to frequently
as ego, possesses a wonderful range of meaning.
Mine, my and me share in this richness since
they indicate relations between me and the world
about me. These words are full of mystery and
wonder because they indicate existence, consciousness, per-
sonality, temperament, experience, capacity and the entire
range of social relations. "I" represents one who thinks, acts
and is responsible, the centre from which mysterious living
influences go out and touch the world at a thousand points.
Influences come from the past and the outer world affecting
my life, my powers, my influence. My property indicates por-
tions singled out from the total mass of wealth in the world
over which portions I have an exclusive, inviolable sanctioned
control. I identify my property with my personality. My
spirit hovers over it and wards off every other human being
from trespass. My reputation indicates the estimate of me in
a thousand or ten thousand minds. My ambitions, my aspira-
tions indicate those features of the dream world that become
law to me and give direction to my life. They indicate the
way in which I am touched by the dreams that inspire the
world and rouse the latent energies of man to glorious action.
My influence represents the sway that I exercise over the lives
of other human beings. Mine, my, me, are wonderful words
full of mystery, rich in suggestion, commonplace beyond de-
scription yet defying adequate explanation.
I.
I am the outcome of the creative act of God. I am an im-
mortal soul, whose faculties of intelligence and will indicate
the God-like power of sharing truth and seeking the good. I
am individualized by my soul, set apart in all the confusion of
the world, intended for a particular destiny in the plans of
God, endowed with particular capacities to be used in the
180 ASPECTS OF RIGHTS AND OBLIGATIONS [May,
service of Him, guided by consciousness and conscience toward
my eternal destiny. And throughout this experience I am the
object of a special providence of Almighty God. The roots
of my dignity, the nature of my personality, the explanation of
every approved relation into which I enter in the world are
fixed by this spiritual element that is I. The standard of every
judgment of me and mine is written down by the Hand of
God. I cannot suspend neither may I forget it or degrade my-
self below this spiritual level fixed by my soul. If I degrade or
ignore it I misunderstand the God Who created me. He
deals with me always as with an immortal soul, intelligent,
responsible and destined to glorify Him. If I ignore the spirit-
ual element within me I shall be wrenched out of harmony
with God's government of the world.
We thus discover the fundamental meaning in the per-
sonal pronoun I. I represents spirit, will, intelligence, the
touch of God by which where nothing was, an everlasting
soul appears, to declare forever His omnipotence.
The soul is hidden in the human body. The body is ma-
terial, visible, perishable. The union of soul and body is
human nature, is life as we see it. Perhaps it were better to
say that the body is made visible by the soul, since the exist-
ence of the former is absolutely conditioned on its union with
the latter. Union of soul and body represents the Will of
God. My body is the envelope of my soul. We know of the
soul by means of its organic expression through the body.
It is the soul that hears. It is the soul that speaks. It is the
soul that thinks. Spirit uses organ. The invisible employs
the visible. The everlasting makes itself known by what is
material and transitory. In this way we find the second, the
material content in human nature. It is spiritual. It is ma-
terial.
God, the Creator, associates the intervention of man with
his own creative act in the development of the race. It is His
Divine Will that we, as individuals, have a social origin in
the family. It is His ordinance expressed in the constitution
of nature that we begin life as helpless infants and attain to
maturity in the midst of complex social relations with others.
Mysteries now multiply upon one another. I am separate from
others, individualized. I am part of others, socialized, in
profound unity with them. I am one in the family group. I
1920.] ASPECTS OF RIGHTS AND OBLIGATIONS 181
am one in a city group. I am one in other social groups.
These group attachments in their mysterious operation seem
to make me almost another being. Sympathy, association,
longing, affection, lead me to diminish myself and expand the
power of others over me. Our Lord told us that the supreme
expression of love for another is to die that that other live.
These groups, whether -essential or accessory, become so thor-
oughly part of me, part of my consciousness, so related to
my interests and dreams, so interwoven into my experience,
so organized into my very aspirations that I find it impossible
to maintain a satisfying distinction in thought, and judgment
between myself and others who are part of me.
At this point we meet the wonderful double process that
is life. On the one hand, the deepest forces within us, touched
by the instinct for self -existence and self-expression, drive me
to maintain myself, to assert myself, to develop my powers
and to attain to sway, or lordship, over things and persons.
This process enhances individuality or separateness. On the
other hand I am drawn irresistibly into the social vortex. He
was right, who said ages ago, "I am part of all whom I have
met." Sentiment, memory, emotion, interest, ambition, ne-
cessity force us with stern power into the social mold, merg-
ing our consciousness with that of others into a social product
that is deeper, wider and more striking than I, myself. By
the law of life we are merged into the lives of others. We
are socialized. We are in a sense diminished, made parts of
larger wholes that we call social groups. We must be made
independent. We must be made dependent. We must act and
live and think as independent persons. We must act and live
and think as dependent persons. The combination of the two
processes which will maintain personality and society in their
intended harmony is the supreme problem of civilization. It
is the final function of religion to assert, protect and develop
individuality, personality, because individuals alone go back to
God. Social groups remain forever glued to earth.
We have found three elements in the meaning of the
personal pronoun I. We find a spiritual element that eternally
individualizes us. We see a material organic sensible ele-
ment called the body, through which we are prepared for
social life. We find finally the social element, that is the
whole range of contacts with other human beings which I
182 ASPECTS OF RIGHTS AND OBLIGATIONS [May,
experience. Therefore, I am spiritual. I am material. I am
social. I, as a Catholic, am conscious of a wonderful range of
social contacts, aspirations and experience. I, as an American,
am conscious of another enriching range of social contacts,
aspirations and experiences. I, as of Irish ancestry, am in-
volved in another wonderful range of social contacts, aspira-
tions and experiences. I, as a member of a University, am
conscious of still another range of social contacts, aspirations
and experiences. Thus I, an individual, become the centre of
a number of concentric social circles. On each of these planes
I gain the double experience of separateness and of associa-
tion, of diminution and of growth, of surrender and of gain.
The spiritual element in me sets the high level toward
which all other elements must be coordinated and subordin-
ated. The soul determines what is desirable and what is un-
desirable, what is good and what is bad, what is helpful and
what is hurtful in the sight of God and man. The supreme
problem of institutions, of moral codes, of scholarship and
statesmanship, of religion, is to understand the law of the soul
and to enforce it, to safeguard spiritual interests and terrace
the sloping sides of the world so that the soul may find easy
and sure ascent to the throne of the Everlasting God. Each
of us is a chapter in the Book of Life, independent and com-
plete, nevertheless a subordinate chapter in the wonderful
Book that reveals the plans of God and unfolds to us the
secrets of His majestic action in the government of the world.
II.
The world has supreme need of a method that will guide
humanity to meet the problem of maintaining the individual
while merging him into the social process. The thought of
the world has done this under the direction of the providence
of God. It is the mission of human rights to maintain the
individual. It is the mission of social obligations or duties to
merge him. Bights are extensions of our personality built
into and through the confusion of the world in order that we
may not be crushed. Social duties indicate the manner of
thought and of action demanded of us in order that social
groups may be strong, helpful and orderly. We gain, we re-
ceive, when we enjoy our rights. They are our social divi-
1920.] ASPECTS OF RIGHTS AND OBLIGATIONS 183
dends. We give, we surrender, when we do our duties. They
are our social taxes. Duty is our measured contribution toward
the social whole, immediately for the welfare of the whole.
Natural rights are defined, not created, by the group for the
immediate sake of ourselves, ultimately for the sake of our
souls. Our rights separate us. Our duties merge us. Justice
individualizes. Charity socializes.
Since rights are extensions of personality they are inviol-
able. They are organized into the foundations of the world.
Their fibre, their content, their sanctions are for the sake of
personality. They are essentially protective. They hinder
others from interfering with us. My right to property identi-
fies my property with my personality. My right to my reputa-
tion identifies my reputation with my personality. My civil
rights, my moral rights to civil liberty, health, to the members
of my body, to the development of my mind are nothing other
than elaborations of my personality, the widening concept of
me. My rights are the ramparts of my soul. The passion for
justice that lights up the pages of the history of the world is a
fundamental expression of the passion of personality, of the
determination of men to live, to grow, to express themselves,
to gain their essential destiny, helped, not hindered, by others.
Not all of the mistakes of the passion for justice scattered
over the history of the world can change its essential and
approved mission. Not all of the volcanic outbreaks of popu-
lar fury and even malicious power of revolution can disturb
in any way the essential social mission of the passion for
justice.
Deep in the heart of the world lies the impulse to expand
personality. The collective and upward and outward pressure
of this impulse is exerted always upon the heavy social insti-
tutions that blundering civilizations have constructed. Not
more impressive in their grandeur nor more determined in
their action are the cosmic forces that have lifted continents
from beneath the waters and have driven the very oceans
themselves from their strongholds, than are the emotional and
intellectual forces that have overturned the structure of civil-
izations in order that room might be made for the larger and
wider personality that demanded freedom in moving about
over broad savannahs of the fair earth. Might not all histor-
ical social philosophies be classified by their concept of human
184 ASPECTS OF RIGHTS AND OBLIGATIONS [May,
personality, of the meaning of I and of the relations among
men? Do not all social institutions reduce in last analysis to
some kind of understanding of the meaning of personality,
the drift of its tendencies, the sway of its passions, the tyranny
of its purposes and the law of all relations among men? Do
not democracy and monarchy differ chiefly in their concepts of
human persons, of the extension of personality through social
rights and in the institutions that define and protect them?
There is, however, equal sanctity, equal moral power in
duty. The dignity of life is in its obligations. My obligations
are echoes of the rights of others or of the rights of groups
of whatsoever kind. Out of the collective sense of duty that
the world has established we draw the material for the very
basis of civilization. The rights of the Church are my obliga-
tions. The rights of the State are my obligations. The prop-
erty rights of others are in equal proportions my obligations.
Since I may invade the personality of others, their rights must
protect them against me. This constraint upon me takes the
form of duty. Since I may endanger the stability, the work,
the moral personality of sanctioned groups, I must be pre-
vented from so doing. Hence groups have rights which con-
strain me, and this constraint upon me takes the form of duty
toward the group. Thus my civil personality is protected by
my rights. The moral personality of sanctioned social groups,
such as the family, Church, State, is protected by their rights
which create my duties. In the spiritual interpretation of
the world which alone is the adequate and true interpretation,
rights and obligations relate to personality. Personality is
directly and exclusively of the soul. The soul is the outcome
of the creative act of God. Rights and obligations rest, there-
fore, in last analysis upon God. God is the God of justice
forever.
III.
Definitions of human rights, with which we are familiar,
are based on varied and converging experiences of man. Since
rights are ordinarily protective they are defined in the face of
some kind of real or imagined danger to personality. Deeper
than the moral sense of the individual lies the moral sense of
mankind. Deeper than the moral judgments of the individual
lie the moral judgments of the world concerning rights and
1920.] ASPECTS OF RIGHTS AND OBLIGATIONS 185
duties among men. As our concepts of human personality will
vary with time, place and relations, variations naturally occur
in definitions. But beneath these accidental differences,
which are often of far-reaching importance, we find the great
plane to which we give the term, the order of nature. All of
the historical States that have arisen have endeavored to ex-
plore, to define, to sanction, natural concepts of personality,
natural rights and obligations. In our own history the Declara-
tion of Independence stands forth as a supreme attempt at an
interpretation of human rights, for the definition and protec-
tion of which the majestic structure of the American nation was
undertaken. The constitution of nature expresses the Will
of God more or less clearly in respect of human rights and
obligations. States arising as the organized sovereign will of
society, incorporate into their institutions and laws certain
concepts of personality, of rights and obligations. States do
not protect all rights. They protect them only as they define
them.
We who have the blessed privilege of belonging to the
Church of God accept our Divine faith as the herald of eternity,
furnishing the law of relation between God and man. Through
faith supernatural revelation is added to natural knowledge
concerning personality, rights and obligations. God super-
imposed the Divine concept of man which clarified and en-
nobled the natural concept and imparted unimaginable dig-
nity to human persons. Out of the Divine Revelation of Our
Blessed Lord we have, therefore, new understanding of human
rights and obligations, added reverence for their sanctity,
added strength in Divine grace to meet the discipline of duty,
sanctions rooted in eternity, which follow our respect for
human rights or violation of them. We accept the Church
as of Divine origin, the organized expression of supernatural
life, the authorized moral teacher of the world in applying
the truths of Revelation to human conduct. But even here this
nobler reading of human relations does not in any way set
aside the social functions of rights and obligations as these
protect the individual against others or as they protect others
against the individual. The natural law compels children to
respect parents. The civil law may compel them to support
parents. The supernatural law demands love, respect, obe-
dience these intimate loyalties of the human heart.
186 ASPECTS OF RIGHTS AND OBLIGATIONS [May,
IV.
We notice then that in the term "I" there are involved spir-
itual, material and social elements. We find ourselves sub-
jected to two processes, one of which emphasizes and saves
individuality; the other emphasizing the process which so-
cializes us, merging us into social communities. We see that
rights are extensions of personality which set forth our funda-
mental understanding of human persons. We find obligations
or duties indicating our contributions toward group life,
toward those social units which are necessary to our existence
and development. We note that there is a spiritual concept
of personality, rights and obligations and as well a civil con-
cept of rights and obligations. A full account of these would
cover the history of the world. Only the most fragmentary
application of these general truths may be undertaken.
Humanity dislikes discipline and loves an easy wayward-
ness of desire and self-assertion. Hence, we find throughout
all history spontaneous insistence upon rights, lingering and
reluctant insistence upon obligations. Humanity drifts to-
ward insistence upon individual ends and away from social
ends. Hence individuals love to assert themselves and to
subject their interpretation of group duties to their own in-
terests or whims. Passionate love of life, liberty, power and
property has always led to general invasion of personal rights
and neglect of larger obligations. Pitiable mistakes of civil
and social authority have made occasions for the masses to
rise to a resistance that has only too often resulted in rebel-
lion and revolution. Pride, covetousness, lust, envy and anger
have throughout all the centuries been social evils because they
are sins. They have led to false conception of personality.
They have promoted selfish ends that have led to grave in-
justice. These have been, on the whole, ugly offspring of
mistaken individualism, mistaken understanding of human
rights, human destiny and dignity: the result of lamentable
failure to understand the balance brought into human life by
.the dignified sense of social and civil obligations. The great
moral task of humanity is to make the sense of duty as keen
and as alert as is the sense of justice; to place behind the
former a noble vehemence that will hold men true to the larger
ideals in which they may find their peace. They who accept
1920.] ASPECTS OF RIGHTS AND OBLIGATIONS 187
the Gospel of Jesus Christ as a declaration of the dignity and
duty of men will come very near to understanding the heart
of Christ as He would wish. If the Saints may be trusted as
our spiritual and social guides; if noble men and noble wom-
en of all time may be followed with unoffending step, this is
the reading of the Gospel that brings understanding.
V.
These thoughts bear directly on certain of the problems
that confront the world today. We have insisted in the history
of our democracy on our rights and exemptions, and we have
slurred civic and social duties to such a degree that moral
and social confusion has everywhere prevailed. If, in the
past, property had been conscious of its obligations and gener-
ous in interpreting them, we could not have experienced the
social cleavage that has reached to the foundations of life. If
industrial power, after gaining lordship over millions of lives,
had been as keen in understanding the social limitations under
which it should have worked, the laboring class had never
been led into conditions that we have known. If the laboring
class itself, in spite of wrongs and long-delayed justice, had
been able to maintain the balanced sense of duty that holds
men true to larger ideals at whatsoever cost, we might have
been spared many sad pages in our history. If those to whose
hands civil authority was intrusted as a sacred charge, had had
the gift of wider vision and sterner consecration to general
welfare, the rights of the weaker classes would have had
earlier definition and far more effective sanction than they
have known. Had this moral and spiritual balance been main-
tained; had the coordinate and spiritual function of social
obligations been rightly estimated and loyally accepted, we
would have been adequately protected against those allure-
ments of futile idealism that are causing so much disturbance
today. And, furthermore, had our citizens been as noble in
fulfilling all of their civil duties as they have been alert in
claiming their rights, we might have been spared much grave
concern. A citizenship that hates taxes and loves dividends
is not fit for democracy. A citizenship that feels no stirring of
moral indignation at social injustice is not fit for democracy.
A citizenship that is indifferent to outstanding types of civic
virtue and trims its vision of duty to fit the demands of par-
188 ASPECTS OF RIGHTS AND OBLIGATIONS [May,
tisanship; seeks lower and not higher types of civic behavior
for imitation, is not fit for democracy.
Democracy is primarily an experience in character. Can
we conceive of noble character without a noble sense of duty,
without a certain tenacious humility that accepts one's minor
place in the plan of the world, does duty promptly and finds
compensation within the heart? If the ideal of democracy is
a maximum of order and justice with a minimum of coercion,
democracy implies that education, religion, home, public
opinion, public leaders, do their full first share in setting up
effective ideals of life, leaving to coercion a minor, but none
the less, honorable role in bringing order to the world. Con-
science, not a jailer, is the symbol of democracy.
On the whole, we have deserved much punishment for
our neglect of social justice. There has been evidence every-
where of a sense of duty so dull as almost to have made us, as
a people, moral defectives. The history of conservative re-
form movements is, in one sense at least, an indictment of our
wisdom. The appeal that radical movements now make to
thousands whom they mislead, is effective because of the tra-
ditions of the bitter social struggle that we carry in our
national memory.
Concurrent testimony of many of our leaders in every
walk of life declares that re-statements of many human rights
must be made in the work of social reconstruction. Of what
will this avail, unless the work of reconstruction re-educate
the world in the understanding of duty and of its place in the
moral balance of the universe. Social reconstruction must
be, of course, to a great extent institutional. But to a greater
extent it must be moral, social and spiritual. New under-
standing of the place of society in the life of the individual is
imperative. No social institution that is founded on rebel-
lious hearts can be stable. Our moral, spiritual, social and
cultural agencies must undertake to purify and strengthen the
general sense of duty; to convince the world of the social, no
less than the spiritual, value of renunciation and sacrifice.
They must uncover to the eyes of men the deeper and purer
charms of duty. All else without this is vain.
This is in last analysis a moral task. It is professedly the
task of the religious forces of the nation. Statesmen as states-
men may not undertake it on account of the spirit of our
1920.] ASPECTS OF RIGHTS AND OBLIGATIONS 189
institutions. The general educational system which the coun-
try accepts undertakes it with hesitation, in only a fragmentary
way and without specific sanction. It is a recognized social
mission of religion to arouse the social sense, to awaken the
impulse and the spirit of service. Thus the challenge is car-
ried to the threshold of the Church. It must teach men to find
their happiness in the intangible compensations of life. The
instincts of men must be controlled. They must be taught to
believe that the pathway to peace leads one away from selfish-
ness and toward the ways of service, trust, sympathy, under-
standing. When our citizenship respects moral and social
obligations with honest conviction and sympathy, we shall
have prepared the nation for those institutions of social recon-
struction for which the world now asks.
If religion has this social mission in the work of personal
welfare, may be not feel reassured since our own dear Church
brings so much of truth in its message, so much of promise in
its resources, so much of strength in its sacramental ministry,
so much of spiritual appeal in its effective words and its his-
torical power. If each of us will but understand the glory
of this present opportunity for us and for the Church, may we
not hope that as a body we shall stand forth our own witnesses
by the Grace of God. The Church must do her honorable part
in standing before a world that is now the unhappy victim of
divided council, and point the way to peace. New under-
standing of social values, keener sense of duty, respect for the
discipline that spiritual and social ends offer to selfishness, are
first steps in any serious social reconstruction. And these
steps lead toward God. How shall we find peace apart from
Him?
ON THE ROAD TO DOMREMY.
BY JAMES LOUIS SMALL.
ITH much shrieking the Strasbourg express pulls
out of the great shed of the Gare de 1'Est and we
are on our way. The train proceeds slowly
through the inner ring of dingy suburbs; then
goes faster and faster between rows of prosperous
villas until we reach the country, basking in the mellow Oc-
tober sunshine.
We flash by one town after another: Meaux, with its
ponderous, square-towered cathedral, associated for all time
with the name of the eloquent Bossuet, who lies buried within
its walls; Chateau Thierry, with war wounds agape; past
roofless farmhouses, whose "strange, sad windows look out
across fresh meadows, now like staring blinded eyes. They
are so still, so deathly still not a single wisp of friendly
smoke, no human color, only a garish patch, perhaps, where
some unremembering bush flaunts its green branch across the
gray."
Late afternoon brings us to Bar-le-Duc, where with deep
regret I exchange the comparative comfort of the express for
the unqualified discomfort of the Neufchateau local. Made up
of weather-beaten coaches of obsolete and nondescript pat-
tern, it resembles nothing so much as a child's train of cars,
assembled from playhouse relics handed down by elder
brothers and sisters. Although there is an hour to spare, the
carriages are filling up rapidly with genial travelers. They
stare, round-eyed, at the American in uniform, with the
strange-looking pack swung over his shoulder, for in true pil-
grim fashion I had brought with me only my haversack, con-
taining the articles that should suffice for my few small needs.
The scenes that enact themselves as the train jerks along
puffily on its three hours' journey to Neufchateau are not
French they are simply human. The gentleman and lady
who share the compartment with me are sedately forty and
anxious to get back to the children, just as Mr. and Mrs. Smith
1920.] ON THE ROAD TO DOMREMY 191
or Jones or McGuire are after a day at the county seat. The
dashing young officer who joins us as we are leaving Bar-le-
Duc, is a friend, homeward bound on furlough. They greet
him effusively, and when he disembarks at a tiny station
down the line he is charged with many messages for his peo-
ple. He is a sturdy peasant type and I fall to wondering if he
has a sweetheart waiting for him. At the next station my mar-
ried friends depart, with much rattling of knobby parcels.
Again there is a family reunion. It is dark now and I am
alone.
By the time we reach Gondrecourt, a name to be remem-
bered, but lightly treasured by the doughboy, the train is al-
most empty. A couple of American soldiers hurrying along
the platform hail me with a jovial, "Hello, Casey!" I bid them
enter and make themselves at home. It seems that they are
with the Graves Registration, and having had an accident en
route to Paris, are on their way back to headquarters to report
the difficulty.
After a time the wheels grind slowly to a stop and the
guard calls the name of a station, which we discover to be
Neufchateau. Although it is only nine o'clock, the little town
is in Stygian darkness. We follow the crowd up the main
street, searching in vain for anything that looks like a hotel.
While we are holding anxious debate a fresh young voice at
my elbow exclaims in perfect English: "Ah, here are some
Americans!" Then, to me: "Is there anything I can do for
you, sir?"
The speaker is a trim-built chap of about eighteen, in the
uniform of a French private. He goes on to explain that
during the War and until recently, he acted as interpreter at
the American hospital just out of Neufchateau. Now the hos-
pital is closed and his friends, the Americans, are gone. He
would be most happy to serve us. Upon hearing of our plight
he conducts us without delay to Neufchateau's leading hos-
telry. A door on the first floor of a tightly-shuttered house
opens to his touch and we find ourselves standing in a quaint,
low-ceilinged room, lighted by swinging oil lamps and fur-
nished with a long table, around which a few elderly French-
men are seated, drinking wine and smoking.
Madame appears and says she has two rooms: one with
two beds, and another, a single room, suitable for Monsieur
192 ON THE ROAD TO DOMREMY [May,
le Secretaire. Our guide bids us a hearty good-night, after
grateful acceptance of a packet of cigarettes, extracted from
my haversack. For six weeks he has smoked nothing but
French cigarettes and he much prefers the others. My sol-
dier-pals are leaving by an early train, so we also say good-
bye. Madame shows me to my room, and deposits the old-
fashioned candlestick on the shiny mahogany table at the head
of the bed.
At seven the next morning I step out into a radiant world
blown across by a stiff breeze that invigorates like new wine.
All about me are friendly, smiling faces, for Americans are
popular in Neufchateau. After a cup of black coffee at the
cafe nearby, I saunter along the narrow, winding Rue St. Jean.
On the corner, near the Hotel de Ville, there is excitement, for
the town-crier is about to give out the morning news. This
functionary is a war veteran, clad in faded blue. He carries
a scrap of paper in one hand, and with the other beats loudly
upon a drum suspended from his neck by a leather strap. At
the first strident rat-a-tat-tat the crowd, mostly old women
and dogs, begins to congregate. When his audience reaches
what he considers respectable proportions, he puts up his
drumstick and reads solemnly from the paper.
A walk of a few paces brings me to the short Rue St.
Christophe, at the head of which stands the ancient church of
the same name. With its battlements and broad-faced towers,
it reminds one of the robust, kindly folk who dwell in its
shadow. I push open the heavy oaken door and enter softly.
Mass is long since finished and I have the church to myself.
The carving, both wood and stone, is curious and palpably of
great age. Tucked away in the corners are tiny chapels where
crimson lamps burn before half-hidden shrines. To what
stirring sermons, one thinks, and to what heartfelt prayers
must not these sober-miened saints and angels have listened
in their time!
I experience no difficulty in finding the way to Domremy;
in fact, an embarassing number of citizens are ready with
directions. It is not over ten kilometres distant (between six
and seven miles) and there is an inn in the village next to
the church if Monsieur wishes to remain overnight. And
so, in high, good humor, I set out.
There is something of eternal unchangeableness about
1920.] ON THE ROAD TO DOMREMY 193
those favored spots of earth that have once sheltered the good
and great. As I take the road pointed out to me by the stout
Alsatian who tends the railway crossing on the edge of the
town, I am no longer in twentieth century France; I am,
rather, a pilgrim on highways that have but yesterday echoed
the heavy tread of Burgundian soldiery; that have witnessed
the tragedy of Agincourt and Neuf chateau in flames; a France
prostrate, inert, broken beneath the heel of the oppressor.
Wars and rumors of wars have penetrated even to the midst
of those quiet hills that lie ahead of me, crowned with the
basilica whose outlines show indistinctly against the russet
of the forest.
Today, as in the days of Jeanne d'Arc, the Chateau Bourle-
mont frowns from the heights on my left. Indeed, its history
is inextricably associated with that of the district. One recalls
that it was L'Arbre Fee de Bourlemont, "the Fairy Tree of
Bourlemont," about which the children of Domremy danced
and sang and upon which they hung their garlands; the tree
that figured in the early life of the Maid and, later on, at the
time of her condemnation, so prominently.
Here in these fruitful fields the present and the past inter-
mingle strangely. A turn in the road brings me suddenly upon
a row of dilapidated barracks, occupied during the War by
some of our American boys. I have scarcely left these behind
when I am back again in the past. There in the meadow by
the roadside is a flock of sheep, and walking in and out
among them the shepherd, staff in hand and dressed in cloak
and pointed hood. In bewildering contrast I hear the familiar
"honk" of a motor horn, and, speeding in my direction from
the village just ahead, there emerges what upon closer inspec-
tion proves to be, of all things, a Ford automobile!
The village is Coussy and very interesting it is. At the
square some black-smoked workmen are watering their horses,
great powerful animals that toss their manes and stamp upon
the turf. They are drinking from a circular trough, in the
centre of which rises a small bronze statue of Jeanne d'Arc.
I take my "Brownie" from my haversack and snap men and
horses before they file away to dinner. I realize that I, too,
am hungry, and so I find my way to the inn on the corner of
the square. The proprietor assents to my request for dejeuner.
The luncheon is an excellent one and the red wine of a sweeter
VOL. CXI. 13
194 ON THE ROAD TO DOMREMY [May,
sort than one is served in Paris; it is more like the wine of
the south, round about Lourdes.
Having finished and paid for my meal I hasten to see the
church. Like St. Christophe at Neufchateau, it is of great age.
The walls and tower are massively built and pierced with small
windows, which gives the whole a fortress-like appearance.
The doorway is low and I am prepared for architectural
treasure as I grope my way inside. So much for my hopes!
The church, sad to say, has been "restored," and not too artis-
tically. One look at the stained glass and I made a rapid
exit.
Instead of taking the main highway to Domremy, I choose
the detour that bears out of Coussy to the left and brings me
to the basilica, whence it descends the hill to the village a mile
beyond. From Coussy to the basilica the road climbs upward
all the way. The fields spread at my feet are suffused with
the golden glow of mid-afternoon. Scores of old men and
women are digging their winter supply of vegetables and,
here and there, a group of cattle or a few sheep make a splotch
of white upon the meadows, emerald green even in autumn.
The peasants straighten for a moment from their toil and
call to me in respectful greeting. I, of course, call back,
and our voices echo and reecho in the still air. I have a cur-
ious sensation of detachment, as if I were part of a
Millet painting, come suddenly to life and stepping out of its
frame.
The basilica above Domremy is small and new, but it
reflects the spirit of the place quite as faithfully as the great
church at Lourdes does that of the grotto beneath. Lourdes
speaks of cures of soul and body; of mighty spiritual forces
that work startlingly near the surface of things. Domremy
breathes of visions, of sweet communings that have left but
a haunting memory upon the peaceful height.
As at Lourdes, the architecture of the basilica on Bourle-
mont is heterogeneous. In spite of this it presents a handsome
appearance and special grace is conferred upon it by the
slender spire. Connected with the church by a cloister is a
modern and well-built presbytery, and on the opposite side of
the road and a little towards Coussy is a large convent of nuns.
My attention focuses upon the two heroic figures that adorn
the front of the basilica. That on the right corner is of the
1920.] ON THE ROAD TO DOMREMY 195
Saint's father, Jacques d'Arc, and the one on the left is of her
mother, Isabel Romee. One is pleased that the world has not
entirely neglected the worthy couple who bestowed upon it
so choice a gift.
A portly priest, a monsignor, if I may judge from the strip
of purple at his throat, is walking up and down saying his
Oflice. As soon as he sees me, he comes forward and offers
to show me the church. He explains, meanwhile, that the
basilica was built on the hill rather than in the village, because
it was here that Jeanne tended her sheep, had her Visions,
and held converse with her Voices. We go first into the crypt,
where Mass is said daily and which does duty as a commem-
orative chapel for those who gave their lives in the War.
Then I am given carte blanche to climb the winding stairs
and make what investigations I please in the nave above.
I do not remain long; partly because there is little to see,
partly because I am anxious to reach Domremy before the
day is farther spent. The interior is still incomplete and there
is not much to attract the visitor, aside from the beautifully
executed gilt carvings of the ceiling and the series of six
panels upon the walls done by Lionel Royer. These last show
the most notable scenes in the life of the Maid, and in the vivid-
ness of their coloring remind one somewhat of Abbey's work
in our own Boston Library.
The day is drawing to a close as I descend the hill. I pass
the Calvaire by the roadside, skirt the marshy border of the
Meuse and find myself in a crooked lane, set on both sides
with aged, tile-roofed houses (they were thatched in Jeanne's
day) that look ready to crumble apart. A buxom, black-eyed
woman is talking with some men at a stable door. "Bon soir,"
I remark in passing. The woman tosses her head and replies
in a loud voice, "Bon soir, Monsieur I'Americain!"
The lane ends abruptly at what looks to be a fair-sized
park encircled by iron paling. At the farther side stands a
stone house which I immediately recognize, from pictures, as
the birthplace of the saint. Just beyond is the parish church
of St. Remy, and in front of the church an open space scarcely
formal enough to be called a square, on the opposite side of
which is a substantial stone bridge spanning the Meuse. A
straggling line of houses, stretching away from St. Remy,
forms the main street of the village. First in the line and
196 ON THE ROAD TO DOMREMY [May,
separated from the church by a narrow lane is the inn, the
Hotel de I'Heroine. Were I unacquainted with rural French
hostelries I should hesitate before spending the night in a place
that, exteriorly at least, smacks so little of comfort. Having
had excellent food and lodging in many a worse looking place,
I give hostages to fortune and enter boldly.
Madame, elderly, neatly garbed and possessed of the
poise which a recent writer assures us is the characteristic
of Frenchmen, Turks and Japanese, but rarely of Americans,
gives me welcome and says my room will be ready for me
immediately after diner. I deposit my haversack on the broad
window seat, where a sleek tabby cat purrs and nods, and
prepare to explore Domremy in the hour left to me before
darkness sets in.
The age of the village church is more apparent than real.
Here, too, there has been "restoration," though happily of finer
order than at Coussy. The stained windows are good and the
general scheme is one of beauty and harmony. In touching
reminder of perils past, there is a notice by the door, dated
in the fall of 1914, but looking as fresh as if it had been
printed but last week, announcing a novena for the deliverance
of the village and its inhabitants from the advancing German
armies. The petitions were heard and the tide of invasion
checked, although Domremy lay too near the front for com-
plete comfort.
Save for the time-stained font and the tablets set in the
wall, identifying various parts of the church with portions of
the original edifice, as, for example, the chapel where Jeanne
prayed, the place at which she received Holy Communion, etc.,
there is little to bring her clearly before one. The same is
true of her birthplace, the Maison de Jeanne d'Arc. It is really
no more than a museum these days, presided over by an
elderly dame, the floodgates of whose eloquence seem per-
manently loosed for the trifling sum of a franc.
I experience, to be sure, a feeling of awe as I reflect that
I am standing within the walls which saw the birth of the
Maid; that before the ample fireplace, on many a winter night,
she crouched with her brothers and sisters listening to the
thrilling tales told by grizzled veterans of the wars; that
across the threshold of yonder doorway she fared forth into
a world that was to treat her with studied cruelty. But these
1920.] ON THE ROAD TO DOMREMY 197
are, for the most part, cogitations of a later hour. I am given
slight opportunity to indulge them now, for the crone is at my
elbow. I am glad to make my escape to the deserted bench
before the inn, where I am free to enjoy the homely sights
and sounds of the day's closing.
Presently the Angelus rings. Its last notes have scarcely
died away before the cattle begin to come in: a long proces-
sion of mild-eyed kine, with bells jangling and breath rising
odorously in the keen air. They are driven by ruddy-cheeked,
strong-limbed girls, who chatter to one another and look
curiously at me as they pass. I am hungry when Madame calls,
and do ample justice to the steaming supper that is served
me where I sit in solitary state in the rear of the inn. No,
I am not quite alone, for the tabby cat comes in and climbs
upon my lap.
At seven the bell in the tower rings again and I remember
that the white-capped Sister, who was sweeping out the church
this afternoon, told me there would be Benediction tonight,
for it is October, the month of the Rosary.
The congregation has assembled when I slip into a chair
near the door. Most of the church lies in shadow, for there
are no electric lights in St. Remy only candles placed in
sconces upon the vaulted walls. Dimly outlined forms of
kneeling worshippers melt into the dusky background, and
up in front tapers glow, starlike, on the marble altar.
The priest comes out with his acolytes, two half-grown
slips of lads. They wear surplices but no cassocks beneath,
and their bare, brown legs contrast oddly with the expanse
of snowy lawn above them. Scattered about the church are a
number of women and children and a few old men. There is
no choir. The congregation signs the hymns, nasally but
with right good will.
After Benediction M. le Cure comes down among his peo-
ple and speaks to them, briefly and intimately, of the Rosary
and its Mysteries and of the Virgin Mother whose sweet,
grave face looks down from the altar-piece of the Lady Chapel
close by.
He is a stockily built man, the Cure, with a firm jaw
and iron gray hair brushed stiffly back from a broad forehead.
I am inclined to think I should get the worst of it if I were
to meet him in a contest of either brains or brawn. Yet I am
198 ON THE ROAD TO DOMREMY [May,
sure that underneath the strength lies tenderness. Even the
most careless and the most casual must be impressed by these
French priests with their fidelity to ideals and their devotion
to a cause. The sacrifices made by scores, nay hundreds, of
obscure Cures go to make up a chronicle that the angels can
but love to read and, in the reading, smile. Le Querdec caught
something of it, and passed it on to us in his Letters of a
Country Vicar, but, human as that is, it yet falls short of
reality.
Upon my return to the Hotel de I'Heroine, Madame lights
me to my room. I fling wide the shutters and look out over
the village, bathed in the light of a harvest moon. Except for
the occasional stirring of some night bird in wood or meadow
all is wrapped in silence. A veil of filmy mist rests upon the
Meuse, and beyond it the highway stretches, ribbon-like, down
the avenue of trees.
In the corner of my chamber the curtained bed invites to
rest. All my life I have wished to sleep in a canopied bed.
I blow out my candle, perform successfully the feat of mount-
ing the heavy frame, and slip contentedly between fragrant
sheets. My dreams are of marching soldiers; of loud alarms;
of armor-clad, clanging hosts, led by a slender, erect form on
a coal black charger, urged forward by thunderings and
Visions and Voices from on high.
Long before daybreak the market carts are creaking past
my window. These, mingled with familiar barnyard sounds
the rattle of milk pails, crowing of roosters and clucking of
hens serve as accompaniments to a confused wakening from
slumber. By the time I finish dressing dawn has broken over
Domremy, leaden and threatening rain. The little church
is quite dark, except for the flickering altar tapers, as I hear
Mass for the last time in France.
During breakfast Madame grows communicative. She
has spied the plain gold band upon the third finger of my left
hand, and naive curiosity struggles quite obviously with native
politeness. Curiosity ultimately triumphs and Madame wishes
to know if I am married, and if so how many "petits garcons"
are mine. Her kindly face registers disappointment, not to
say disapproval, when I assure her that the ring is a family
heirloom and in no way connotes matrimony. Moreover, her
manner indicates quite plainly a suspicion of strangers over
1920.] JESUS 199
thirty-five who travel about with counterfeit credentials of
respectability.
Nine o'clock strikes. I shoulder my haversack, wish Ma-
dame "Bon jour," and cross the stone bridge that spans the
Meuse.
I turn for a last look at the roofs of Domremy where it
nestles in the peaceful valley. Possibly, quite probably, I
shall never again see it in this life. I think of the Blessed
Maid who thus said farewell to it five hundred years ago.
Never more should she see the smoke from its happy firesides
rise upward to the sky. Never more would the church bell
call to her, or the branches of the Fairy Tree on Bourlemont
wave in friendly greeting. My eyes fill with tears and I face
about and take up my journey to Neufchateau. Like Jeanne
d'Arc, I go forth into a world of conflict.
JESUS.
BY EDWARD ROBERTS MOORE.
THE spring is here,
Yet bloomed for me nor rose nor eglantine,
Wert Thou not near.
The skies are fair,
Yet in my soul the sun could never shine,
Wert Thou not there.
Aye, though the thrush and skylark joyous sing,
And back the great blood-breasted robins wing,
And Maytime breezes Maytime fragrance bring,
Winter shall ever shroud the heart
From Thee apart.
THE BENEDICTINE LIFE.
BY W. E. CAMPBELL.
OME people may be tempted to turn aside from
Abbot Butler's important volume on Benedictine
Monachism, 1 believing it to be a monument of
extensive and peculiar learning. It is learned,
but in a simple and straightforward way; it is ex-
tensive, for it covers, or rather uncovers, the monastic founda-
tions of Western Christendom during fourteen hundred years;
but it is not peculiar; it is Benedictine, and therefore it dis-
criminates against everything that is unreal, unhealthy or un-
sound in the spiritual life. In truth, it is an honest historical
record of the Benedictine attempt to realize amid earthly con-
ditions that Christian ideal set forth by Our Lord Himself.
St. Benedict was born at Nursia not far from Spoleto
in the province of Umbria about the year 480 and died about
544. Coming of a well-to-do country family, he was sent to
complete his education in Rome. But the licentiousness of the
place, and perhaps of the students among whom he lived, led
him to leave it secretly, "despising," as St. Gregory tells us,
"the pursuit of letters, abandoning his father's home and prop-
erty, and desiring to please God alone." He then betook him-
self to the lonely district of Subiaco; and finding a cave in
which he could dwell, gave himself up to the eremitical life.
Like many young men both before him and after, in the
first fervor of his turning to God, he took the line of extreme
isolation and austerity. And there was much in the nature
of the times to give him countenance in so doing. Italy (and
most of Romanized Europe) was in a state of "disorganization
and confusion almost without parallel in history." It was
over-run by barbarian invaders, corrupted by the viciousness
of a dying paganism, and given up for the most part to the
Arian heresy. Finally, there was the example of countless
spiritual men who had betaken themselves to the strictest
monasticism as a refuge from moral disaster. The most
1 Benedictine Monachtsm. By the Right Rev. Cuthbert Butler, Abbot of Downside
Abbey. New York: Longmans, Green & Co. ?G.50 net.
1920.] THE BENEDICTINE LIFE 201
prominent of these was the great St. Antony, 2 and also, living in
the Nitrian deserts of Egypt, there were thousands of monks,
gathered from all parts, who, while they could not equal St.
Antony in his solitude, want far beyond him in their astonish-
ing feats of individual asceticism.
For three years, then, Benedict lived his life of severity
and solitude in the cave of Subiaco. But at the end of that
time the fame and attractiveness of his personality led many
people to put themselves under his spiritual guidance. Here
he continued until certain troubles brought on by the jealousy
of a local priest induced him to leave the district, and go with
a chosen band of monks to Monte Cassino.
He reached Monte Cassino in 525, being then about forty-
five years of age. Here he lived for the remaining twenty
years of his life; and here he wrote his famous Rule.
When we remember the youthful Benedict of twenty or
so dwelling (like the Forerunner of Our Lord) alone with
rigorous severity in his cave at Subiaco, and compare him with
the St. Benedict of about fifty who wrote the Rule, we become
aware that his idea of what was essential to a true monasticism
has undergone considerable change in that lengthy interval
of thirty years. And yet (as Dom Butler shows us so clearly)
this change of mind on the part of St. Benedict was the gradual
outcome of his own growth in spiritual wisdom, in knowledge
of monastic history and in experience of human nature.
Furthermore, as the Rule is the final and authoritative ex-
pression of St. Benedict's mind on the whole matter of mon-
achism, it must be taken as the form of all subsequent Bene-
dictine development. It will be well therefore to notice its
main characteristics.
That the Rule would reflect St. Benedict's own mature
character is a thing to be expected, and that it does so we know
from St. Gregory. A comparison of the two records, the one
given us by the Rule, which is mainly a record of ideas, and
the other given us by St. Gregory, which is a record of bio-
graphical facts, leads to the conclusion that in the long period
of years which passed between early youth and later manhood,
the spirit of Christ Himself gradually took possession of St.
Benedict's soul and in the end possessed it to the uttermost:
it enlightened his mind, enlarged his heart and gave to his
Page 305.
202 THE BENEDICTINE LIFE [May,
character a full endowment of Christian graces a holy fear,
a deep humility, high courage, wide tolerance, unending pa-
tience and great magnanimity; a very human tenderness, a
quiet gravity, a sound moderation and, crowning all, an im-
perturbable faith. "His Rule," writes Abbot Butler, "begins
with Christ and ends on Him. . . This is the sum of St. Bene-
dict's teaching on the Spiritual Life." 3
An important thing to be noticed about the Rule is that it
is a rule it prescribes a way of Christian living which may
be freely chosen or freely refused, but if chosen must be
obeyed, "that through this labor of obedience the soul may re-
turn to God." Men leave God by the easy way of disobedience;
they can only return to Him by the difficult way of obedience.
And the nature of this obedience is a simple following of the
Rule as interpreted by the Abbot "as if the command came
from God." It will be "an obedience acceptable to God and
sweet to man if what is commanded be done not hastily nor
half-heartedly, but with zest; not with a murmur nor with a
grudging assent;" an obedience that should be interior as well
as exterior, for "if the disciple murmur not merely with the
mouth, but even in his heart, although he fulfill the command,
it will not be acceptable to God:" and an obedience even to
impossible commands; for "if they are enjoined the monk
shall receive them quietly; and if he sees that they altogether
exceed his powers he may patiently and opportunely explain
the reason of his inability, but without resisting or contradict-
ing. If after this the superior persists in the command, the
subject is to do his best to try to carry it out, trusting to God's
help, and he is to know that so it is best for him."
And lastly, St. Benedict describes the relations of the
monks to each other as "a path of obedience by which they will
go to God." Such an obedience as this persevered in until it
becomes almost a second nature, "provides the principal ascet-
ical element in the Benedictine life." For so practised it is
the "outward expression of true humbleness of heart and the
renunciation of self-will."
This leads us to the consideration of stability, the central
determining quality of the Benedictine life as laid down in
the Rule. To choose a life-work wholly worth while, and to
go on with it in the same place, in the same way, with the
3 Benedictine Monachism, p. 57.
1920.] THE BENEDICTINE LIFE 203
same people, until death brings it to completion, is a difficult
thing to do. And when it is done (as it has been done by in-
numerable men and women throughout the Benedictine cen-
turies) without any noise or ostentation, with dignity, with
gentleness and gayety, with sweetness, serenity and strength,
who shall estimate its spiritual value or its social fruitfulness
upon the earth?
St. Benedict was a man with a big mind and a big heart
his mind being as full of sound common sense as his heart was
full of human tenderness. He wished his monastic houses to
be real homes, where the abbot was a father in his calm and
equable rule, where the monks were real sons in their generous
obedience to their abbot, and real brothers in their unselfish
relations with each other. As St. Benedict conceived it, home-
liness was to be the native air of every Benedictine house;
there was to be no admixture of stuffy professionalism, noth-
ing sanctimonious or merely official.
But while ordinarily homeliness is the product of paternal
goodness and of family obedience rooted in family stability,
Benedictine homeliness is something more. Its real home is
in heaven. Nostra conversatio est in cselis, our conversation
is in heaven, is a Pauline phrase which gives us the Benedictine
idea of private prayer and public worship. There is another
phrase used in the same Epistle which conveys the active,
practical, social side of the Benedictine life : Digne Evangelio
Christi conversamini let your conversation (your everyday
behavior) be worthy of the Gospel of Christ. And these two
ideas are unified by the Benedictine vow that still remains to
be noticed Conversatio morum, the solemn promise of true
Christian behavior both towards God and man. And it is of
more than scholarly interest that the word conversatio has been
shown by Abbot Butler to have been the original one used by
St. Benedict when he drew up the Rule Conversatio morum
and not conversio morum, as the later variant has it.
Benedictine behavior, then, is inspired from above by
the Father of all men, and just in so far as this is so, does its
homeliness descend like gentle dew upon the earth. And per-
haps this same word homeliness gives a clue to the mind of
St. Benedict upon most Benedictine matters.
When does a home cease to become a home and become
something else? Such a question may very well have oc-
204 THE BENEDICTINE LIFE [May,
curred to St. Benedict as he was thinking out his Rule. And
the answer to it may be read even now in the pages of the Rule
itself. As far as can be judged from Abbot Butler's book, it
was St. Benedict's wish that his monasteries should always be
homes and never become anything else however grand, glor-
ious or efficient. Homes cannot pass a certain point in size,
numbers, wealth, extent and jurisdiction without becoming
institutions. But is not an institution a thing from which the
true family spirit has departed? By wishing that every one of
his houses should be a home, St. Benedict evidently thought
to avoid the extremes of individualism on the one hand, and
of institutionalism on the other. His abbot was to be a spir-
itual father keeping home for a spiritual family; but no ab-
bot, however good, can keep home for a multitude, much less
a scattered multitude. He may, however, do something differ-
ent and something very good of its kind. As Abbot Butler re-
marks, the feudal abbot was really great; but he was not and
could not be St. Benedict's abbot.
And now we come to St. Benedict's idea of asceticism. An
ascetic has been defined (by Dr. Johnson) as one wholly em-
ployed in exercises of devotion and mortification. It is re-
markable, therefore, that the words mortificare and mortift-
catio are not to be found in the Rule at all. St. Benedict knew
what extreme asceticism was from his own three years' expe-
rience of it in the cave at Subiaco; but having experienced it,
he did not recommend it in later life either by precept or ex-
ample. His asceticism differed a good deal from that of many
of his monastic predecessors; it neglected much that they
thought important; but for all that it was thoroughgoing to
the point of austerity it was of the inward rather than of
the outward man, and it was concerned primarily with the
growth, order, unity and simplification of the personal powers
of the soul; this indeed was a difficult and lifelong task, but
its gradual achievement enabled the soul to rest in its proper
Object (which was God), and at the same time to keep the
body in reasonable subjection. St. Benedict once met a hermit
who had chained himself to a rock and spoke to him as fol-
lows: "If thou be God's servant," he said, "let the chain of
Christ and not any other chain hold thee."
Personal devotion to Our Lord was, in fact, the motive
power of all his life. He had also the habit of seeing him by
1920.] THE BENEDICTINE LIFE 205
faith in everyone he came across. And this habit he im-
pressed upon his monks; for he knew it to be a means of true
recollection amid worldly intercourse, and the secret of the
most delicate and genuine courtesy possible between man and
man.
The Benedictine life may be described as one of devoted
work for God and for the likeness of God in man. And St.
Benedict lays great stress upon work. Idleness is the enemy
of the soul and only work hard, quiet, persistent work will
put that enemy to flight. Work is the way to every kind of
achievement and the safeguard of whatsoever has been
achieved. A stranger came one day and asked to be admitted
to the monastery. St. Benedict gave him a bill-hook and told
him to clear away some briers as a first step towards making
a garden. "Ecce labora!" he said, "Go and work!"
Three principal traditions of work were established by St.
Benedict and laid down in the Rule the tradition of bodily
labor, the tradition of learning and education, and the tradi-
tion of prayer.
The idea was common in St. Benedict's time that bodily
labor was degrading to an honorable man. It was the sort of
thing that only slaves should do. Unfortunately, the idea is
still common but it is utterly unchristian for all that. Ac-
cording to St. Benedict's scheme of the monastic life, bodily
labor took up more time daily than either study or church
services, and was done either in the fields or garden or about
the house. But the amount of time spent upon it varied very
much according to circumstances as St. Benedict evidently
foresaw that it would; for he writes in the Rule that "if the
needs of the place, or the poverty of the monks, oblige them,
they should themselves labor at gathering in the crops and
not be saddened thereat; because they are truly monks when
they live by the labor of their hands as did our fathers and the
Apostles."
It was by this "labor of the hands," as well as by that of the
mind and spirit, that the Benedictines renewed the arts of
industry and peace in those parts of Europe which for the time
had been given over to barbarism. And then they set out in
the same quiet and practical way to convert a northernmost
Europe that as yet had hardly been Christianized at all. In
England, Germany, Holland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Bo-
206 THE BENEDICTINE LIFE [May,
hernia and even in Slavdom "by the mere fact of settling
among a people and exhibiting to them the excellence and
beauty of the Christian life, the Benedictines won them in-
sensibly to adopt the Christian creed." And Augustine, Wil-
frid, Willibrod, Wulfram, Boniface, Ansgar, Sigfrid, Boso,
Vicelin and Adalbert were the monks who led this splendid
apostolate. A summary of what it effected in Saxon England
may give some idea of its effectiveness in other countries.
When the Benedictines came to England they found an
Anglo-Saxon race, which, during the hundred and fifty years
of its occupation, had made no progress whatever. The monks
taught the English a life of cooperation and free labor, a life
of obedience, order, regularity and economy, a life which
was nothing else than an unconscious imitation of Benedictin-
ism itself: how to farm and drain the land, how to regulate
their domestic and political affairs, how to practise punctual-
ity and dispatch. They impressed upon our rough and hardy
ancestors a gentler manner and breeding, new duties of re-
spect to themselves and others. They taught them the mean-
ing of justice and charity. The discipline of life as set forth
by the monks "reached from the highest to the lowliest duties
of man, as if all were bound together in one indestructible
union. It allowed no fervor of devotion to be pleaded as an
excuse for neglect, or waste, or untidiness; no urgency of
labor as a set-off for want of punctuality; no genius or skill
or rank as an exemption from the tribute of respect, considera-
tion and kindliness due to others. The broken fragments of
their frugal meal were as carefully gathered up to be given
to the poor, their clothes washed, mended, and put away,
their kitchen utensils and linen, their spades and implements
of husbandry kept in as trim order and ready for use, as if
their spiritual advancement depended upon these things (as
in fact it did). . . . These societies of well-bred and educated
men took their turn at the trowel or the dungcart, and were
deft and skillful in the kitchen, the brew-house, and the bake-
house, in the workshop and in the field, as they were in il-
luminating manuscripts, in choral music, in staining a glass
window or erecting a campanile. Talk, indeed, of an aristoc-
racy of labor! Why the very notion of such a thing was in-
conceivable to the old world, as it would have been to us, but
for the disciples of St. Benedict." 4
Giraldl Cambrensii Opera, vol. iv., edited by J. S. Brewer, M.A., pp. 323-25.
1920.] THE BENEDICTINE LIFE 207
It is not surprising that another non-Catholic historian
should assert that "the chief claim of the monks to our grati-
tude lies in this, that they helped to diffuse a better apprecia-
tion of the duty and dignity of labor." 5 But it is surprising that
while so many of our learned or leisured people belaud the
duty and dignity of labor, so few of them can make with their
own hands any single thing of beauty or usefulness. At any
rate they might go so far as to insist that their children should
be taught some manual skill either at home, at school, or at
the universities. Our schoolmasters (a timid race) might then
be encouraged to go back to St. Benedict's sound notions on
the importance of bodily labor, and take some practical steps
to carry them out and all this without any detriment to
games which should always have a place (but hardly the first
place) in the order of educational importance. If this were
done there would be a great renewal of social sympathies, a
great bridging over of social chasms.
In matters of learning and education the value of Bene-
dictine work is admitted. In St. Benedict's rule a certain time
daily was prescribed for reading of a kind that was almost
entirely devotional. It was limited to the Scriptures, to the
writings of the Fathers in general and those of St. Basil and
Cassian in particular. Out of this arose, as time went on and
circumstances gave occasion, other educational and learned
undertakings, upon which Abbot Butler has an interesting
chapter, until at last we come to that specialized, historical and
textual scholarship which owes its spacious foundations to the
corporate labors of the Benedictines of St. Maur.
The Venerable Bede (673-735) stands out as the first
Benedictine historian and critical scholar, "who always took
delight in learning, teaching and writing amid the observance
of regular discipline and the daily care of singing in the
Church."
St. Dunstan (924-988), who was educated by the monks of
Glastonbury, becoming their abbot and finally Archbishop of
Canterbury, was a less specialized scholar than St. Bede. He
is representative of a splendid Benedictine type that still
endures. Full indeed of the book learning of his time, he was
also skilled in "handicrafts, masonry, carpentry, smith-work,
metal-casting, could draw, paint and design beautifully, was
An Essay on Western Civilization, by W. Cunningham, D.D., vol. Ii., p. 35.
208 THE BENEDICTINE LIFE [May,
an excellent musician, playing, singing and composing well,
and being especially fond of the old English songs and lays,
which (St. Aldhelm and) King Alfred had delighted in." He
also guided the policy of King Edgar, who was called the
Peaceable and was the first acknowledged ruler of a united
England.
Aldhelm, Benedict Biscop, Lanfranc and Anselm are other
Benedictine names that savor of the same sound but inspired
learning, combined with the same radiant social beneficence.
In a short space it is impossible to convey the fact and
effect of the Benedictine life as lived throughout Western
Europe between 650 and 1100 a period which Abbot Butler
has called par excellence the Benedictine centuries. Through-
out its duration the Benedictines undoubtedly and substan-
tially fulfilled the intentions of their Founder. They glorified
God by public worship and private contemplation; they cher-
ished His likeness among men by an example that was whole-
some, practical and inspired; they rescued and multiplied
the treasures of ancient and patristic learning and by a crafts-
manship, magnificent in scope and beautiful in detail and
color, they touched with divine perfection whatever their
hands found to do.
Work without inspiration is valueless, for it destroys true
manhood. To work like a slave is to become a slave, whereas
toil of body or brain, hard though it may be, grows sweet and
dignified in the light of some noble end. Idle dreams are use-
less, but so are deeds without inspiration. Benedictine inspira-
tion is from above donum perfectum desursum est, de-
scendens a Poire laminum. And it comes through prayer.
Prayer is the principal work of the Benedictine life. The
Church has always insisted that prayer is work; that it is a
necessary activity of the soul, and that therefore it should be
a deliberate and regular activity. Consequently, it needs guid-
ance on the part of superiors, who are themselves men of
prayer, and can discern the working of the Holy Spirit with-
out disturbing it in any individual soul. It also needs serious
self-discipline, of the honest interior sort, on the part of each
individual monk. "We may not look," said Blessed Thomas
More, "at our pleasure to go to heaven in feather beds. It is
not the way." For every spiritual wayfarer there are places
and times of genuine refreshment and relaxation; but these
1920.] THE BENEDICTINE LIFE 209
are by the way; they are a necessary spiritual offset to other
times of hardship and difficulty. In prayer as in every other
serious occupation, men have to do honest work before a real
foothold is gained, much less a livelihood of increasing excel-
lence.
Prayer, like every other kind of effort, has its end; but,
unlike any other kind of effort, its end is unique it is the
union of the soul with God. Prayer is a graduated thing of
different degrees and stages, but in each of these the soul
becomes more and more as God wishes it to be; it gives and
loses and gets and gives itself again; it gives itself to God,
it loses its own selfishness, it receives of God's goodness in
return, and again gives this to others without any spiritual
loss. And so, quietly, surely and persistently, now in one way
and now in another, in darkness, in grayness or in light, in
yearning or in hardship, in refreshment or in ease, the soul
goes on to God, until God, Who is ever becoming more at-
tractive to it, becomes in the end, the one and only Object
of its life.
There are people who think that somehow or other the
life of prayer must be a selfish life. But whatever it is, it can
hardly be that. A man who does not pray has one tingling
centre of personal reality and that is himself. He may speak
about God and argue about God and even dream about God,
but for all that he is more real and personal to himself than
God is to him. With the man of prayer exactly the opposite
is the case. He has two centres of personal reality, himself
and God, and of the two God is the more real. God is more
intimately real and personally present to the man of prayer
than he is personally real and present to himself. If there
is one true thing that can be said of men who make prayer
their lifelong and determining activity, it is that they are un-
selfish. They are men becoming more and more emptied of
selfishness and more and more filled with the goodness of
God. They are ready, therefore, as none else are ready, to do
good work for the world, and that they have done it in the
past is evident from the Benedictine history.
Prayer, then, is a social as well as an individual activity,
and so it has a public as well as a private way of expressing
itself. At one time the monk takes part with all his brethren
in the Community High Mass or in the recital of the Divine
VOL. CXI. 14
210 THE BENEDICTINE LIFE [May,
Office; and at another he engages in private prayer or con-
templation; but in each of these actions he is informed by
one and the same spirit of prayer. This is brought out very
clearly by Abbot Butler in three chapters entitled respectively,
"St. Benedict's Teaching on Prayer," "Benedictine Mysticism,"
and "Benedictine Contemplative Life."
"It is sometimes asked," writes the Abbot, "which is the
principal and best kind of prayer for Benedictines, the public
prayer of the Liturgy, or private interior prayer? The answer
is simple: each in its turn is best. Each kind of prayer
answers to one of the two great instinctive tendencies of the
human heart, the social and the individualistic. Man is a so-
cial animal, and it is a fact that he does many things best in
company . . . and so in every religion recourse is had to
social worship of God and common prayer, with their accom-
paniments of music and singing and ritual, as helps to the
evoking of religious feeling and action. And the Catholic
Church, true to that instinct which makes her take men as
God made them, and which has been one of her principal
sources of strength through the ages, appeals to men's souls
through their senses and through the contagion of numbers,
and so has made her public worship of God a solemn and
stately social act of her children; like the glimpse vouchsafed
in the Apocalypse of the worship of God by the saints in
heaven where it is represented under the symbol of a grand
act of solemn liturgical social worship.
"But there is that other instinctive way in the worship
of God, expressed by Our Lord when He said: 'Thou when
thou prayest, enter into thine inner chamber, and having shut
thy door, pray to thy Father, Who is in secret.' This is that
instinct that makes us seek God in our hearts and in our
souls; introversion it is called, for the kingdom of God is
within us. This is the solitary communing of the soul with
God, spirit with Spirit, in interior prayer.
"Both these kinds of prayer are Scriptural: the Gospels
show us Jesus Christ exercising both. Both are set before us
by St. Benedict by word and example. And Benedictine
monks, like others, must do their best to travel along both
these great roadways of the soul to God. Nor is there any
antagonism between them : they will mutually help each
other. The more we are penetrated with the spirit of the
1920.J THE BENEDICTINE LIFE 211
Liturgy, the better able shall we be to reach the heights of
interior prayer; and the more sedulously we cultivate mental
prayer the more spiritual and contemplative will our recita-
tion of the (Divine) Office become.
"For it must be remembered that contemplation is not
attached to interior mental prayer only; its heights may be
attained also, and often are, in vocal prayer, whether the
Office or some other."
But Benedictines are counseled by the Abbot ever to bear
in mind St. Benedict's words: "Let nothing be placed before
the work of God," the Opus Dei by which St. Benedict always
means the Divine Office.
Monks who recite the Office with becoming devotion will
experience the truth expressed by Dame Gertrude More, an
English Benedictine nun and mystic : "The Divine Office is such
a heavenly thing that in it we find whatsoever we can desire:
for sometimes in it we address ourselves to Thee for help
and pardon for our sins, and sometimes Thou speakest to us,
so that it pierceth and woundeth with desire of Thee the very
bottom of our souls; and sometimes Thou teachest a soul to
understand in it more of the knowledge of Thee and of herself
than ever could have been by all the teaching in the world
showed to a soul in five hundred years; for Thy words are
works." 7
An attempt has been made to summarize the general char-
acteristics of the monastic life as Abbot Butler has given them
to us, and as he believes St. Benedict himself to have con-
ceived them. How the Founder's intentions were carried out
through the ages, how they were developed, and how on oc-
casion they deviated in their development, the reader may
gather for himself by a perusal of the Abbot's book. The fact
remains that after fourteen centuries the Benedictine life in-
creases its quiet activity in a still unquiet world.
Benedictine Monachism, pp. 69, 70.
* The Inner Life and Writings of Dame Gertrude More. Revised and edited by
Dom Weld-Blundell. Vol. 1., p. 58.
THE NATIONAL RELIGION OF JAPAN.
BY JOSEPH FRERI, D.D.,
Director, Society for the Propagation of the Faith.
II.
RELIGIOUS DUTIES OF THE MIKADO.
S each successive Mikado is but a link in the "di-
vine" family line, he is not only the living god of
Japan, but also the supreme pontiff in the cult of
his divine ancestors, so that the performance of
religious ceremonies takes up a good deal of his
time. From early ages the celebration of rites in honor of the
gods was considered to be the chief function of the Mikados,
and it is more than ever so now.
There are three sanctuaries or shrines in the precincts of
the imperial palace: one, dedicated to the spirits of defunct
Emperors from Jimmu downward; the second, to the divine
ancestress, the sun-goddess and other deities of her family,
while the third contains a facsimile of the regalia of Japan, and
its name may be translated, "Awe-Inspiring Place."
These regalia consist of three sacred emblems : the copper
mirror, the steel sword and the precious stones, symbolizing
respectively knowledge, courage and mercy. The original mir-
ror, said to be kept in the famous temple of the sun-goddess
at Ise, and which perhaps for centuries no living person has
ever seen, is the palladium of Japan, the most sacred and pre-
cious thing in the whole Empire. Shintoists of today tell us
that the sun-goddess is embodied or rather "transubstantiated"
in it; therefore it is more than a symbol. Almost the same
dignity is accorded to the replica preserved in the palace of
Tokyo. The original sword has found its abode at the temple
of Atsuta, near the large city of Nagoya. The three crescent-
shaped jewels, one red, one white, and one blue, remain near
the Emperor in the palace shrine.
These regalia, having been bestowed by the sun-goddess
on her grandson when she sent him down from heaven to rule
Japan, were thenceforth transmitted from generation to gener-
1920.] THE NATIONAL RELIGION OF JAPAN 213
ation of the Mikados. Without them the Empire would hardly
be conceivable to the Japanese people, for the whole tradition
of the imperial people is bound up in them; their possession
bestows sovereignty by divine right, and the instinct of the
people is to acknowledge no man as Emperor unless he possess
the regal symbols. Hence their supreme importance.
Shortly after the restoration of 1868 a new set of thirteen
festivals celebrating imperial official events was established;
these are national holidays, compulsory for all public offices,
schools, banks, etc. But the religious calendar of the palace is
still more burdened with anniversaries, purifying ceremonies
and so on. The rites are mostly performed in the sanctuary
of imperial ancestors, with offerings of rice, food and rice-beer,
prayers and sacred music. A board of ritualists and special
musicians are in charge of the ceremonies under the direction
of a court noble as Grand Master of Rites, but the Emperor
presides in person and reads a prayer. The morning ceremony
is often repeated at four P. M., sometimes with a sacred dance,
and in the interval those high officials and exalted personages
who did not attend the rites, are "admitted" to worship before
the shrine. On these occasions the Emperor and ritualists are
robed in the ceremonial garb of the eleventh century, while the
music flutes and fifes, and sometimes a small drum is the
legacy of an epoch anterior to the ninth century.
Still more peculiar are the ceremonies of the last day of the
year, a grand purification lasting for five or six hours, those of
January 1st, beginning at half past five in the morning, and of
the harvest festival, November 23d, repeated twice over the
same night from 6 to 8 P. M., and from 1 to 3 A. M.; after the
Emperor has again offered to his divine ancestors the newly-
harvested rice and some rice-beer sent to the court from every
prefecture, he himself partakes of the new rice of the year.
This latter rite, by the way, is an essential part of what we
improperly call the coronation of a Mikado (as the Mikado has
no crown at all), and must therefore always take place in No-
vember. At the so-called coronation the Emperor formally
takes possession of the three regalia in announcing his acces-
sion to his divine ancestors; he then proclaims his accession
to his faithful subjects, represented by a plenary meeting of all
princes, nobles, higher officials and members of the Diet, and,
finally, after one day of silent preparation and purification
214 THE NATIONAL RELIGION OF JAPAN [May,
during which the whole Empire must also observe silence, he
passes the night in a specially built rustic shrine, attended by
only one young female, in the mysterious company of his
ancestors, offering to them rice and various viands and par-
himself of the banquet.
Obviously the characteristic of this cult is that it considers
the divine and imperial ancestors as beings who still form the
actual family of the Mikado and are really living in our midst,
so that the duties of filial piety must never be neglected. A
large staff of chamberlains and ritualists, to say nothing of
princes of the blood, are constantly going and coming from the
capitol to various Shinto temples and tombs of former sove-
reigns either to report important events to the gods and im-
perial ancestors or to represent the Mikado at ritual cere-
monies. For all these religious performances are duplicated,
one being held in the palace shrines and the other at the par-
ticular temple or grave of the ancestor concerned. The
Mikado sends special envoys to apprize the sun-goddess and
his nearer ancestors of family events, and events of national
importance. On more solemn occasions he visits the grand
shrine of the sun-goddess, and once a year worships before
the grave of his father near Kyoto. These pious duties con-
stitute the most important occupation of the Mikado.
Apart from the cultural or liturgical life of the Mikado
there is little to say of this Emperor, who reigns and yet does
not rule, leaving the real political power in the hands of a
small clannish oligarchy. As becomes a superhuman monarch,
he leads a very secluded life, restrained by the sternest pro-
tocol. The pitiless clique of stubborn officials of his house-
hold keep the four young imperial children dwelling apart
from their parents in distant palaces, and hold their august
master more confined, more enslaved than any of his subjects
could possibly be. They make their living god pay dear for
his divinity.
Out of respect for the sacred person of the Mikado his
subjects never use his personal name either in speech or in
print. Whereas "Mikado" (Sublime Porte) is a very old word,
now utterly fallen into disuse in Japan, the ordinary term is
Tenno (Celestial Emperor), and sometimes in print Seijo (All-
Wise or Supreme Wisdom). Even the language used by the
papers in announcing or recording the Emperor's actions and
1920.] THE NATIONAL RELIGION OF JAPAN 215
journeys is strictly proper to His Majesty, and could not be
used with reference to the actions of his subjects.
One rarely passes the main gate leading to the imperial
palace, without seeing numbers of people approach the en-
trance of the "Double Bridge" with bared heads, bow pro-
foundly in the direction of the palace, and then reverently
withdraw. The palace buildings are not visible, and its pre-
cincts are separated from the esplanade by a wide moat and
an embankment forty feet high. As His Majesty is unap-
proachable, his devout subjects have no other means of paying
him obeisance, and so they display their devotion from afar,
even though the Emperor be absent from the palace.
The citizens of the capital gaze reverently on his carriage
when he drives through the streets to attend some official
function. But, as it is considered wholly unbecoming and
is rigidly forbidden to gaze on the Emperor from above,
every upper window must be closed up and curtains drawn
when the imperial retinue passes; boys cannot climb trees,
fences, wagons, lamp-posts or near-by slopes; the street cars
are stopped in side streets at a distance of two or three hun-
dred yards, with all blinds lowered. The same rules hold
good when the Mikado travels by rail, so that, if he raises his
eyes, no matter when or where, he never sees anybody above
himself. Cheers and applause are never indulged in: "stand
silent and bare-headed" is the order.
For about twenty years after the restoration of 1868 it
was almost forbidden to private persons to have in their pos-
session the picture of the Emperor it is still forbidden to snap
a photo of His Majesty but when it was decided to promote
the imperial cult by every available means, the Shintoists
decided the worship of the imperial picture would help enor-
mously to this end. Since then the Emperor's photograph has
been hung up in every school of the land, in barracks, on board
warships, in all state and municipal administrative offices.
On national holidays school children and students, army and
navy men, must reverently bow down worship, as they say-
before this picture. In case of fire, the first and foremost care
of reputable people is to snatch away from the blaze such a
precious treasure even at the peril of their life: to neglect
so sacred a duty is to be dishonored forever.
To understand why the Japanese have so readily accepted
216 THE NATIONAL RELIGION OF JAPAN [May,
the imperial cult, you must know the mental attitude of the
race towards religion. The Japanese is religious, but he does
not take religion seriously. It is for him a thing of secondary
importance, optional, indifferent, and which he considers
mostly from a utilitarian viewpoint. This is due to his intel-
lectual training and to the lack of well defined principles of
logic. For instance, neither Buddhism nor Confucianism has
impressed upon the Japanese a clear distinction between
matter and spirit; that notion, so familiar to us, is not clear
in their mind, hence they attach little importance to it. Again,
while certain Buddhist sects have taught the moral sanctions
of a future life in which reward and punishment will be
meted out according to strict justice, this doctrine has not
penetrated the conscience of the Japanese to the extent of
affecting seriously his moral conduct. Furthermore, its in-
fluence has been practically annihilated by other factors.
The first Regent of the family of Tokugawa, in 1600, with-
out giving up Buddhism, which remained the national religion,
thought it necessary, for political ends, to give a new impetus
to Confucianism. With the rigor of an autocrat he imposed
its doctrines, not on the mass of people incapable of grasping
them, but on the military and educated class, which monop-
olized the intellectual and official life of Japan. Now to the
orthodox Confucianist, what we call religion is mere super-
stition. For him there exists neither God nor future life, con-
sequently all relations with a spiritual world, all notions of a
supernatural life, all religious dogmas, are devices to impose
upon the ignorant, tame the multitude, and console the unfor-
tunate. Since all religions are regarded as radically false and
imaginary, it follows that morality can have no connection
with the religious idea, and could not but be weakened by
being based on it. Morality is a matter of education, and is
part of the political sciences. As far as the individual is con-
cerned, his duty is to obey whether or not he understands the
laws made for him: morality is defined by legality.
Such, for two centuries and a half, was the attitude of the
leading class of Japan towards religion and such it is today.
But, by a singular inconsistency, while professing Confucian-
ists despised Buddhism and considered it their duty to ridicule
its practices and attack its doctrines, the official world and
scholars continued to profess Buddhism at least externally.
1920.] THE NATIONAL RELIGION OF JAPAN 217
The third Regent, Tokugawa, in 1624 built at Edo (Tokyo)
the magnificent Buddhist temple of Ueno, which is now de-
stroyed; the tombs of the Regents, feudal lords, Samurai,
were intrusted to the care of bonzes, and the spirits of those
illustrious personages were honored according to the Buddhist
cult.
This example of inconsistency, given to the people by the
leading classes for two hundred and fifty years, naturally in-
creased their indifference to the religious question. The peo-
ple remained strongly attached to their superstitions, to cer-
tain traditional celebrations and especially to their worship
of the dead. Nothing would induce them to relinquish those
pilgrimages to the tombs of the departed, which, for the most
part, are only pleasure trips. These were quite sufficient to
satisfy their religious instinct, and from the moral point of
view, makes them neither better nor worse, since for them
morality does not rest on religion but on filial piety and
legality.
This state of mind explains how the Japanese nation, far
from opposing the official introduction of the imperial wor-
ship, could not but welcome it. They were not handicapped
by any previous religious conviction. On the contrary, the
tradition of the divine nature of the Emperor, always tacitly
admitted but little invoked, offered a natural basis for the new
religion. Furthermore, the history of Japan shows that its
people have always been coerced into passive submission to
the civil power. They are the slaves of unrelenting customs
and restrictions, so the administrative pressure in behalf of
the worship of the Mikados met with no opposition.
As a matter of fact the spread of the new ideas has been
easy. A large class derives power from their diffusion, and
it is the business of no one in particular to oppose them. These
ideas shock, disturb or hinder nobody, they clash with nothing
dear to the people. Moreover, in the East the disinterested
love of truth for its own sake is rare; the patience to unearth
it, rarer still. Last, but not least, national pride works in the
interests of credulity, for Japanese national pride has every
reason to feel gratified with the doctrines enforced from above.
Owing to the "facts" that the Japanese land was begotten
by the two gods, Izanagi and Izanamu; was the birthplace of
the sun-goddess, and is ruled by her sublime descendants for
218 THE NATIONAL RELIGION OF JAPAN [May,
ever and ever as long as the universe shall endure, Japan is
infinitely superior to other countries, whose chief and head it
is. The descendants of the gods accompanied the grandson
of the sun-goddess when he went from heaven to rule the
country, and also the offspring of the successive Mikados,
and have gradually increased and multiplied, and become the
Japanese people. From the fact of the divine descent of the
Japanese people proceeds their immeasurable superiority in
courage and intelligence to the natives of other countries.
Therefore, between the Japanese nation and other peoples
of the world there is a difference of kind rather than of degree.
No other nation is entitled to equality with her, and all are
bound to do homage to the Japanese sovereign.
The absence of a Shinto moral code is accounted for by
the innate perfection of the Japanese race, which obviates the
necessity for such outward props. Every Japanese, being a
descendant of the gods, is born with a naturally perfect and
upright disposition, which, from the most ancient times, has
been called yamato-damashii, and, being absolutely upright
and straightforward, needs no moral teaching. While the
mind of each Mikado is always in perfect harmony with that
of his ancestress, the sun-goddess, so his ministers and people
live up to the tradition of the divine age. In this way the age
of the gods and the present age are not two, but one.
Foreign countries were of course produced by the power
of the creating gods, but they were not begotten by Izanagi and
Izanami, nor did they give birth to the sun-goddess, hence
their inferiority. Further, as they are not the special domain
of the sun-goddess, they have no permanent rulers, and evil
spirits, having found in them a field of action, have corrupted
mankind. In those countries any wicked man who could man-
age to seize on the power became a sovereign.
Such are the views of the "pure" Shintoists as described
by Sir Ernest Satow in his Revival of the Pure Shinto. In
this system the divinity and the mutual relations of the land,
its creators and gods, its rulers and its people are so inter-
mingled and inseparable that the Japanese believe themselves
justified in asserting that everything pertaining to their origin,
their nationality, their Emperor, their patriotism, their na-
tional spirit and soul, is absolutely unique and incomparable,
and consequently foreigners are, and shall be forever, unable to
1920.] THE NATIONAL RELIGION OF JAPAN 219
understand such sublime things. The Imperial Household
Department, fountainhead and stronghold of revived Shinto,
has ordered the pupils of all schools in the Empire to be
indoctrinated with these views, so that every Japanese may
be fully conscious from childhood of his superior nature.
Moreover, Japan has wonderfully prospered for the last
fifty years, and her warriors have gained great victories. As
Professor Chamberlain has rightly pointed out, the prestige
thence accruing to Imperialism and to the rejuvenated Shinto
cult was enormous. All military success was ascribed to the
miraculous influence of the Emperor's virtues and to the vir-
tues of his imperial and divine ancestors. Imperial envoys
were regularly sent after each great victory to carry the good
tidings to the sun-goddess at her great shrine at Ise. Not there
alone, but at the other principal Shinto shrines throughout the
land, the cannon captured from Chinese or Russian foes were
officially installed with a view to identifying Imperialism,
Shinto and national glory in the popular mind. Why should
the shortsighted and insular Japanese not believe in a system
that produces such excellent practical results, and is so power-
ful an instrument for the attainment of national aims?
Many Japanese Protestants are carried away by the ir-
resistible tide. The Reverend Dr. Ebins (independent and
undenominational), one of the leading lights of the Protestant
sects in Japan, thus expounds his position: "Though the en-
couragement of ancestor-worship cannot be regarded as part
of the essential teaching of Christianity, it (Christianity) is
not opposed to the notion that, when the Japanese Empire was
founded, its early rulers were in communication with the
Great Spirit that rules the universe. Christians, according
to this theory, without doing violence to their creed, may ac-
knowledge that the Japanese nation has a divine origin. It is
only when we realize that the Imperial Ancestors were in
close communion with God (or the gods) that we understand
how sacred is the country in which we live." Dr. Ebins ends
by recommending the Imperial Rescript on Education as a
text for Christian sermons.
How thoroughly the nation must be saturated by the
doctrines in question for such amazing utterances to be pos-
sible !
In Japan there is a party of zealots always ready to fight
220 THE NATIONAL RELIGION OF JAPAN [May,
whoever is not bowed down before their national god and the
incomparably perfect nature of the Japanese. While Chris-
tians may not utter a word or allude to these intangible ques-
tions, that party delights in launching against them the most
disparaging and insulting attacks. From August to November,
1916, there appeared four numbers of a self-styled monthly
review, the Dai Kokumin (Great Nation), treating solely of the
"Extermination of Christianity." The cover of these four num-
bers show ignoble caricatures representing Christ in the shape
of a dog with human head or of an ugly monster half-man,
half-dog, and crushed beneath the colossal fist or heel of
Japan. Some American papers, to which these caricatures
were sent, deemed them too scandalous to be reprinted in the
United States. The three hundred pages of text are entirely in
keeping, in their infuriated and slanderous attacks on Chris-
tianity.
The promoters of this outrageous campaign were cow-
ardly enough to remain anonymous, although the names of
some would not be hard to guess. They are men of standing,
else their publication could not have been printed at the Koku-
min's (a great Tokyo daily owned and edited by a Peer, Mr.
Tokutomi), published at the M. P.'s Club in the House of the
Diet, and have contained articles or essays from many in-
fluential people. The four issues of the pseudo-review are
numbered from 782 to 785, which figures would indicate a
duration of sixty-five years for a monthly magazine, and this
is nonsense in Japan. Indeed, no review with the title of Dai
Kokumin was published before or after the four slanderous
numbers: the Dai Kokumin was entered at the Post-Office
as third-class matter on June 15, 1916, six weeks before the
appearance of the first issue. This is a pretty good demonstra-
tion of that vaunted yamato-damashii or Japanese spirit,
"without blemish and shortcomings, incapable of fault or sin,
irreproachable and immaculate, unequaled all the world
over."
It is neither possible nor advisable to translate here the
attacks against particular Christian bodies in Japan, the silly
blunders with regard to the social and religious conditions of
the Western World, or the blasphemous and abusive language
concerning Christ and His doctrine. We can give only a sum-
mary of the lucubrations of those infatuated minds.
1920.] THE NATIONAL RELIGION OF JAPAN 221
"There could be no greater curse for Japan than the spread
of Christianity, which, with its God and its Bible, excludes
any other religion, overthrows the great law binding subjects
to their sovereign, disobeys the Imperial Rescript on Educa-
tion, diffuses dangerous opinions, hinders the liberty of
thought, the study of art and the progress of civilization.
Christianism is hurtful, wicked, fiendish, because it is es-
sentially anti-national; its triumph would prove ruinous to
the Japanese Commonwealth, to our national soul and ideals,
to our peculiar spirit; in short, to our whole people. Whereas
the peerless morality special to Japan rests primarily on the
loyalty to the Emperor and on patriotism, Christianity does
away with that noble foundation. In teaching that it is a
crime to pray to the divine spirits of the imperial ancestors
and to worship our Celestial Emperor, in putting one so-called
Heavenly Father above our sovereign, in lowering the latter
to the level of mortals born with sin and sinners, Christianism
makes the Japanese who accept such doctrine disloyal, guilty
of high treason, at war with their own country, rebellious peo-
ple to be curbed by every means. Therefore, since Christian-
ism cannot co-exist with our national organism, we want to
drive it out of the land, so that it may not defile the divine
religion of our Empire. Our gods, our ancestors, our imperial
family, our nation form, so to speak, one soul, sublime, sacred
and venerable. As Christianity is openly opposed to it and
strives to wear it away, there can be no more urgent duty
for us than to preserve our country from so harmful a re-
ligion and, in spite of the recognized liberty of worship, to
resort to violence for preventing its diffusion, or else it will
do away with the unity of thought on most essential and holy
things and endanger the very existence of the Empire. Since
we have divine ancestors who founded our country and
lavished on it inestimable benefits, since the true religion of
Japan is the worship of our Emperor, real and visible god,
why should we adore foreign and barbarian gods or an
imaginary Heavenly Father? If Christianity cannot adapt
itself to the national organism and morality of Japan, then it
is a poison and must be expelled outright."
These ideas are not the fancies of anonymous publicists
or their obscure hirelings, but are endorsed and uttered by
222 THE NATIONAL RKLIGION OF JAPAX [May,
many exalted personages who willingly contributed articles to
the Dai Kokumin. Among them, Dr. S. Takata, then (1916)
Minister of Education in the Okuma Cabinet, and for long
years President of Waseda University; the presidents of the
Tokyo Imperial University and of the private Universities,
Keio and Chuo; a former president of the Kyoto Imperial
University; a dozen of the most renowned university pro-
fessors, one of whom, Dr. Y. Haga, was most kindly welcomed
in America at the very time Dai Kokumin appeared in Japan;
Lieutenant General G. Tanaka, Deputy-Chief of the Army
General Staff; Rear Admiral T. Sato, President of the Naval
Staff College; Dr. Yokota, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court;
K. Nishikulbo, then Chief of the Metropolitan Police; Baron
T. Hirata, several times Minister of State, one of the heads
of the reigning bureaucracy; Baron K. Takagi, Surgeon Gen-
eral of the Navy, retired, founder and director of a medical
school and charity hospital in Tokyo; M. Kato, for many years
Vice- President of the great shipping concern, Nippon Yusen;
Dr. C. Egi, foremost jurist and barrister, and the chief editors
of two Tokyo dailies.
In conclusion, I will repeat what is known to every mis-
sionary in Japan: as long as the Government continues to
assert the divinity of the Emperor, and the official world ap-
parently believes in it; as long as all classes of citizens have
not full liberty to embrace the Christian religion and practise
its tenets without hindrance, the Church will not make serious
progress in the country.
The problem for Japan is how to get rid of the divinity
of its ruler. Forty years ago it would have been easy; today,
with all the scaffolding erected around that doctrine, it is a
difficult task. It is to be feared that, in discarding the doc-
trine, the Japanese people might take occasion to overthrow
the Emperor himself, and the remedy would be worse than
the evil. The Japanese are not ripe for a republican form of
government; they need to be ruled by a strong hand.
Let us hope that Divine Providence, which has means of
solving human problems unknown to us, will bring about a
happy solution to that mooted question. Then it will be seen
that the obstacles to the conversion of the nation to Chris-
tianity are fewer in Japan than in several other pagan coun-
tries of the Far East.
IMAGINATION AND EMOTION IN LITERATURE.
BY F. P. DONNELLY, S.J.
BOUT the beginning of the last century the terms,
fancy and imagination, entered largely into all
literary criticism, and for much the greater part
of the nineteenth century writers were busy de-
fining, illustrating and applying the ideas of
fancy and imagination to literature and art. Wordsworth in
his Prefaces, Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria, were the
pioneers. Leigh Hunt followed with his book, Imagination
and Fancy. Ruskin in his Modern Painters developed the
ideas, analyzed the imagination and fancy into species and
applied the terms to painting. He afterwards spoke slightingly
of this part of his work. Other critics, like Poe and Hutton,
made use of the same terms. Philosophers followed in the
wake of the critics and investigated the nature of fancy and
imagination. But in more recent years there is less heard of
these terms. What is the reason for this silence? Perhaps
readers have been surfeited with fancy and imagination, or
did not understand very well what the terms meant, or could
not follow the multiple varieties which each new critic added.
Perhaps they could not make out whether fancy and imagina-
tion were qualities in word or speech or faculties of the mind
and, if the latter, whether they were distinct from each other
and each divided into many species or simply two phases of
the same faculty, and finally, whether that faculty was the
immaterial mind or some material power.
The trouble all along with these terms has been their
vagueness. Those who used them had no consistent philos-
ophy or definite theory of thought, and could not speak of
imagination and fancy without confusion. Coleridge brought
in very early some of the terms of German idealistic philos-
ophy, and further complicated things by tangling up the imag-
ination with personality and consciousness. He calls, too, the
imagination an "esemplastic" faculty, but one diligent reader
can find no tangible meaning in that learned phrase unless it
signifies the mind applying an adjective to a noun or assert-
224 IMAGINATION AND EMOTION [May,
ing a quality of a subject, in a word the intellectual process of
attribution, "a good man," and of predication, "the man is
good." Wordsworth and Hunt kept away from the philosophy
of the subject, and by their illustrations led their readers to
identify imagination and fancy not with any particular facul-
ties. They kept strictly to the products of these faculties in
language. Ruskin rejects the explanation of a Scotch meta-
physician and refers everything to mystery. Poe has a clear,
well-reasoned theory, easy at any rate to understand, if it
does not explain the whole truth. He claims that imagination,
fancy and humor are all products of one and the same faculty,
the mind, which by attribution or predication, brings two or
more ideas together. When the combination satisfies us as
being true and natural, we have imagination; if the combina-
tion startles by its novelty, we have fancy; if the combined
elements are incongruous, we have humor.
More recent literary criticism has made a fetish of emo-
tion. Imagination had some meaning, but what meaning is
attached to emotion by many critics it is very hard to deter-
mine. Imagination, too, was nearer to the truth because imag-
ination is a faculty of knowing, and beauty, the object of
literature, effects subjectively a pleasure in the cognitive
faculty. Besides, the term, imagination, is not exposed to the
excesses of the term, emotion. If imagination was a cloak for
ignorance, what shall we say of emotion? A professor of
theology used to warn his class that it was a good thing to
know the precise point where reason ended and where mystery
began. It was not good theology to cry mystery when the
mind grew weary or was deficient in acumen. Neither is it
good criticism to cry emotion when nobody knows just what is
meant by emotion.
In a splendid book, the Principles of Literary Criticism,
which is sane and sound despite its philosophy or lack of
philosophy, Professor Winchester, the author, on every page
speaks of literature in terms of emotion, and yet refuses to
define emotion. "I have not thought it necessary," he states,
"to enter into any investigation of the nature and genesis of
emotion." 1 If the author wishes to make emotion the essential
element in literature, he need not, of course, be able to com-
prehend fully what emotion is and how it is generated, but he
'Page 55.
1920.] IMAGINATION AND EMOTION 225
should have at least a definite objective meaning to the term,
which would identify it for the mind when he uses the term.
Such a definite meaning would have saved him from in-
consistency in saying that "emotions are motives, as their
name implies; they induce the will; they decide the whole
current of life," 2 and then later 3 rejecting from literature all
self-regarding emotions. All action, it is well known, orig-
inates in good and every emotion appealing to the will is self-
regarding. Again a definite meaning for emotion would have
kept him from making one difference between imagination and
fancy to be that imagination awakens emotion and fancy does
not. 4 If fancy does not awaken emotion, then fancy is ruled
out of literature by the author's essential definition, and that
would result in absurd consequences fatal to his theory.
Professor Winchester's good taste keeps him from the
conclusions to which his theory, logically followed out, might
lead. He has no sympathy with the school of literature or
poetry which makes the spinal thrill the final test of poetic
and literary excellence. A professor in one of our large uni-
versities subscribes to the theory of the spinal thrill. 5 The
ex|reme statement of the theory is found in the preface of
At A Venture, a volume of poems issued by Blackwell, Ox-
ford. "The wisest know that poetry is a human utterance, at
once inevitable and unforced, and leave it at that. This much
is certain: Reason has no part in it. There is no Muse of
Logic. Feeling, which of its essence defies logical limitation,
is the be-all and end-all of Poetry. Ultimately, perhaps, the
spinal thrill is the surest working test." How far this state-
ment is from Wordsworth's description of poetry as the
"breath and finer spirit of all knowledge," and from Pater's,
"All beauty is in the long run only fineness of truth or what
we call expression, the finer accommodation of speech to that
vision within!"
The earlier critics did not neglect emotions in their criti-
cism of literature and of poetry, but Keble was probably the
first who made the fe'elings and emotions so prominent a fac-
tor in poetry, which in his Oxford lectures he described as a
relief of the emotions. It may have been due to these lectures
that Newman added a note to his essay on Aristotle's poetics,
making "the moving of the affections through the imagination"
Page 48. "Page 63. Page 127. 'Bookman, October, 1917, p. 133.
VOL. czi. 15
226 IMAGINATION AND EMOTION [May,
the function and aim of poetry. With Keble emotions were
the efficient cause; with Newman the "affections," not a happy
term, seem to be the final cause of poetry.
All this confusion about the emotions in poetry and fine
art arises from a neglect or obscuring of the distinction be-
tween the appetitive emotions and the cognitive or aesthetic
emotions. Balfour, in a lecture, "Criticism and Beauty," given
at Oxford in 1909, after a depressing and skeptical rejection of
all else connected with the idea of beauty, makes the following
declaration : "What are the aesthetic emotions about which we
have been occupied in these pages? They are the highest
members of a great class whose common characteristic is that
they do not lead to action. It is their peculiarity and their
glory that they have nothing to do with business, with the
adaptation of means to ends, with the bustle and dust of life.
. . . They are self-sufficing, and neither point to any good
beyond themselves, nor overflow except by accident into any
practical activities." 6 "Here then we have two great divisions
of feeling the one self-sufficing, contemplative, not looking
beyond its boundaries, nor essentially prompting to action;
the other lying at the root of conduct, always having some
external reference, supplying the immediate motive for all the
actions of mankind. Of highest value in the contemplative
division is the feeling of beauty; of highest value in the active
division is the feeling of love." 7
Balfour states here at length what St. Thomas puts suc-
cinctly and comprehensively : "Good has the nature of an end
or final cause; beauty that of a formal cause." 8 "Beauty re-
gards knowledge." 9 "It belongs to beauty to satisfy by its
sight and contemplation." 10 This is the teaching of all Scho-
lastic philosophers from his time down to Coffey's Ontology
and Mercier's Ontologie.
The neglect or obscuring of the fundamental distinction
between the emotions which are of the will and those which
are of the mind, permeates Winchester's Principles of Literary
Criticism and much recent criticism. Taste and a subcon-
scious feeling for the truth keeps most critics from the spinal
thrill absurdity, but it is unfortunate that this clear and funda-
mental distinction should in the slightest way be obscured.
Page 41. ' Page 45. s S. la., q.v., a.iv. Ibid,
10 S. la., 2ae., q.xxvii., ad.iii.
1920.] IMAGINATION AND EMOTION 227
^Esthetic emotions differ from other emotions in faculty,
in origin, in nature. To desire a fruit, to hope for it, to joy in
its possession or grieve for its loss, these are emotions which
are not aesthetic. Hope, desire, fear, joy, sadness and the like
are tendencies towards good or away from evil, and are modi-
fications of the primal emotions of love and hate. Even dis-
interested love begins in appetitive tendency and when it
reaches the stage of so-called benevolence, it is still tending
towards good, but now towards a higher and unselfish good.
On the other hand, aesthetic emotions are not characterized by
that outward tendency to an end. Interest, taste, wonder,
mental delight, awe, inspiration, enthusiasm are some of the
aesthetic emotions, although not all of these terms have the
precise meaning and definite use which belongs to the corre-
sponding terms of the other class of emotions. In truth, the
specific kinds of aesthetic emotions have not been as definitely
determined or as carefully differentiated as the kinds of emo-
tions awakened by good or evil. Yet experience testifies that
to call to imagination the vision of a fruit, to contemplate it,
to admire shape, color or other beauties may be just as free
from desire, hope and other species of love and hate as the
contemplation of a painted or sculptured fruit would be. The
aesthetic emotions belong to the faculty of knowing, which is
not self-seeking. The other emotions belong to the will and
appetite which are of their very nature and always must be
self-seeking. Only good, or an end, can actuate will and ap-
petite, and beauty, as such, has not, in the words of Aquinas,
"the nature of an end."
What has led some astray is the fact that literature and
all the arts may present emotion as their subject matter, just
as they present persons and actions. "Even dancing," says
Aristotle, "imitates character, emotion and action." Such emo-
tions are the material objects of art, and are no more its for-
mal object than character or action constitute such a formal
object. Certain specific emotions are essential to certain
species of literature, as fear and terror to tragedy, but these
emotions are essential to the species not to poetry in general,
any more than because to shave the beard is the specific work
of the razor as distinguished from other knives, therefore all
knives cut beards. In Aristotle's teaching it is the "imitation"
which is the essential note of art; it is the "imitation" which
228 IMAGINATION AND EMOTION [May,
gives the artistic pleasure; it is the "imitation" which, by trans-
ferring nature to another universe through the different me-
diums of words, sounds, pigments and solids, generalizes the
artist's subject, frees it from actuality, puts characters, actions
and emotions into a sound world or color world or shape
world or word world where appetitive emotions are released
and awakened, but are robbed of their personal application by
being transferred through imitation to another sphere. The
emotion of fear is as innocuous for the spectator of a tragedy
as the emotion of desire for the admirer of a painted apple.
"Imitation" is originally a dramatic term and was transferred
from the stage to all arts. Dramatization or staging would
give the various suggestions of the term better than imitation.
Whatever be Aristotle's full meaning, it is in dramatization
that he places the essential note of all arts.
This digression to Aristotle has taken us away from the
main question, which is, that aesthetic emotions are essentially
different from the emotions which lead to action. ^Esthetic
emotions are caused by beauty, are cognitive and unselfish in
nature and are connected with the senses, imagination and
mind, whereas the common emotions of love and hate with
all their species are awakened by good and evil, are self-seek-
ing emotions, and are connected with the spiritual or corporal
appetite.
The earlier criticism which judged all literature and art
in terms of the imagination, and the later criticism which
judges all literature and art in terms of emotions, are both right
but are both defective through lack of definition. The term
imagination should be restricted to its usual meaning, the
material faculty which stores up the impressions of the senses
and images objects in their absence. The imagination works
always in union with the mind but is not the mind. In art the
imagination is important because the beauty of art is embodied
in a concrete medium, and the vivid imagining of the artist's
product precedes, accompanies and perfects his work. The
term, emotion, should likewise be carefully distinguished into
its two kinds. When we agree upon what is meant by these
terms and keep to that agreement, literary and artistic criti-
cism will be greatly benefited.
THE LOYALIST.
BY JAMES FRANCIS BARRETT.
PART II.
CHAPTER I.
T was a hot October day. A torrid wave generated
somewhere in the far west and aided by the pre-
vailing trade winds, had swept relentlessly across
the country, reaching the city at a most unusual
time. It had not come unheralded, however, for
the sun of yesterday had gone down a blazing red,
illuminating the sky like the rays from a mighty furnace, and
tingling the evening landscape with the reddish and purplish hues
of an Indian summer. And what a blanket of humidity accom-
panied it! Like a cloak it settled down upon the land, making
breathing laborious and driving every living creature out of doors.
Jim Cadwalader and his wife sat on the lawn, if the patch of
brownish grass to the side of their little house could be termed
a lawn, and awaited the close of the day. Three huge elms, mo-
tionless in the still sunshine and, like all motionless things, add-
ing to the stillness, afforded a canopy against the burning rays of
the sun. What mattered it that the cool, shaded air was infested
with mosquitos and house-flies or that the coarse grass was un-
even and unkempt, from the low mounds which ran all over it,
and the profusion of leaves which had fluttered down from the
great trees. Neither Jim nor his wife had found time for the
proper care of the premises, and even, had they had the time,
inclination was wanting.
"Sumthin's got t' turn up in sum way 'r other b'fore long. I
ain't see the sight o' work here in nigh two year."
"Guess you won't see it fur a while," responded the wife, from
her straight-backed chair, her arms folded, her body erect.
"Like as not a man 'd starve t' death in these here times,
with nuthin' t' do."
Jim sat with his elbows resting upon his yellow buckskin
breeches, his rough stubby fingers interlocked, his small fiery
eyes piercing the distance beyond the fields.
"If this business o' war was through with, things 'd git right
agin."
"But it aint goin' t' be over, let me tell yew that."
230 THE LOYALIST [May,
They became silent.
Sad as was their plight, it was no sadder than the plight of
many of their class. The horrors of a protracted war had visited
with equal severity the dwellings of the rich and the poor. It
was not a question of the provision of the sinews of war; tax
had been exacted of all classes alike. But it did seem as if the
angel of poverty had tarried longer at the doorposts of the less
opulent and had, in proportion to their indigence, inflicted suffer-
ing and privation. Figuratively speaking, this was the state of
affairs with Jim's house.
Everything that could stimulate or gratify a middle-aged
couple; the blessings of health, the daily round of occupation, the
joys of life and the hopes of at length obtaining possession of a
little home, all these and the contentment of living, were swept
away from Jim Cadwalader and his wife by the calamities of war.
They had lived as many had lived who have no different excuse to
plead for their penury. The wages of their day's labor had been
their sole means of support, and when this source of income had
vanished, nothing was left. In the low, dingy rooms which they
called their home, there were no articles of adornment and many
necessary for use were wanting. Sand sprinkled on the floor did
duty as a carpet. There was no glass upon their table; no china
in the cupboard; no prints on the wall. Matches were a treasure
and coal was never seen. Over a fire of broken boxes and barrels,
lighted with sparks from the flint, was cooked a rude meal to
be served in pewter dishes. Fresh meat was rarely tasted at
most but once a week, and then paid for at a higher price than
their scanty means could justly allow.
"The way things 're goin' a pair o' boots 'II soon cost a man
'most six hundr' dollars. I heard a man say who's good at fig-
urin' out these things, that it now takes forty dollar bills t' make
a dollar o' coin. We can't stand that much longer."
"Unless a great blow is struck soon," observed Nancy.
"But it won't be struck. Washington's watchin' Clinton
from Morristown. The Americans are now on the offensive an'
Clinton's busy holdin' New York. The French 're here an' who
knows but they may do somethin'. 'Twas too bad they missed
Howe's Army when it left here."
"Were they here?"
"They were at the capes when the chase was over. Lord
Howe's ships had gone."
Again there was silence.
"I guess Washington can't do much without an army. He
has only a handful an' I heard that the volunteers won't stay.
1920.] THE LOYALIST 231
Three thousan' o' them left t' other day. Can't win a war that
way. If they'd only listen to Barry they'd have a navy now, an'
if they want to catch Clinton in New York they'll need a navy."
"Is the Captain home?"
"I saw him t' other day. He is goin" t' Boston t' command
the Raleigh, a thirty-two gunner. But one's no good. He needs
a fleet."
"Thank God! The French have come. Peace is here now."
"It's money we need more'n soldiers. We can git an army
right here if we could only pay 'em. No one '11 fight fur nuthin'.
They're starvin' as much as us."
The fact that the hopes of this American couple had suffered
a partial collapse, must be attributed rather to the internal state
of affairs than to the military situation. While it is true that no
great military objective had been gained as a result of the three
years of fighting, yet the odds at the present moment were de-
cidedly on the American side. Still the country was without any-
thing fit to be called a general government. The Articles of Con-
federation, which were intended to establish a league of friend-
ship between the thirteen States, had not yet been adopted. The
Continental Congress, continuing to decline in reputation and
capacity, provoked a feeling of utter weariness and intense de-
pression. The energies and resources of the people were without
organization.
Resources they had. There was also a vigorous and an ani-
mated spirit of patriotism, but there were no means of concen-
trating and utilizing these assets. It was the general adminis-
trative paralysis rather than any real poverty that tried the souls
of the Colonists. They heartily approved of the war; Washing-
ton now held a higher place in their hearts than he had ever held
before; peace seemed a certainty the longer the war endured.
But they were weary of the struggle and handicapped by the
internal conditions.
Jim and his wife typified the members of the poorer class,
the class upon whom the war had descended with all its horror
and cruelty and desolation. Whatever scanty possessions they
had, cows, corn, wheat or flour, had been seized by the foraging
parties of the opposing forces, while their horse and wagon had
been impressed into the service of the British, at the time of the
evacuation of the city, to cart away the stores and provisions.
A means of occupation had been denied Jim during the period of
stagnation, and to eke out a mere existence now, he depended
solely on the tillage of the land upon which he dwelled. Never-
theless the Cadwaladers maintained their outward cheer and ap-
232 THE LOYALIST [May,
parent optimism through it all, although they yearned inwardly
for the day when strife would be no more.
"I can't see as t' how we're goin' to git off eny better when
this here whole thin's over. We're flghtin' fur Independence, but
the peopul don't want to change their guverment; Washington '11
be king when this is over."
Jim was ruminating aloud, stripping with his thumb nail the
bark from a small branch which he had picked from the ground.
" 'Twas the Quebec Act th' done it. It was supposed to re-
establish Popery in Canada, and did by right. But th' Americans,
and mostly those in New England who are the worst kind of Dis-
senters and Whigs, got skeered because they thought the Church
o' England or the Church o' Rome 'd be the next thing established
in the Colonies. That's what brought on the war."
"We all don't believe that. Some do; but I don't."
"You don't?" he asked, without lifting his eyes to look at her.
"Well, you kin. Wasn't the first thing they did up in New Eng-
land to rush t' Canada t' capture the country or else t' form an
alliance with it? And didn't our own Arnold try t' get revenge
on it fur not sidin' in with him by plunderin' th' homes of th'
peopul up there and sendin' the goods back to Ticonderoga?"
She made no reply, but continued to peer into the distance.
"And didn't our Congress send a petition to King George t'
have 'em repeal the limits o' Quebec and to the people t' tell 'm
the English Gover'ment 'is not authorized to establish a religion
fraught with sang'uary 'r impius tenets.' I know, 'cause I read
it."
"It makes no diff'rence now. It's over."
"Well it shows the kind o' peopul here. They're so afreed
o' the Pope."
She waved her hand in a manner of greeting.
"Who's that?" asked Jim.
"Majorie."
He turned sideways looking over his shoulder. Then he
stood up.
That there was more than a grain of truth in the assertion
of Jim Cadwalader that the War for Independence had, like the
great rivers of the country, many sources, cannot be gainsaid.
There were oppressive tax laws as well as restrictions on popular
rights. There were odious navigation acts together with a host
of iniquitous, tyrannical measures which were destined to arouse
the ire of any people, however loyal. But there were religious
prejudices which were likewise a moving cause of the revolt, a
moving force upon the minds of the people at large. And these
1920.] THE LOYALIST 233
were utilized and systematized most effectively by the active mal-
contents and leaders of the strife.
The vast majority of the population of the Colonies were Dis-
senters, subjects of the Crown who disagreed with it in matters
of religious belief and who had emigrated thither to secure a
haven where they might worship their God according to the dic-
tates of their own conscience rather than at the dictates of a body
politic. The Puritans had sought refuge in Massachusetts and
Connecticut, where the white spires of their meeting houses, pro-
jecting above the angles of the New England hills, became indic-
ative of Congregationalism. Roger Williams and the Baptists
found a harbor in Rhode Island. William Penn brought the
Quaker colony to Pennsylvania. Captain Thomas Webb lent ac-
tive measures to the establishment of Methodism in New York
and in Maryland, while the colony of Virginia afforded protection
to the adherents of the Established Church. The country was in
the main Protestant, save for the vestiges of Catholicism left by
the Franciscan and Jesuit Missionary Fathers, who penetrated
the boundless wastes in an heroic endeavor to plant the seeds of
their faith in the rich and fertile soil of the new and unexplored
continent.
Consequently with the passage of the Quebec Act in 1774, a
wave of indignation and passionate apprehension swept the coun-
try from the American patriots of Boston to the English settle-
ments on the west. That many and influential members of the
Protestant religion were being assailed and threatened with op-
pression, and the fear of Popery, recently reestablished in
Canada, became an incentive for armed resistance and proved
motives of great concern. The people reminded King George of
these calamities and emphatically declared themselves Protes-
tants, faithful to the principles of 1688, faithful to the ideals of
the "Glorious Revolution" against James II., faithful to the House
of Hanover, then seated on the throne.
"Can a free government possibly exist with the Roman Catho-
lic Church?" asked John Adams of Thomas Jefferson. This
simple question embodied in concrete form the apprehensions of
the country at large, whose inhabitants had now become firmly
convinced that King George, in granting the Quebec Bill, had be-
come a traitor, had broken his coronation oath, was a Papist at
heart, and was scheming to submit this countr- to the unconsti-
tutional power of the English monarch. It was not so much a
contest between peoples as a conflict of principles, political and
religious, the latter of which contributed the active force that
brought on the revolt and gave it power.
234 THE LOYALIST [May,
Strange to relate, there came a decided reversal of position
after the formation of the French Alliance. No longer was the
Catholic religion simply tolerated; it was openly professed, and
owing in a great measure to the unwearied labors of the Domin-
ican and Franciscan Friars, made the utmost progress among all
ranks of people. The fault of the Catholic population was any-
thing but disloyalty, it was found, and their manner of life, their
absolute sincerity in their religious convictions, their
generous and altruistic interest in matters of concern to the pub-
lic good, proved irrefutable arguments against the calumnies and
vilifications of earlier days. The Constitutions adopted by the
several States and the laws passed to regulate the new govern-
ments, show that the principles of religious freedom and equality
had made progress during the war, and were to be incorporated as
vital factors in the shaping of the destinies of the new nation.
The supreme importance of the French Alliance at this junc-
ture cannot be overestimated. Coming, as it did, at a time when
the depression of the people had reached the lowest ebb, when the
remnant of the army of the Americans was enduring the severities
of the winter season at Valley Forge, when the enemy was in pos-
session of the fairest part of the country together with the two
most important cities, when Congress could not pay its bills, nor
meet the national debt, which alone exceeded forty million dollars
when the medium of exchange would not circulate because of
its worthlessness, when private debts could not be collected and
when credit was generally prostrated, the Alliance proved a bene-
fit of incalculable value to the struggling nation, not only in the
enormous resources which it supplied to the army, but in the
general morale of the people which it made buoyant.
The capture of Burgoyne and the announcement that Lord
North was about to bring in conciliatory measures, furnished con-
vincing proof to France that the American Alliance was worth
having. A treaty was drawn up by virtue of which the Americans
solemnly agreed, in consideration of armed support to be fur-
nished by France, never to entertain proposals of peace with Great
Britain until their independence should be acknowledged, and
never to conclude a treaty of peace except with the concurrence of
their new ally.
Large sums of money were at once furnished the American
Congress. A strong force of trained soldiers was sent to act
under Washington's command. A powerful fleet was soon to set
sail for American waters, and the French forces at home were
directed to cripple the military power of England and to lock
up and neutralize much British energy which, otherwise, would be
1920.] THE LOYALIST 235
directed against the Americans. Small wonder that a new era
began to dawn for the Colonists!
When we remember the anti-Catholic spirit of the first years
of the Revolution and consider the freedom of action which came
to the Catholics as a consequence of the French Alliance, another
and a striking phase of its influence is revealed. The Catholic
priests hitherto seen in the Colonies had been barely tolerated in
the limited districts where they labored. Now came Catholic
chaplains of foreign embassies; army and navy chaplains cele-
brating Mass with pomp on the men-of-war and in the camps and
cities. The French chaplains were brought in contact with all
classes of the people in all parts of the country, and the Masses
offered in the French lines were attended by many who had never
before witnessed a Catholic ceremony. Even Rhode Island, with
a French fleet in her waters, blotted from her statute book a law
against Catholics.
"What have we here, Marjorie?" asked Jim as he walked part
of the way to meet her.
"Just a few ribs of pork. I thought that you might like
them."
She gave Jim the basket and walked over to Mrs. Cadwalader
and kissed her.
"Heaven bless you, Marjorie," exclaimed Nancy as she took
hold of the girl's hands and held them.
"Oh, thank you! But it is nothing, I assure you."
"You ken bet it is," announced Jim as he removed from the
basket a long side of pork. "Look 't that, Nancy." And he held
it up for her observation.
Marjorie had been accustomed to bring little gifts to Jim and
his wife since the time when reverses had first visited them. Her
good nature, and the long friendship which had existed between
the two families, prompted her to this service. Jim would never
be in want through any fault of hers, yet she was discreet enough
never to proffer any avowed financial assistance. The mode she
employed was that of an occasional visit in which she never failed
to bring some choice morsel for the table.
"How's the dad?" asked Jim.
"Extremely well, thank you. He has been talking all day
on the failure of the French to take Newport."
"What's that?" asked Jim, thoroughly excited. "Has there
been news in town?"
"Haven't you heard? The fleet made an attack."
"Where? What about it?"
236 THE LOYALIST [May,
"They tried to enter New York to destroy the British, but it
was found, I think, that they were too large for the harbor. So
they sailed to Newport to attack the garrison there."
"Yeh."
"General Sullivan operated on the land, and the French
troops were about to disembark to assist him. But then Lord
Howe arrived with his fleet and Count d'Estaing straightway put
out to sea to engage him."
"And thrashed m "
"No," replied Marjorie. "A great storm came up and each
had to save himself. From the reports father gave, General
Sullivan has been left alone on the island and may be fortunate
if he is enabled to withdraw in safety."
"What ails that Count!" exclaimed Jim thoroughly aroused.
"I don't think they're much good."
"Now don't git excited," interrupted Nancy. "That's you all
th' time. Just wait a bit."
"Just when we want 'im he leaves us. That's no good."
"Any more news, girl?"
"No. Everything is quiet except for the news we received
about the regiment of Catholic volunteers that is being recruited
in New York."
"In New York? Clinton is there."
"I know it. This is a British regiment."
"I see. Tryin' t' imitate 'The Congress* Own?"
"So it seems."
"And do they think they will git many Cath'lics, or that there
're enough o' them here?"
"I do not know," answered Marjorie. "But some hand-bills
have appeared in the city which came from New York."
"And they want the Cath'lics? What pay are they goin' t'
give?"
"Four pounds."
"That's a lot o' money nowadays."
"That is all I know about it. I can't think what success
they will have. We are sure of some loyalists, however."
"I guess I'll hev to git down town t' see what's goin' on.
Things were quiet fur so long that I stayed pretty well t' home
here. What does yur father think?"
"He is angry, of course. But he has said little."
"I never saw anything like it. What'll come next?" He
folded his arms and crossed his knee.
An hour later she stood at the gate taking her leave of Jim
and Nancy.
1920.] THE LOYALIST 237
"Keep a stout heart," she was saying to Jim, "for better days
are coming."
"I know 't, girl. Washington won't fail."
"He is coming here shortly."
"To Philadelphia?" asked Nancy.
"Yes. So he instructed Captain Meagher."
"I hope he removes Arnold."
"Hardly. He is a sincere friend to him. He wishes to see
Congress."
"Has he been summoned?"
"No! Captain Meagher intimated to me that a letter had
been sent to His Excellency from the former Chaplain of Con-
gress, the Rev. Mr. Duche, complaining that the most respectable
characters had withdrawn and were being succeeded by a great
majority of illiberal and violent men. He cited the fact that
Maryland had sent the Catholic, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, in-
stead of the Protestant, Tilghman."
"Who is this Duche?"
"I do not know. But he has since fled to the British. He
warmly counseled the abandonment of independence."
"If that's his style, he's no good. Will we see the General?"
"Perhaps. Then, again, he may come and go secretly."
"God help the man," breathed Nancy.
CHAPTER II.
"Simply a written statement. A public utterance from you
denouncing the Catholics would prove of incalculable value to us."
John Anderson had been for an hour or more in the com-
pany of the Military Governor. Seemingly great progress had
been made in the recruiting of the regiment, much of which had,
of necessity, been effected in a secret manner, for now the city
was under the domination of the Continental forces. Yet Ander-
son had made the most of his time and was in a fair way to report
progress for the past month.
"Don't be a fool, Anderson. You know that it would be the
height of folly for me to make any such statement. I can do
no more than I am doing. How many have you?"
"Nearly a hundred."
"There are several miserable Papists in Congress. If they
could be prevailed upon to resign, it would create a considerable
impression upon the minds of the people."
"I did see Carroll."
"How did he receive you?"
238 THE LOYALIST [May,
"He replied to me that he had entered zealously into the
Revolution to obtain religious as well as civil liberty, and he
hoped that God would grant that this religious liberty would be
preserved in these States to the end of time."
"Confound him! We cannot reach him, I suppose."
'"So it appears. He is intensely patriotic."
"You have a hundred, you say? All common folk, I ven-
ture. We should have several influential men."
"But they cannot be reached. I know well the need of a
person of influence, which thought urged me to ask such a state-
ment from you."
He looked at him savagely.
"Do you think I'm a fool?"
" 'The fool knows more in his own house that a wise man
does in another's.' I merely suggest, that is all."
"My answer is absolutely, No!"
There was silence.
"I know that Roman Catholic influence is beginning to re-
veal itself in the army. Washington is well disposed toward
them and they are good soldiers. Time was when they were less
conspicuous; but nowadays every fool legislature is throwing pub-
lic offices open to them, and soon France will exercise the same
control over these States as she now wields across the seas."
"Would you be in league with France?" asked Anderson with
a wavering tremor in his voice.
"God knows how I detest it ! But I have sworn to defend the
cause of my country, and I call this shattered limb to witness how
well I have spent myself in her behalf. I once entertained the
hope that our efforts would be crowned with success, nevertheless
I must confess that the more protracted the struggle grows, the
more the conviction is forced upon me that our cause is mistaken,
if not entirely wrong, and destined to perish miserably. Still, I
shall not contenance open rebellion. I could not."
"You will continue to advise me. I am little acquainted with
the city, you know, and it would be difficult for me to avoid dan-
gerous risks."
Arnold thought for a minute, his features overcast by a
scowl which closed his eyes to the merest chinks.
"I shall do no more than I have already done. I cannot per-
mit myself to be entangled. There is too much at stake."
He was playing a dangerous game, inspired by no genuine
love for country, but by feelings of wounded pride. He was urged
on, not because of any genuine desire to aid or abet the cause of
the enemy, but to cast suspicion upon a certain unit within his
1920.] THE LOYALIST 239
own ranks. To be deprived of active duty in the field was to his
warm and impulsive nature an ignominious calamity. To learn
subsequently of the appointment of Gates to the second in com-
mand, the one general whom he despised and hated, was more
than his irritable temperament could stand. The American cause
now appeared hopeless to him, nevertheless he entertained no
thought of deserting it. He had performed his duty in its behalf,
as his wounded limb often reminded him, and it was only fitting
that he, who alone had destroyed a whole army of the enemy,
should be rewarded with due consideration. Congress had ever
been unfriendly to him and he had resented their action, or their
failure to take proper action, most bitterly. Throughout it all his
personal feelings had guided to a large extent his judgment, and,
for that reason, he viewed with mistrust and suspicion every in-
tent and purpose, however noble or exalted.
He had been violently opposed to the Alliance with France
from the start. It was notorious that he abhored Catholics and
all things Catholic. To take sides with a Catholic and despotic
power which had been a deadly foe to the Colonists ten or twenty
years before, during the days of the French and Indian Wars, was
to his mind a measure at once unpatriotic and indiscreet. In this
also, he had been actuated by his personal feelings more than by
the study of the times. For he loathed Popery and the thousand
and one machinations and atrocities which he was accustomed to
associate with the name.
The idea of forming a regiment of Catholic soldiers interested
him, not for the numerical strength which might be afforded the
enemy, but in the defection which would be caused to the Amer-
ican side. He hoped the Catholic members of Congress would be
tempted to resign. In that event he would obtain satisfaction
through the weakness to which the governing body would be ex-
posed, and the ill repute which would befall American Catholics
and their protestations of loyalty.
Arnold deep down in his own heart knew that his motives-
were not unmixed. He could not accuse himself of being out-
rageously mercenary, yet he was ashamed to acknowledge, even to
himself, that the desire of gain was present to his mind. His
debts were enormous. He entertained in a manner and after a
style far in excess of his modest allowance. His dinners were the
most sumptuous in the town; his stable the finest; his dress the
richest. And no wonder that his play, his table, his balls, his con-
certs, his banquets had soon exhausted his fortune. Congress
owed him money, his speculations proved unfortunate, his priva-
teering ventures met with disaster. With debts accumulating and
240 THE LOYALIST [May,
creditors giving him no peace, he turned to the gap which he saw
opening before him. This was an opportunity not to be despised.
"About that little matter how soon might I be favored?"
the Governor asked, rising from his chair and limping with his
cane across the room.
"You refer to the matter of reimbursements?" Anderson
asked nonchalantly.
"I do." He gazed from the window with his back turned to
his visitor.
"I shall draw an order for you at once."
"You shall do nothing of the kind." He looked fiercely at
him. "You are playing a clever game, are you not? But you
have to cope now with a clever adversary."
He walked deliberately up to him, and continued:
"Anderson," he said, "I want to tell you I know who you are
and for what purpose you have been sent here. I know, too, by
whom you have been sent. I knew it before you were here
twenty-four hours and I want to tell you now before we continue
that we may as well understand one another in a thorough man-
ner. If you desire my assistance you must pay me well for it.
And it must be in legal tender."
"Of course but but the truth is that I am in no way
prepared to make any offer now. I can communicate with you in
a few days, or a week."
"Don't come here. You must not be seen here again. Send
it to me, or better still, meet me."
"Can you trust the Shippens?"
"Absolutely."
"Why not there?"
"You mean to confer with me there?"
"If it is safe, as you say, where would be more suitable?"
"True. But I must have some money as soon as possible.
The nation is bankrupt and my pay is long overdue. I cannot,
however, persuade the creditors any longer. I must have money."
"You shall have it. At the Shippens then." He rose and
walked directly to the door. "Next week."
He shut the door after him and hurried along the corridor.
As he turned he came face to face with a countenance entirely
familiar to him, but momentarily lost to his consciousness by its
sudden and unexpected appearance. In a second, however,
he had recovered himself.
"Captain! I am pleased, indeed." He put out his hand.
Stephen thought for a moment. Then he grasped it.
"Mr. Anderson. What good fortune is this?"
1920.] THE LOYALIST 241
"Complimentary. Simply paying my respects for kindness
rendered."
"Have a care lest your zeal overwhelm you."
Anderson colored at the allusion.
"Thank you. I shall exercise all moderation."
Stephen watched him as he moved away. He deliberated
hurriedly on the advisability of starting after him. Whatever his
mission or his purpose, he would not learn in this house cer-
tainly, nor from him nor from Arnold for that matter. If he was
intent on securing information concerning this man he must do
it in a surreptitious manner. There was no other method of
dealing with him, and such being the circumstances, he deemed
it perfectly legitimate to follow him at a safe distance.
The more he thought over it the more did his resolve take
action. Whatever mischief was afoot, and he had no more than a
mere suspicion that such existed, must reveal itself sooner or
later. His object in all probability had already been accom-
plished, nevertheless his errand, if he had an errand, might still
be discovered. He would follow him if for no other purpose
than to learn his destination.
Second Street was now astir with an animated procession.
There, every day when business was over, when the bank was
closed, when the exchange was deserted, crowds of pleasure-
seekers came to enjoy the air and to display their fine clothes.
There might be seen the gentlemen of fashion and of means, with
their great three-cornered, cocked hats, resting upon their pro-
fusely powdered hair done up in cues, their light colored coats,
with their diminutive capes and 'long backs, their striped stock-
ings, pointed shoes, and lead laden cuffs. They were paying
homage to the fair ladies of the town, gorgeous in their brocades
and taffetas, luxuriantly displayed over cumbrous hoops, tower
built hats, adorned with tall feathers, high wooden heels and
fine satin petticoats. It was an imposing picture to behold these
gayly dressed damsels gravely returning the salutations of their
gallant admirers with a deep courtesy.
Stephen searched deliberately for his man throughout the
length of the crowded thoroughfare, standing the while on the
topmost step of the Governor's mansion that great, old-fashioned
structure resembling, in many details, a fortification, with its
two wings like bastions extending to the rear, its spacious yard
enclosed with a high wall and ornamented with two great rows
of lofty pine trees. It was the most stately house within the
confines of the city and, with Christ Church, made Second Street
one of the aristocratic thoroughfares of the town.
VOL. CXI. 16
242 THE LOYALIST [May,
With difficulty, Stephen discerned Anderson walking briskly
in the direction of Market Street. He set off immediately, taking
care to keep at a safe distance behind him. He met several
acquaintances, to whom he doffed his hat, while he pursued his
quest with lively interest and attention. When he reached
Market Street he was obliged to pause near a shop window lest
he might overtake Anderson, who had halted to exchange the
pleasantries of the day with a young and attractive couple. On
they went again, deliberately and persistently, until, at length,
it began to dawn upon Stephen that they were headed for the
Germantown road, and for the Allison's house.
What strange relation was arising between Marjorie and
that man? Anderson is paying marked attention to her, he began
to muse to himself, too much attention, perhaps, for one whose
whole existence is clouded with a veil of mystery. Undoubtedly
he is meeting with some encouragement, if not reciprocation
(perish the thought!), for he is persistent in his attention, and
this Stephen resented and deplored. Yet this man was not with-
out charm. There was something fascinating about him which
even he was obliged to confess was compelling. What if she
had been captivated by him, by his engaging personal qualities,
by his prepossessing appearance, by his habit of gentle speech,
by his dignity and his ease of manner! Justifiable irritation pos-
sessed him.
There was little doubt now as to Anderson's destination.
Plainly, he was bent on one purpose. The further he walked,
the more evident this became. Stephen wanted to be sure,
however, and pursued his way until he had seen his man turn
into the Allisons' house. Then, turning deliberately, he began to
retrace his steps.
"This looks like the kind of book. Has it the 'Largo?' "
Anderson sat on the music-stool before the clavichord, turn-
ing over the pages of a volume that rested on the rack.
"Perhaps. I scarce think I know what it is. I have never
heard it."
Marjorie was near by. She had been musing over the keys,
letting her fingers wander where they would when he had called.
He would not disturb her for all the world, nevertheless he
yielded to her entreaties to take her place on the stool.
"You have never heard Handel? The 'Largo,' or the greatest
of all oratorios, his Messiah?"
"Never!"
He did not reply. Instead he broke into the open chords,
1920.] THE LOYALIST 243
the sweetly solemn, majestic harmony of the "Largo." He played
it entirely from memory, very slowly, very softly at first, until
the measured notes, swelling into volume, filled the room in a
loud arpeggio.
"That is beautiful," she exclaimed with enthusiasm, "I
should have said exquisite. May I learn it?"
"Surely there must be a copy in the city. I shall consider
it a favor to procure one for you."
"I should be delighted, I am sure."
He played it again, she watching him. It was astonishing to
note the perfect ease and grace with which he performed. The
erect carriage, the fine mold of the head, the delicately carved
features attracted her attention, while talents with which he was
so signally endowed, furnished matter for reflection. He was ex-
ceedingly fascinating, a danger to the heart of any woman. Still
Marjorie was shrewd enough to peer beneath his superficial
qualities, and to become absorbed in a penetrating study of the
man, his character, his peculiarities so absorbed, in fact, that the
door behind her opened and closed without attracting her attention.
"I must obtain that copy," she announced as she turned
towards her chair.
"Why, father!" she exclaimed. When did you come?
Mr. Anderson, father you already know him."
"Well, met, my boy. You are somewhat of a musician. I
was listening."
"Just enough for my own amusement," laughed the younger
man. "I know a few notes."
"Be not quick to believe him, father. He plays beautifully."
Mr. Allison sat down.
"Accomplishments are useful ornaments. Nowadays a man
succeeds best who can best impress. People want to see one's
gifts."
"The greatest of talents often lie buried. Prosperity thrives
on pretence."
"True. I'm beginning to think that way myself, the way
things are going."
"With the war?" he asked.
"With everything. I think Congress will fail to realize its
boasts, and Arnold is a huge pretender, and
"He has lost favor with the people."
"Lost it? He never had it from the day he arrived. People
do not like that sort of thing."
Anderson watched him intently and Marjorie watched An-
derson.
244 THE LOYALIST [May,
"He may resign for a command in the army. I have heard
it said that he dislikes his office."
"Would to God he did! Or else go over to the other side."
Anderson's head turned the least little fraction so that
Marjorie could see the flash light up his eyes.
"He could not desert the cause now without becoming a
traitor."
A pause followed.
"Men of lofty patriotism often disagree in the manner of
political action. We have many loyalists among us."
"Yet they are not patriots."
"No! They are not, viewed from our standpoint. But every
colony has a different motive in the war. Now that some have
obtained their rights, they are satisfied with the situation. I
don't know but that we would be as well off if the present state
of affairs were allowed to stand."
"What do the Catholics of the Colonies think?"
This was a bold question yet he ventured to ask it.
"We would fare as well with England as with some of our
own," answered Marjorie decisively.
Anderson looked at her for a minute.
"Never!" replied Mr. Allison with emphasis.
"See how Canada fared," insisted Marjorie.
"Tush!"
Anderson listened attentively. Here was a division of
opinion within the same family; the father intensely loyal, the
daughter somewhat inclined to analysis. A new light was thrown
upon her, which afforded him evident satisfaction and conscious
enjoyment. To have discovered this mind of apparent candor
and unaffected breadth was of supreme import to him at this
critical moment. He felt sure that he had met with a character
of more than ordinary self-determination which might, if tuned
properly, display a capacity for prodigious possibilities, for, in
human nature, he believed the chord of self-interest to be ever
responsive to adequate and opportune appeal.
Marjorie might unconsciously prove advantageous to him.
It was essential for the maturing of his plans to obtain Catholic
cooperation. She was a devout Catholic and had been, in so far
as he had been enabled to discover, an ardent Whig. True, he
had but few occasions to study her, nevertheless today had fur-
nished him with an inkling which gave her greater breadth in
his eyes than he was before conscious of. The remark just made
might indicate that she favored foreign rule in the interest of
religious toleration, yet such a declaration was by no means de-
1920. j THE LOYALIST 245
cisive. Still he would labor to this end in the hope that she might
ultimately see her way clear to cooperate with him in his
designs.
"We are losing vast numbers through the Alliance," volun-
teered Anderson.
"I suppose so," admitted Mr. Allison. "Many of the Colonists
cannot endure the thought of begging assistance from a great
Roman Catholic power. They fear, perhaps, that France will use
the opportunity to inflict on us the worst form of colonialism and
destroy the Protestant religion."
"But it isn't the Protestants who are deserting," persisted
Anderson. "The Catholics are not unmindful of the hostile spirit
displayed by the Colonists in the early days. They, too, are cast-
ing different lots."
"Not us. Every one of us is a Whig. Some have faltered,
but we do not want them."
"And yet the reports from New York seem to indicate that
the recruiting there is meeting with success."
"The Catholic regiment? I'll wager that it never will exist
except on paper. There are no Tories, no falterers, no final
deserters among the American Catholics."
"What efforts are being made in Philadelphia?" asked Mar-
jorie.
"None that I know of," was the grave reply. "I did hear,
however, that an opportunity would be given those who are de-
sirous of enlisting in New York."
Marjorie sat and watched him.
"I heard Father Farmer was invited to become its chaplain,"
observed Mr. Allison.
"Did he?"
"He did not. He told me himself that he wrote a kind letter
with a stern refusal."
And so they talked; talked for the best part of an hour, now
of the city's activities, now of the Governor, now of the success
of the campaign. Until Anderson felt that he had long overstayed
his leave.
"I am sorry to leave your company." Then to Marjorie,
"At Shippen's tomorrow?"
"Yes. Will you come for me? If you won't I daresay I shall
meet you there."
"Of course I'll come. Please await me."
There was a certain exhilaration for Marjorie in the pres-
ence of this man; and while she felt that she did not care
246 THE LOYALIST [May,
for him, she was conscious, nevertheless, of a certain subtle in-
fluence about him which she was powerless to define. It has been
said that not all who know their mind, know their heart; for the
heart often perceives and reasons in a manner wholly peculiar
to itself. Marjorie was aware of this and it required her utmost
effort to respond solely to the less alluring promptings of her
firm will. She was decided to frequent the company of her new
acquaintance, on the pretence of being impelled by her feelings,
in order to exchange confidences with him and emerge the victor
in the combat.
She would allow him to see her again that she might learn
more about him and his strange origin. Stephen had suggested
to her the merest suspicion concerning him. There was the pos-
sibility that the germ of this suspicion might develop and in her
presence. The contingency was certainly equal to the adventure.
It was not necessary that she pay Peggy a formal call. Im-
mediately after the announcement of the engagement, she had
gone to offer her congratulations to the prospective bride upon
her enviable and happy fortune. The note, which again had come
into her possession upon Stephen's return of it, whose contents
were still unknown to her, she had restored to Peggy together
with a full explanation of its loss and its subsequent discovery.
One phase of its history, however, she had purposely overlooked.
It might have proved embarrassing for her to relate how it
chanced to fall into the hands of Stephen. And as he had made
no comment upon its return, she was satisfied that the incident
was unworthy of mention.
Anderson called promptly on the hour and found her wait-
ing. By mutual agreement they walked into town. This was pref-
erable, for there was no apparent haste and, for the present, no
greater desire throbbed within them than the company of their
own selves. For, as they talked continually of themselves, they
could never weary of one another's company.
The country about them was superb. The fields stood
straight in green and gold on every side of the silvery road.
Beside them, as they passed, great trees reared themselves aloft
from the greensward, which divided the road from the footpath,
and rustled in the breeze, allowing the afternoon sunshine to
reveal itself in patches and glimpses. The air was a sea of
subdued light, resonant with the liquid notes of the robin and the
whistle of the quail, intruders upon the tranquility of the hot
Sunday afternoon.
"Does it not strike you that there are but few persons with
whom it is possible to converse seriously?"
1920.] THE LOYALIST 247
"Seriously?" asked Marjorie. "What do you call seriously?"
"In an intelligent manner, with perfect ease and attention."
"I suppose that this is due to the great want of sincerity
among men."
"That, as well as the impatient desire we possess of intruding
our own thoughts upon our hearer, with little or no desire of
listening to those he may want to express."
"We are sincere with no one but ourselves, don't you think?
The mere fact of the entrance of a second person means that we
must try to impress him. You have said that prosperity thrives
on pretence."
"And I repeat it. But with friends all guile and dissimulation
ceases. We often praise the merits of our neighbor in the hope
that he, in turn, will praise us. Only a few have the humility
and the whole-hearted simplicity to listen well and to answer
well. Sincerity to my mind is often a snare to gain the confidence
of others."
There was depth to his reasoning, Marjorie thought, which
was riddle-like as well. It was amazing to her how well he could
talk on any given topic, naturally, easily, seriously, as the case
might be. He never seemed to assume the mastery of any con-
versation, nor to talk with an air of authority on any subject,
but was alive to all topics and entered into all with the same
apparent cleverness and animated interest.
He stopped suddenly and exerted a gentle though firm pres-
sure on her arm, obliging her to halt her steps. Surprised, she
turned and looked at him.
"What is it?" she asked.
There was no response. Instead, she looked in the direction
of his gaze. Then she saw.
A large black snake lay in graceful curves across their path
several rods ahead. Its head was somewhat elevated and rigid.
Before it fluttered a small chickadee in a sort of strange, though
powerless fascination, its wings partly open in a trembling man-
ner, its chirp noisy and incessant, its movement rapid and nerv-
ous, as it partly advanced, partly retreated before its enchanter.
Nearer and nearer it came, with a great scurrying of feet and
wings, towards the motionless head of the serpent. Until Ander-
son, picking a stone from the roadside, threw a well-aimed shot,
which bounded over the head of the snake, causing it to turn
immediately and crawl into the recesses of the deep underbrush
of the adjoining field. The bird, freed from the source of its
sinister charm, flew out of sight into safety.
"Thank God!" Marjorie breathed. "I was greatly frightened."
248 THE LOYALIST [May,
"Nothing would have saved that bird," was the reply. "He
already was powerless."
Marjorie did not answer to this, but became very quiet and
pensive. They walked on in silence.
Nearing the home of Peggy, they beheld General Arnold
seated on the spacious veranda in the company of his betrothed.
Here was intrusion with a vengeance, Marjorie thought, but the
beaming face and the welcoming expression soon dispelled her
fears.
"Miss Shippen," Anderson said, as he advanced immediately
toward her to seize her hand, "allow me to offer my tender though
tardy congratulations. It was with the greatest joy that I heard
the happy announcement."
"You are most kind, Mr. Anderson, and I thank you for it,"
was the soft response.
"And you, General," said Marjorie. "Let me congratulate
you upon your excellent choice."
"Rather upon my good fortune," the Governor replied with
a generous smile.
Peggy blushed at the compliment.
"How long before we may offer similar greetings to you?"
he asked of Mr. Anderson, who was assisting Marjorie into a
chair by the side of Peggy.
"Oh! Love rules his own kingdom and I am an alien."
He drew himself near to the Governor and the conversation
turned naturally and generally to the delicious evening. The
very atmosphere thrilled with romance.
[TO BE CONTINUED.]
IRew Boohs.
THE LETTERS OF ST. TERESA. A complete edition translated
from the Spanish and annotated by the Benedictines of
Stanbrook. With an Introduction by Cardinal Gasquet.
Volume I. New York: Benziger Brothers.
This precious addition to the Teresian translations of the
Nuns of Stanbrook Abbey, probably will be the last. They have
given us the Saint's Interior Castle, Way of Perfection, Poems and
Minor Prose Writings, all versions made directly from her native
tongue, learnedly and sympathetically edited. Their service to
the English-speaking clients of the greatest of modern mystics
is incalculable.
The letters cover St. Teresa's entire public life, the twenty
years from her first foundation at Avila till close upon her happy
departure to Paradise in 1582. They are addressed to her closest
intimates, religious and secular, including her principal spiritual
advisers; many of them were written also to persons of great
prominence, including King Philip II., and several canonized
saints. She was at home with everybody. Her native candor,
her entire absence of human respect, her perfect mastery of a
lucid style, and the immense sacredness of the topics she usually
discussed, give to her letters the highest spiritual value. They
are her literary relics. Compelled by obedience, St. Teresa wrote
her Life, likewise the history of her Foundations, both truly great
books.
But better, in some respects, even than these two great works,
better because bringing us into her most sacred confidences, are
these Letters. They form a self-written chronicle of St. Teresa's
later and most important era. They impart a new sense of real-
ism to our knowledge of her, eliciting deeper veneration for one
of the most fascinating characters formed by the Holy Spirit dur-
ing many ages.
The Stanbrook Nuns, besides procuring Cardinal Gasquet's
invaluable introduction, have distributed editorial comments
throughout the text, making St. Teresa live again in the local and
personal environment of their origin.
One may well envy the translators their privilege of spending
so many years within the cloister of the Saint's holiness, trans-
lating her writings, listening to her noble Spanish idiom as she
discoursed, with contagious enthusiasm, of divine things, uncon-
sciously heartening all future generations to greater and greater
zeal for God's honor and men's salvation.
250 NEW BOOKS [May,
"MARSE HENRY," AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. By Henry Walter-
son. Two volumes. New York: George H. Doran & Co. $10.00.
Colonel Henry Watterson of the Louisville Courier-Journal
has written his reminiscences as only a Southern gentleman, a
Jacksonian Democrat, and a journalist of the post-bellum school
could pen them. Narrated in a colloquial tone, there is little of
the egotism or garrulity of the publicist, who rightly regards
himself as a political force, a national observer, and an appraiser
of men's motives and characters. For sixty odd years, "Marse
Henry" has been an observer who allowed few events to escape
his searching analysis, and few Americans of note have crossed
the stage without making his acquaintance and meeting his ap-
praisement. Watterson is never neutral, never without a sturdy
opinion. Furthermore, neither an office-holder nor a seeker of
patronage, he has guarded so well his heritage of free speech,
that he can castigate the leaders of his party when they fall into
the snares of Populism or speak in terms of the world rather than
of America. In general, if a man's interpretation of democracy
does not differ from that of Jefferson, Jackson, Tilden, and Wat-
terson a sort of political quadrilateral fortress Watterson's
estimate is tolerant and justly fair, even in its picturesque candor.
Always there is sincerity and an intuitive perspicacity which
challenges the reader, and will attract the student despite the in-
convenience of a wretched arrangement and no index.
Washington, of his early years, Watterson pictures as quite
as unattractive as the poet Tom Moore found it. His own father,
a representative from Tennessee, led so convivial a life with
Senator Franklin Pierce, that both had been whisked away by
irate families to preserve them from publicans and politicians.
Yet, they renewed associations, one as editor of the Washington
Union, the other as President of the United States. It was in this
newspaper office and around Kimball's livery stable, headquarters
for frontier statesmen, that the boy was schooled rather than by
his private tutors or during his impatient attendance at a Phila-
delphia academy. His style as a writer is ascribed to his con-
nection as a reporter with Jack Savage, "a brilliant Irishman,
who with Devin Relley, John Mitchell, Thomas Francis Meagher,
his intimates, made a pretty good Irishman of me. They were
'48 men with literary gifts, who certainly helped me along
with my writing." Through his family position he was on intimate
terms with Washington's leaders, revelling in their society, when
the war ended all, the War of the Sections, as Watterson per-
sistently and justly labels the internecine conflicts.
Slightly new is the commentary on the war. Watterson had
1920.] NEW BOOKS 251
never believed in slavery, had freed his valet, had opposed the
lepeal of the Missouri Compromise, had no sympathy with the
fire-eating radicals, had supported, along with his father, Doug-
las, and had ascribed to the latter's view of his opponent:
"Lincoln is a good man, in fact a great man, and by far the
ablest debater I have ever met." With secession, he was at odds,
and hence hoped to retire to literary seclusion in Tennessee. Yet,
when the crisis came, like many another how many we shall
never know he followed his State. Looking back, he is inclined
to believe that the secessionists had a debatable if not a logical
position, and that if the erring Sister-States had been suffered to
depart in peace, they would have soon clamored for re-admission
into the Union. Slavery proved the obstacle even to Southern
success, for as Slidel suggested to Watterson, if slavery could
have been gradually abolished without disrupting the Confederate
armies, France and England would have intervened. Reconstruc-
tion is only seen as a vicious attempt to ruin the South by a
radical Republican Congress, desirous of turning Dixie-land into
"a carpet-bag Poland and a terrorized Ireland." "To this ghastly
end," he writes, "had come slavery and secession; and all the
pomp, pride, and circumstance of the Confederacy. To this bitter
end had come the soldiership of Lee, and Jackson, and Johnston
and the myriads of brave men who had followed them." At this
moment, "Marse Henry" accepted the editorship of the Courier-
Journal, which waged the long campaign for honest reconstruc-
tion, bridging the chasm between the sections, and the burial of
the "bloody shirt."
Scattered sections of the volumes dealing with the Liberal
Republican movement and the disputed election of 1876, offer
original material which no future historian can afford to ignore.
Elsewhere there is not available so complete a survey of those
vitally important political episodes and their promoters, so ideal-
istic and impractical. Greeley, Watterson regards as the last of
the old editors, and Samuel Tilden as the last of the orthodox
Democrats. With Cleveland, he parted company because of his
tariff heresies, and with Bryan's cheap money fallacies he could
no more agree than he can accept Wilson with his personal am-
bition, federalizing tendencies, and League of Nations. Taken to
task for bolting the organization, the Colonel questions its loyalty
to the past, urging that, like the Republican Party, it has repu-
diated its founders. Party alignments have become artificial, for
politicians, like actors, dissimulate to please the multitude. No
longer is it North against South or even East against West. The
agitator downs the statesman; fads displace principles; for
252 NEW BOOKS [May,
it is an age which "teaches men to read, not to think."
Prohibition and woman suffrage, the least objectionable phase of
feminism, by federal amendment, have destroyed what was left
of old line Democracy. The coup de grace has been struck by
Wilson, "the disciple who thinks himself a doctrinaire," Wilson
of the coat of many colors, of the run-away pen, who "proposes
to bind the hands of a giant and take lottery chances on the
future," in order to enter the new jingoist role of moral custodian
of the world. This true, Walter son rejoices that he is eighty
years of age!
Journalists will find an especial appeal in Watterson's favor-
able view of schools of journalism, his associations with, as well
as estimates of, many whose names will be heralded in the annals
of the press.
A bon homme himself, Watterson loved raconteurs, game-
sters, reporters, actors, and knight-errants, for he has always
been one of them, gifted as he is with a boundless, if somewhat
erratic, versatility. A master of epigram, a rare story teller, the
wielder of an ironic, snarling pen, an honest man, a candid
speaker, an idealist, tolerant in religious matters, something of
an optimist, a connoisseur of mint juleps, but above all things
else, a Kentucky Colonel and an old-style Democrat, such is
"Marse Henry" Watterson in the flesh and in his book.
THE NEW BLACK MAGIC. By J. Godfrey Raupert, K.S.G. New
York : The Devin-Adair Co. $2.00.
This latest volume from the authoritative pen of Mr. Raupert
serves as an antidote to the poisonous influence of Sir Oliver
Lodge's visit to America. He, together with Sir Conan Doyle, are
singled out as the special adversaries, and their fantastic theories
and maudlin sentimentality receive scant mercy. In the opening
chapters, Mr. Raupert presents the claims of the Spiritists ac-
curately and specifically, quoting passages from their most repre-
sentative works. In the succeeding chapters, he thoroughly dis-
proves their contentions from all viewpoints, from the evidence of
history, of fact, of true science and from reason. In the last
chapter, "The Inevitable Inference," he draws his conclusion that
these spirits "who come to us in the forms and with the voices
of our dead, are not really spirits of the dead at all, but are some
of those fallen angels of which the true revelation speaks."
Accordingly, throughout the book, there is continually sounded
the note of warning against any meddling with these phenomena
and spirit manifestations. Not only do their contradictory state-
ments give clear proof of their origin, but the moral, intellectual,
1920.] NEW BOOKS 253
and physical degeneration which they invariably produce sub-
stantiate the author's contention that "never probably in all the
history of the world has a greater danger threatened our moral
and social life."
To the scientific investigator, the conclusions of Mr. Raupert,
based as they are on an intimate knowledge of the subject,
should furnish a danger signal, while to the over-curious, they
should prove a strong deterrent. While the book is a scientific
repudiation of the claims of the Spiritists, it is also a magnificent
eulogium of that true belief of the other world, as taught by the
Church.
SCIENCE AND MORALS, AND OTHER ESSAYS. By Sir Bertram
Windle. London : Burns & Gates, Ltd. 7 s.
This, Sir Bertram Windle's latest volume, is worth while and
very much worth while. It is worth while as a readable and
popularly rendered contribution to apologetical literature: it is
very much worth while because it is a contribution from a recog-
nized scientist on a subject of wide scientific consequence.
The first chapter of the book is a sharp critical commentary
on certain scientists, turned moralists. The moral of the chapter
is the advice given to the cobbler in the old proverb. The second,
gives his historical accounting for what he calls modern Theo-
phobia a Calvinistic by-product in the dominant literary cur-
rents of the past century and a half. It contains some pregnant
observations on Spiritism. "Within and Without the System" is
a protest against the fallacy of "separatism," as a too common
phenomenon among biologists. It is the most technical chapter
of the volume. "The Tyranny of the Church" in keeping
"Science in Bondage," an old subject in apologetical literature, is
refreshingly re-treated in the fourth chapter. This, with certain
chapters of Von Ruville's Back to Holy Church, "should be in
every scientist's library." Of the five other chapters one may say
in all truth that each is a contribution in itself to biological apolo-
getics. Each is worth reading, worth keeping, worth advertising
among one's friends.
The book's general thesis is expressed in the concluding sen-
tences of the fifth chapter: "We are anxious," says Dr. Windle,
"that science and scientific teaching be assisted in every possible
way. But let us be quite clear that, while science has much to
teach us and we much to learn from her, there are things to
which she has no message to the world. The Minor Prophets of
science are never tired of advising theologians to keep their hands
off science. The Major Prophets are too busy to occupy them-
254 NEW BOOKS [May,
selves with such polemics. But the theologian is abundantly in
his right in saying to the scientific writer, 'Hands off morals!' for
with morality science has nothing to do. Let us at any rate avoid
that form of kultur which consists in bending Natural History to
the teaching of conduct, unconnected by any Christian injunctions
to soften its barbarities."
THE MAID OF ORLEANS. By M. S. C. Smith. New York:
Thomas Y. Crowell Co. $1.25.
This history of Joan of Arc, for girls, is a commendable piece
of work. All that is essential for knowledge of the historical cir-
cumstances is given concisely, though interestingly, while all that
relates to the character of the girl-martyr is dwelt upon in loving
detail. Most appropriately, the latter portion of the book deals
not only with her canonization, but also with the wonderful in-
crease of devotion to her developed during the War, the awaken-
ing in minds non-Catholic, even non-religious, of reverent interest
in her personality, the "Pardon, Jeanne!" of the English soldiers
as they passed her statue, the tribute of the popular song, "Joan
of Arc, they are calling you." The work is an excellent means
for the inculcation and intensifying of understanding love for the
newly-canonized saint.
LIBERALISM IN AMERICA. By Harold Stearns. New York:
Boni & Liveright. $1.75.
This book merits its title by the law of contraries. Instead
of being a narrative of the "Origin, Temporary Collapse and
Future" of Liberalism, as the sub-title declares, it is a condemna-
tion of our unliberalism in the past, an expose of the Govern-
ment's despotism during the late War, and a grave fear that lib-
eral principles may not control in the impending social revolu-
tion. The evils of our present system and its problems are por-
trayed with great lucidity; the remedies offered by Liberalism are
rather vague and shadowy. Herein lies the fundamental weakness
of the discussion. One gathers no clearly defined impression of
what Liberalism is or expects to do, and who are the Liberals.
The author says, "I have attempted to make Liberalism mean not
a body of specific beliefs or a particular creed, but an attitude and
a temper and an approach to all beliefs and creeds equally." And
earlier, "That the core of liberal philosophy is respect for the indi-
vidual and his freedom of conscience and opinion." But the
author's interpretation of such a tolerance seems to be irrestraint
of any kind. The utter freedom which he pleads, in its develop-
ment must lead to anarchy and confusion. Social life necessarily
1920.] NEW BOOKS 255
requires law, and law, of its nature, must curtail some of the
individual's freedom, must impose certain restrictions, and must
employ compulsion, when necessary, for the good of the com-
munity.
In his preface, the author disarms the critic by giving what
he calls a reasonably fair review. We agree with him when he
says that "the volume is slightly uneven in tone" and "that no defi-
nite remedies are advanced for the curing of the evils exposed."
We would distinguish his meaning when he calls the book "un-
conventional" and "provocative." In these times, it is quite con-
ventional to strive for the unconventional, and so the book falls
into a well-defined category. It is "provocative" in the sense of
being "an irritant," for it casts a shadow over almost every phase
of public endeavor. Mr. Stearns writes impassionately and with a
refreshing verve that carries the reader headlong with him.
PREACHING. By Rev. W. B. O'Dowd. New York: Longmans,
Green & Co. $2.25 net.
Father O'Dowd's book on Preaching contains in brief compass
the essentials of a very vast and difficult subject. He sticks rigid-
ly to his theme of guiding the average young priest to address ac-
ceptably the average parochial congregation. A priori it would
seem the easiest task in the world; for is not the priest a well-
educated man, and has he not been specially trained in view of his
profession? But sad experience proves that really good preachers
are extremely rare, and even acceptable preachers, who can hold
the interest of a congregation are by no means common. Father
O'Dowd advises the young priest to write out his first sermons in
their entirety, and to learn them word for word. Then gradually
as he acquires facility in speaking and self-confidence, to emanci-
pate himself more and more from the manuscript, until at last he
is able to speak extempore as long as he possesses the heads of
his discourse. But Father O'Dowd wisely recognizes that the
personal equation enters more largely than elsewhere into the
preparation of a sermon, and hence he gives ((pp. 106-108) Mgr.
Benson's method of preparing a sermon which is almost diametri-
cally opposite. Chapter III., which describes and illustrates "real
and unreal preaching," is also very good. The heart must be
moved before the mouth can utter with conviction, and a preacher
will succeed in making others feel only what he himself has felt
first. Nor is the author such a slave to convention as to recom-
mend famous preachers (e. g., St. Augustine), whose genius pre-
cludes their being either safe or suitable models for ordinary
mortals.
256 NEW BOOKS [May,
Appendix IV. furnishes subjects for a three years' course of
sermons, and gives the references to aid in their composition.
The book is full of valuable counsel and hints to young preachers.
A HISTORY OF FRANCE. By William S. Davis. Boston:
Houghton Mifllin Co. $3.50.
Since the history of France is the history of all Europe, to
present it in an abridged form, suitable for the class-room and
the average reader, is a test of real historical power. Professor
Davis has done fairly well, and in a measure given us a clear and
dramatic portrayal of the very intricate national life of this inter-
esting people. He has wisely omitted much of the irrelevant
military and diplomatic details and has insisted more on the de-
velopment of the national consciousness. As a result there is a
proper foreshortening of the earlier history and a greater em-
phasis on the periods nearer our own. Though one can clearly
discern the author's purpose of presenting his facts fairly and
with due justice to all, he has not perfectly understood the spirit
and ideals that have made France. All writing of history must,
of its very nature, be partisan; the author's early training and
mode of thought, his sub-conscious self will imperceptibly ob-
trude to color his work. Early and mediaeval France cannot be
judged by the ideals of modern American Protestantism; mod-
ern France must not be viewed from the angle of the dominant
anti-clerical party. Despite his evident attempt to be fair, and
his sympathy with our late Allies, Prof. Davis has failed to give
that Catholic tone which is demanded in the history of a Catholic
people.
A DICTIONARY OF CANON LAW. By Rev. P. Trudel, S.S. St.
Louis: B. Herder Book Co. $1.50.
The present work is a concise summary of Canon Law,
alphabetically arranged. There are many who would like to get
some knowledge of the laws o/ the Church, whether general or
particular, but are deterred by the difficulties of the language in
which the laws are written, or the extensive reading which the
perusal of the whole text would require. This work does away
with such difficulties by presenting in brief form and in the ver-
nacular the ecclesiastical laws. The book has less than two
hundred and fifty pages, yet it is more than an index to the New
Code; it is, as the title declares, a dictionary, containing under
each term or heading, complete explanations of the law. If the
student wishes to examine these various laws in the text of the
Code, he may easily do so, for the author has appended the
Canon number to each point of ecclesiastical legislation.
1920.] NEW BOOKS 257
A SHORT HISTORY OF ROME. Volume II. By Guglielmo Fer-
rero and Corrado Barbagallo. New York: G. P. Putnam's
Sons. $1.90 net.
The leading ideas of this Short History of Rome have already
been developed by Ferrero in the five volumes of his Greatness
and Decline of Rome. His method of setting forth his facts is the
same, although the sketches are necessarily shorter and the
narrative more concise. The second volume deals with the Em-
pire from the death of Julius Caesar to the Fall of the Western
Empire 44 B. C. to 476 A. D.
As an out-and-out rationalist, following German models,
Ferrero is always inaccurate and unfair in discussing Christian-
ity, either in itself or in its relation to the Empire. He styles it
first of all a Jewish sect, whose only message was "the approach-
ing end of the world and the near advent of the Kingdom of
God." This original Gospel was changed by the convert, Paul of
Tarsus, who substituted the doctrine of the redemption of man-
kind from original sin and from evil by Christ's death upon the
Cross. Nero, he tells us, did not persecute the Christians for their
faith; Trajan, "in fact, did Christianity a service by bringing it
to a legal trial;" Diocletian even "hesitated to shed the blood of
the martyrs, despite the provocation of rebellion." The aims of
Julian the Apostate were "lofty and noble even to sublimity"
especially as he fought Christianity through the schools, as do his
modern pagan imitators. We never knew before that Christian-
ity openly combated (or tacitly despised) the sacred duty of
marrying and having children or that the Catholic Church began
at the Council of Sardica in 342. And yet such writers descant
upon the narrowness and obscurantism of the Christian scholar.
THE DRIFT OF PINIONS. By Robert Keable. New York: E. P.
Dutton & Co. $2.00.
When, in 1902, Hugh Benson, then a member of the Anglican
Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield, published The Light
Invisible, a definite step was taken in what we may call the
Anglican school of mystical fiction. A year later Benson became
a Catholic, and there was no one to take the place in High Church
literature, which he had just begun to carve out for himself, until
a woman, writing under the pseudonym, "Michael Wood," began
the series of charming tales which includes The House of Quiet
and The White Island. There have been few to venture into this
unpopular and esoteric field, a field so new to Anglicans that
there are few to follow the spiritually-minded authors, among
whom the Rev. Robert Keable easily ranks as first. The first
VOL. CXI. 17
258 NEW BOOKS [May,
two and the last of the sixteen chapters of The Drift of Pinions
easily rank with Benson at his best, while both the spiritual and
the literary tone throughout the volume are of the highest order.
The chapters just mentioned are frankly about Roman Catholics.
One reads the other chapters carefully to discover that the
clergymen and others who recount their supernatural experiences
are Anglicans. The scene of the South African Mission (known
by experience to the author before he was transferred to a chap-
laincy in the B. E. F.) lends charm and glamour to the subject
matter.
It is a book which cannot fail to interest Catholic readers, and
which, if studied carefully, will give a better insight to the
peculiar psychology of the "extremely High Church" Anglican
than anything that has hitherto appeared in this country.
The chapters, "In No Strange Land," "Our Lady's Pain,"
and "The Acts of the Holy Apostles" are not only the best
stories in the book, but they are the only ones which carry with
them a sense of actuality all the others, devotional, vivid, inter-
penetrated and suffused with the spirit of Catholicism as they are,
are rather what the author wishes and dreams might be in his
own denomination.
THE SOCIAL EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. By George Willis
Cooke. Boston: The Stratford Co. $3.50.
This book aims to show that religion is "a product of social
experience, a form of social organization, an expression of social
need." The author's viewpoint is frankly naturalistic: "It is
to be borne in mind that man is an animal, that he is of animal
origin, that he continues to inherit congenitally much that belongs
to the animal nature; but in many respects he has left far behind
his animal instincts and desires. He has somehow, in the course
of the ages, acquired that marvelous instrument for the develop-
ment of social heredity, language." Religion, then, is a purely
human phenomenon; for Mr. Cooke there is no such thing as the
supernatural.
The author has drawn heavily upon writers of his own way
of thinking. In fact, the volume is a compilation of naturalistic
theories of religion, taken over bodily, without the slightest exer-
cise of the discriminating spirit for which there is so much room,
as there is so much need, in such lucubrations. Nowhere is there
evidence of any scientific discernment. For instance, Mr. Cooke
quotes sympathetically the views of Hartland and of Cheyne, who
opine that the Virgin Birth of Our Lord is a heathen myth bor-
rowed from Greek or from Babylonian mythology, and invested
1920.] NEW BOOKS 259
with a Jewish character. Now for this theory there has not
been a particle of solid proof adduced from any source since the
days when Justin the Martyr refuted a similar objection.
Parallels, indeed, may be found, but the deep-lying differences be-
tween them and the Christian belief, as well as the difficulty
recognized by all historians of transplanting a heathen myth
to Jewish, Christian soil, have always appealed to serious scholars
as decisive. Harnack's testimony that the myth explanation of
the Virgin Birth contradicts the entire earliest development of
Christian tradition, is not even noticed in this volume.
We looked for the usual sciolist's cavil at the philosophic
school of religious thought, and were not disappointed. "Too
long have we listened to the metaphysicians and theologians.
They have not led us to the green meadows of life, but into a
tangled wilderness of subtleties and abstractions. All their be-
liefs and dogmas may well be swept away." This from a man
who extends the easy hospitality of his pages to such "theologians"
as Stanley Hall, H. G. Wells, and Roy Wood Sellars.
All creeds, including, of course, the Christian creed, are
doomed to go into the "dust heaps of the past," but they will be
succeeded by a more satisfying religion. "What man has made
man can make again. He has created many a spiritual world in
the past, and he can build more stately mansions for the souls in
years to come." What these "stately mansions" will be, the
author refrains from telling us, but we cannot help recalling
Talleyrand's recipe for founding a new religion.
The foreword gravely informs us that "Mr. Cook is prophet
quite as much as scholar."
BOLSHEVISM AND THE UNITED STATES. By Charles Edward
Russell. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Co. $1.50 net.
The author of this volume aims not at the destruction, but
at a radical and sweeping alteration of the present "house of
civilization." The proximate purpose of his book, he informs us,
is that it "may serve to warn my countrymen." He darkens
nearly the entire treatise with graphic descriptions of the horrors
produced by Russian Bolshevism, makes the rain of American
industrial injustice beat into the reader's face, and finally the
conclusion flashes forth that since "labor creates all the wealth
of the world," the "doom of the wage system is foreshadowed,"
and the cooperative system "is already in sight."
From purely empirical standards the work is what a book-
seller might call intensely absorbing. The author was commis-
sioned to visit the scene of the terrible tragedy that he recounts,
260 NEW BOOKS [May,
and the perusal of nearly ninety per cent of the book is like the un-
coiling of a reel of sensational pictures, Lenine, obsessed with the
Great Idea, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, in the title
role.
Skillful as the writer is in sketching descriptions, the same
compliment cannot be paid to him when he starts drawing con-
clusions. Should the book be studied in view of knowing just
what Bolshevism is, the reward comes through such attenuated
remarks as: "In the last analysis, Bolshevism is not really a
creed or a doctrine or a system. Bolshevism is an order of mind."
Reference to the United States is brief. In our own land,
Bolshevists, actual and potential, are classified under seven
headings, one of the groups consisting of "certain intellectuals,
clergymen, university professors, educators, writers and artists."
One reflects bewilderingly in an effort to attach favorable con-
notations to the terms of such statements as this: "We may as
well recognize the fact that the thesis with which Lenine started
is substantially sound."
It is praiseworthy to concede the existence of acute social
evils, to propose remedies, and to warn one's country against im-
pending danger. Economic prudence is disclosed in emphasizing
production, distribution and the inter-dependence of both indi-
viduals and nations. But it would be far healthier for the read-
ing public, if producers of popular, though ephemeral, books
would express more pointedly the moral aspects of life, rather
than aggravate existing social unrest by promising a new paradise
through mere economic reforms.
HEY RUB-A-DUB-DUB. By Theodore Dreiser. New York : Boni
& Liveright. $2.00 net.
Mr. Dreiser's volume of essays, far from being "exciting,"
as the publisher's cover promised, is dull and drab in the ex-
treme. He states so many things that are not so, and he states
them so arrogantly and cocksuredly, that the intelligent reader
asks himself in amazement: "How can such an inane book
poorly written, full of repetitions, blatant in its irreligion, shame-
less in its immorality find enough readers to warrant publica-
tion?"
The writer denies the existence of God the Creator, because,
sponge-like, he has absorbed the teaching of the discredited Ger-
man monist, Haeckel, and finds himself at a loss to solve the
problem of evil. He questions the Ten Commandments and the
moral law, because he cannot settle the simplest questions in
casuistry. He calls all Christians hypocrites, because he has met
1920.] NEW BOOKS 261
a few dishonest ones in his newspaper hack work, and dubs all
lovers of decency, Pharisees, when they will not praise the
indecencies of a Swinburne or they dare to suggest a
censorship of the modern movie. He ridicules the narrowness
of the Christian teaching on marriage, and by "broadness" means
a harking back to the morals of pagan Rome. He declares our
American democracy an utter failure, because the money power
dominates our courts and legislatures, and our statesmen hobnob
with autocrat nations like Japan, England and the old imperial
Russia before its fall.
He tells us that he "is constantly astonished by the thousands
of men exceedingly capable in some mechanical or narrow
technical sense, whose world of philosophic vision is that of a
child." That he is one of the thousands he so vigorously de-
nounces, never enters his mind for an instant. Mr. Dreiser has
no saving sense of humor hence this awful book.
A CRY OUT OF THE DARK. By Henry Bailey Stevens. Boston:
The Four Seas Co. $1.25 net.
This volume contains three one-act plays. They are not
practicable for acting, and were not written for that purpose.
They embody the author's views upon war, which he regards
only as a hideous disease. His manner of expressing himself
shows imagination and excellent literary quality; but from his
limited outlook he contributes nothing which has not been long
and deeply pondered by all thoughtful people. Other worth
while considerations, such as the inspiration of courage, service
and sacrifice, seem to have escaped his attention.
THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS AND OTHER POEMS. By Ben-
jamin R. C. Low. New York: John Lane Co. $1.50 net.
Benjamin Low's new volume is a pursuit of beauty rather
than of happiness if, indeed, the two be definitely separable
and the sonnet sequence, or series, which gives it title, is a group
of fifty-five lyrics related only in what Fiona Macleod would have
called their "nostalgia for sweet, impossible things." Wistful,
yet restrained, is the chord upon which their music ends its
abiding, persistent consciousness that
There is a beauty, after all is said
And after all is sung unreached forever.
Mr. Low shows wide metrical proficiency and an almost con-
fusing wealth of metaphor, but in the last analysis his appeal is
chiefly, perhaps, intellectual. He is not merely a "poet's poet"-
262 NEW BOOKS [May,
he is also a scholar's poet. At once romantic and classic, of the
past and of modernity in his affiliations, his place in contem-
porary American letters is distinctly interesting and challenging.
MINCE PIE. By Christopher Morley. New York: George H.
Doran Co. $1.75.
In his foreword, "Instructions," the author tells us this book
is intended to be read in bed. "Please do not attempt to read it
anywhere else ... If one asks what excuse there can be for
prolonging the existence of these trifles (originally published in
various newspapers and magazines) my answer is that there is
no excuse. But a copy on the bedside shelf may possibly pave the
way to easy slumber. Only a mind debauched by learning (in
Dr. Johnson's phrase) will scrutinize them too anxiously." This
is all very good. No volume can be more delightful for the
luxurious relaxation which one feels propped up in bed, at peace
with the world and on the threshold of slumber than Mince Pie,
which, as a mixture duly flavored and sweetened, proves alluring
to all healthy appetites.
"Two Days We Celebrate" throws sidelights upon Samuel
Johnson with such delicate sympathy that the Great Cham lives
again in his stalwart Christian faith. "163 Innocent Old Men"
is delectable and there is a deal of the lighter psychology in
"Sitting in the Barber's Chair." It is indeed the lighter and
brighter side of life which attracts Mr. Morley, at whose com-
mand are deft touches, a naive and whimsical humor, and an un-
failing literary skill. There are allusions aplenty to prove Mr.
Morley's wide acquaintance with literature, and at the same time
to tickle the palate of the Epicurean without offending the un-
initiate. The interest of the reading public in Mince Pie is a good
sign; it means that the witty, the humorous, and the clever need
not be divorced from the clean.
ALTRUISM: ITS NATURE AND VARIETIES. By George Herbert
Palmer. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. $1.25 net.
This little volume, containing the Ely Lectures for 1917-18 at
the Union Theological Seminary, is, in much, interesting and read-
able. In much else, it may be accused fairly of obfuscating old
and accepted definitions by giving canonized terminology a new
content.
The book is an appeal for selflessness: but there is a lack of
insistence on the only source of the only enduring selflessness.
The chapter of introduction, especially, shows the author to be one
of those who believe that the "conjunct or social self" is the only
1920.] NEW BOOKS 263
"real person." This is pure idealism, sprung of the subjectivist
logic that has come down from Kant. To insist on partial truth-
man's social relations to the extent of denying the other half of
the truth involved man's personality and individuality is an
excess that carries its own condemnation.
i
MYSTICS ALL. By Enid D. Dinnis. St. Louis: B. Herder Book
Co. $1.60 net.
Wide circulation is the rightful due of this welcome collec-
tion of eleven stories which treat of Catholic mysticism, laid, for
the most part, among scenes and people of everyday life. They
combine much diversity of theme with uniformity of interest and
merit. None falls below the standard of the group, but there is
one that surpasses it, "The Lady," a lovely little tale with a quality
for which not even the general excellence had entirely prepared us.
THE PRIESTHOOD OF CHRIST, by the Bishop of Sale (The
Australian Catholic Truth Society), contains a series of ser-
mons preached by the Most Rev. Patrick Phelan, D.D.,
Bishop of Sale in the Cathedral of St. Mary on the occasion of
the consecration of Australasia to the Sacred Heart. The central
idea developed in these sermons is the Priesthood of Christ as
exercised by Himself and shared in by the people of His own and
succeeding generations. These sermons make good reading and
will be found both interesting and instructive.
THE Catechism of Religious Profession, published by the
Brothers of the Sacred Heart at Metuchen, N. J. ($1.50 net),
is a standard work for all religious communities with simple
vows. In question and answer form it discusses various queries
in reference to the religious life, following the outlines of the
Normx and the legislation of the New Code of Canon Law.
Part First treats of the vow in general, of religious profession,
of perfection and the observance of rules and constitutions.
Part Second is concerned with the vows of poverty, chastity, and
obedience, while Part Third deals with perseverance in the insti-
tute.
The volume offers much useful and necessary information
for religious and those considering the question of vocation.
THE canonization this month of Blessed Margaret Mary Alaco-
que has inspired a very beautiful commemorative ode To
Margaret Mary in Heaven, by Rev. Edward F. Garesche, S.J. This
worthy tribute of a gifted poet and devoted client of the Sacred
264 NEW BOOKS [May,
Heart to the "predestined girl, woman of fated and celestial
might," will be welcomed by all who, led by her, have entered "a
strife that holiest Heart to come more near." The poem is pre-
sented by the Queen's Work Press of St. Louis, in a booklet of
attractive size and make-up. Price, 50 cents a copy; $40.00 a
hundred.
GOOD CHEER, by Humphrey J. Desmond ( Chicago :'~A."C. Me-'
Clurg & Co. 60 cents), sets forth a cheerful outlook upon
life. The author arranges his material into eight chapters, each
being subdivided into paragraphs that are, practically, in them-
selves miniature essays. The matter presented contains much
that is sensible and timely. On the whole, the little book repays
reading, especially as its form admits of taking it up, from time
to time, to occupy a leisure minute.
. ', <
THOSE interested in noting the prominence, in many fields of
activity, of Americans who are of Irish birth or ancestry,
will find an excellent and careful summary in Some Contributions
to American Life and History, an address delivered at the Train-
ing School of Teachers, Brooklyn, New York, on March 17, 1920,
by Dennis R. O'Brien.
IN the March issue of THE CATHOLIC WORLD, in giving notice to
a publication of Allyn and Bacon, entitled Everyday Science, we
stated that it was our regret that the book did not contain an
alphabetical Index. As a result of a protest from the publishers,
we find that the particular volume sent to us for review was a
faulty one, and that the properly bound book carries a full Index
of thirty-three pages. We wish, therefore, to withdraw this ex-
ception to the worth of the book which our criticism made and
of repeating our otherwise full approval.
STORIES OF GREAT HEROES, by the Rev. James Higgins
(New York: The Macmillan Co. 60 cents), recounts in
simple fashion the tale of seventeen of the discoverers, explorers
and Apostles of the New World. It aims to interest youth-
ful readers in the men, who, since 1492, have opened up to colon-
ization and civilization the broad plains of America from Canada
to Patagonia. The book will be useful as a supplementary reader
in the third or fourth grades both for history and language
lessons.
1920.] NEW BOOKS 265
FOREIGN PUBLICATIONS.
De sacris particulis abaimo 1730 in senensi basilica S. Francisci
incorruptc servatis, by Agostino Ruelli, O. E. S. A. Siena : tipografla S.
Bernardino, 1917. On the fourteenth of August, 1730, the ciborium pre-
served in the tabernacle of the high altar of the church of St. Francis
of Assisi in Siena was stolen by sacrilegious hands. It contained a
great number of consecrated hosts for the Communion of the faithful
on the feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin. The authorities
of the town instituted a rigorous investigation. On the seventeenth
of August, in the Church of Saint Mary of Provenzano, a seminarian,
Paolo Schiavi, praying before the high altar, saw some hosts in a
broken place in the marble of the altar, on the Gospel side. They
were taken by prelates appointed by the Bishop of the town, and
recognized as those stolen from the Church of St. Francis. Their
number was of 348, besides six fragments. Monsignor Alessandro
Zondadari, Bishop of Siena, ordered them to be transferred with due
solemnity to the Church of St. Francis. On the eighteenth of August
of the same year the sacred particles were placed into a ciborium, and
after fifty years were still found in a perfect state of preservation.
On the tenth of June, 1914, Bishop Monsignor Prospero Scaccia again
certified to their continued miraculous preservation. Studying this
marvelous preservation, F. Agostino Ruelli, a learned Augustinian,
has taken occasion to present an admirable historical and theological
study on Eucharistic miracles. His treatise embraces a most accurate
and critical examination of the sources of the supernatural event of
Siena. The writer possesses an extensive knowledge of the Fathers
of the Church and of St. Thomas. He quotes them frequently and
harmonizes their doctrine with his conclusions. The work of F.
Ruelli deserves cordial welcome from the students of Catholic theology.
It is written in most elegant Latin, and betokens in all its pages the
greatest devotion of the writer towards the Blessed Sacrament.
A publication containing many helpful hints for the education
and up-bringing of children and young people is the review published
by The League for the Popularization of Practical Knowledge, Peda-
gogical and Sociological in the Family. It is called L'Education
Familiale and comes out in Brussels ten times a year. (Rue Victor
Lefevre, 14). The subscription is 9 francs.
Exposition de la Morale Calholique. Morale Speciale. IX. "La
Justice envers Dieu," by Rev. M. A. Janvier, O.P. (Paris: P. Lethiel-
leux. 5/r.), presents the seventeenth course of Lenten conferences
delivered at Notre Dame in Paris by the Abbe Janvier. It treats of
the Worship of God, Exterior and Interior Worship, Public Worship,
the Efficacy of Prayer, the Excellence or Importance of Prayer, and
Sacrifice. At the very beginning of his conferences Father Janvier
declares that he has no confidence in the Paris Peace Conference,
because it made no mention of God in its sittings. He quotes the New
266 NEW BOOKS [May,
Testament most aptly: "Viam pads non cognoverent: non est timor
Dei ante oculos eorum, and the way of peace they have not known.
There is no fear of God before their eyes" (Rom. iii. 17, 18).
Pierre Tequi publishes Le Droit Canon des Laiques, by Rev. J.
Louis Demeuran, a brief synopsis of the New Code of Canon Law for
the use of the laity. Abbe Demeuran follows the order of the Code
throughout, laying special stress upon those laws that in any way
affect the laity. Such a book in English would be welcomed by our
people.
And Marriage, Celibat, Vie Religieuse (3 fr. 50), by the Abbe Mil-
lot, the Vicar General of Versailles, a series of conferences on
marriage, celibacy and religious life. These simple talks to young
girls are illustrated by stories in real life and happenings in the lives
of the saints.
Also Prieres de la Vie Interieure (1 fr. 50). This collection of af-
fective prayers, highly endorsed by the Bishop of Versailles, is well
calculated to promote a growth of spiritual life, grounded in humility
and energized by courageous confidence. Ibo Te du.ce, a spirit that
dares the heights, is the keynote of this little volume, whose author
modestly withholds her name.
From the Librarie Gabriel Beauchesne we have Une Doctrine de
Vie, by Dr. Henri Carriere (7 fr. net), which gathers together in a
volume of some four hundred pages some of the finest passages in the
writings of Henry Bordeaux, the well-known French critic and novel-
ist. Dr. Carriere dedicates his book to the youth of France, asking
them to make a careful study of this writer, who has always waged a
vigorous fight against the enemies of the faith and morals of Catholic
France.
And La Cornpagnie de Jesus, by Rev. Joseph Brucker, S.J. (12 fr.),
a most thorough account of the Jesuits from their foundation to
their suppression (1521-1773). In some eight hundred pages the author
gives us the history of the Society in all the countries of the world,
their missions, schools, literary and scientific labors, etc. He answers
in brief form the many calumnies of their enemies, and sets forth
simply and eloquently the many services the Jesuits have rendered the
Church.
Scintilla; Ignatiante, by Gabriel Hevenesi, S.J. (New York: Fred-
erick Pustet & Co. $1.25; cloth, 75 cents), contains spiritual readings
for every day of the year, selected from the works of St. Ignatius. They
treat of poverty, chastity, obedience, humility, prayer, the love of God,
mortification, spiritual blindness, rash judgment, envy, calumny, scru-
pulosity, etc.
IRecent Events*
The revolutionary government which was
Germany. set up in Berlin under Dr. Wolfgang von
Kapp as Chancellor and General Baron von
Luettwitz as Commander-in-Chief collapsed after a brief existence
of five days. The collapse was brought about by the general apathy
of the people, and the open hostility of all political parties and
particularly by the operation of the general strike which had been
called by President Ebert throughout Germany. Both Kapp and
von Luettwitz and the other leaders of the Revolutionists fled from
Berlin, and the revolutionary troops returned to their barracks at
Doeberitz. A few days later the Ebert Government was again in
control in Berlin.
Almost immediately the restored Government found itself face
to face with serious disorders throughout the country, especially
in Westphalia and the valley of the Ruhr, where the workers en-
deavored to set up a Soviet regime. Armed workmen seized
Essen, and violent fighting took place in Kiel, Leipsic, Hamburg,
Stuttgart, and particularly in the Ruhr district, which was re-
ported aflame with Bolshevism, and where Communist forces were
said to number as many as 70,000 well-armed men. In order to
quell these disorders the Berlin Government sent an armed force
into the region and requested permission of the Allies to increase
the number of her troops in the disturbed district, which, accord-
ing to the Treaty of Versailles, has been neutralized. To this re-
quest England, Italy and the United States seemed disposed to ac-
cede, but France offered opposition.
This division of Allied opinion was intensified at the begin-
ning of April, when France took individual action and sent into
the Rhineland an army of 18,000 men under General Degoutte,
which occupied Frankfort, Darmstadt and Hanau. Her ground
for this action was that the Germans had violated the Treaty pro-
vision which forbade the invasion of the neutralized Rhine valley
by German Government troops. France was supported in this
stand by Belgium, but Great Britain and Italy emphatically dis-
avowed approval of the French occupation. The contention of
the French was, that the Versailles Treaty had been violated, and
that the presence of German troops in the Rhineland was a grave
military danger to France. England, while admitting a technical
violation of the Treaty, felt the military danger to be slight, and
that the Allies' first duty was to permit Germany a free hand in
268 RECENT EVENTS [May,
stamping out Bolshevism within her borders. Sharp notes were
exchanged between France and England, and for a time it looked
as if there would be a dissolution of their alliance, but this was
finally averted in a new settlement.
By this settlement the British Government commits itself
anew to the enforcement of the Versailles Treaty, especially the
clauses prescribing the disarmament of Germany, and which par-
ticularly affect France. The French Government agrees to a slight
extension of the permission to the German Government to main-
tain a limited number of troops in the neutral zone. As soon as
the supplementary troops have been withdrawn by the Berlin
Government, the French troops will quit Frankfort, Darmstadt,
Hanau, Hamburg and Dieburg. The French Government regards
the outcome as a victory. Although it retreats somewhat from
its original stand by agreeing to evacuate Frankfort before all the
German troops are withdrawn from the neutral zone, yet it points
out it has gained the assurance of the enforcement of the disarma-
ment clauses of the Treaty, for the strict carrying out of which
the Rhine move was only a detailed measure. In the new settle-
ment France retains for unforeseen eventualities the right of indi-
vidual action.
The Interallied Commission of Control has recommended that
the August protocol permitting the Germans to have 17,000 troops
in the Ruhr, which expired April 10th, be extended one month.
The Germans asked for a three months' extension. The recom-
mendation of the Interallied Commission will probably be adopted
by the three main Allied Governments. The withdrawal of all
German troops no longer needed in the Ruhr district has already
begun, and the Communist revolt, with the exception of sporadic
outbreaks, seems to have been effectually broken.
Shortly after the return of the Ebert Government to Berlin
an entirely new Cabinet was formed, composed of Majority Social-
ists with six places, Democrats with three, and Centrists with
three. The new Premier, who is also Foreign Secretary, is Her-
man Muller. Gustave Noske, the former Minister of Defence, who
was looked upon as the strongest man in the old Cabinet, has been
replaced by Herr Gessler, the Chief Burgomaster of Nuremberg.
The Labor Federation, whose opposition proved fatal to the Kapp
regime, has expressed its approval of the new Cabinet. Reports
from South Germany, however, indicate that a secession move-
ment, centring in Munich and affecting Bavaria and neighboring
States, is gathering strength. The south Germans are reported
dissatisfied with the coalition Government in Berlin, particularly
because of its recent concessions to the labor unions.
1920.] RECENT EVENTS 269
Similar dissatisfaction with the Berlin administration has
been expressed in the West. The Catholic newspapers in particu-
lar are restive because of what they call the Government's dilatori-
ness in handling the Ruhr insurrection, and have even hinted at a
dissolution of the Republic. Moreover, a commission, represent-
ing the Reichwehr troops operating in the region of Essen and
also the Socialist and Catholic labor organizations there, which is
in Berlin to make representations regarding the pacification of
the region, demands that the Government punish the Communist
leaders immediately. The commission also protests against the
interference of the labor unions in the Government. On the other
hand, recent dispatches show that the rule of the workmen has
ceased throughout the Ruhr district, the executive committees at
Dusseldorf, Elberfeld, Barmen and Hagen having relinquished
authority to the municipal officials in accordance with the peace
terms between the Government and the workers.
Recently the German battleships, Nassau and Ostfriesland,
arrived at the Firth of Forth, this constituting the first steps in
the surrender of the remainder of the German warships under
the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Ultimately the Ostfries-
land, which was reckoned by the Germans one of their first-class
battleships, and which displaces 22,800 tons, will be turned over to
the American Government. The Nassau, which is also of the dread-
naught class, but displaces only 18,000 tons, has been allocated to
Japan. The arrival of these two battleships marks the first de-
livery of German naval vessels since the Scapa Flow incident.
There remain six battleships, several light cruisers and some forty
or fifty torpedo-boat destroyers and a number of submarines to be
delivered. In addition, it has been agreed that fifty-four German
submarines shall be sold for the benefit of the Allies. The alloca-
tion of the remaining vessels has not been determined upon, but
it is understood that Brazil will receive six torpedo-boat destroy-
ers, some submarines and a cruiser. The delivery of these vessels
is expected to take place within a month.
In execution of the armistice terms Germany also has re-
cently delivered to France 2,683 locomotives, of which 697 have
been ceded by France to the Allied Powers.
Financial conditions in Germany have improved during the
past month. Recent quotations on the Berlin Exchange show that
the mark, which before the Kapp revolution stood steadily at
rather more than 300 to the pound sterling, stands now at 216.
Also there has been a drop in price of some important raw mate-
rials, such as copper. But the fall in the mark has been accom-
panied by an all-around rise in prices and by the exhaustion of
270 RECENT EVENTS [May,
some necessaries. There is little or no coal, and the price of
leather has increased enormously. The food situation is decided-
ly worse than a year ago. Imported foodstuffs are three times
dearer than six months ago.
The physical condition of the people, especially the children,
is very poor. At least twenty-five per cent of Berlin's children
between one and fourteen years are badly underfed. Of 485,000
Berlin children, 29,000 are suffering from tuberculosis, according
to the latest statistics, and 77,000 are suffering from various other
illnesses brought on by long underfeeding. In January the fig-
ures for forty-three big towns of Germany showed that over
200,000 children were afflicted with tuberculosis, and 850,000 were
ill from lack of proper food. All great towns report a big increase
in the death rate.
The most important military event of the
Russia. month has been the launching of the long
heralded spring campaign of the Bolshevik
armies against Poland. This campaign began about the middle
of March and has continued to the present, but has met with uni-
form failure, the Poles repulsing, with sanguinary losses to the
enemy, repeated and shifting attacks along a four hundred mile
front, despite the fact that they were greatly outnumbered and
that the Soviet troops used heavy artillery, tanks, armored cars,
and other apparatus captured from General Denikin on the South
Russian front. The most severe fighting has occurred on the
Polesian-Podolian line, near the Galician frontier, the Bolsheviki
concentrating their attacks on this sector in an endeavor to cap-
ture Kovno, an important railroad centre, and Kamenetz-Podolsk,
a city highly prized because of its strategic importance. The
Russian offensive has broken down at all points, due partly to the
superior morale of the Polish troops and partly to the collapse of
the Russian railroad system, which is in no condition to support
an offensive. A recent report of Russian technical experts to the
Allied representatives at Warsaw, shows that there are approxi-
mately only 300 serviceable locomotives throughout the country
as compared with 16,000 before the War.
Meanwhile, peace negotiations have been in progress between
the Bolsheviki and the Poles, but to date without definite result.
The Polish peace terms are severe, the foremost condition being
that Russia must renounce sovereignty to all territory obtained by
Russia through the partition of Poland by the Governments of
Prussia, Austria, and Russia more than a century ago. In addi-
tion, the Poles ask considerable guarantees in the form of a row
1920.] RECENT EVENTS 271
of barrier States, a new cordon sanitaire, under Polish protectorate
and. lying between the neighborhood of Brest-Litovsk and the old
Polish frontier of 1772. The Poles also demand the temporary
occupation of the Government of Smolensk as an additional meas-
ure of security, but this may be a mere talking point to be traded
off for something else.
The Soviet Government in its counter proposal asked for an
armistice along the entire battlefront during the proposed peace
negotiations, and also suggested the holding of the peace confer-
ence in Esthonia instead of Borisov, on the Beresina River, north-
east of Minsk, but the Poles rejected both these proposals, on the
ground, first, that a general armistice would be taken advantage
of by the Bolsheviki to bring up reinforcements, and, second, that
Esthonia, by its negotiation of a treaty with the Russian Soviets,
violated the terms of its existing treaty with Poland. The latest
development of the situation has been the announcement by the
Soviet Government that it considers the last note of the Poles in
the nature of an ultimatum, and declares that the selection of a
city in the military zone for the negotiations and the conclusion
of a merely local armistice are unprecedented. The message con-
cludes by saying that Russia's only alternative is to address a
communication to the United States, Great Britain, France and
Italy, pointing out that the reestablishment of commercial rela-
tions with the Powers will be greatly hindered if Russia is unable
to obtain peace, and that "it is impossible for the Entente to de-
cline responsibility on this occasion when their influence would
induce Poland to adopt a less irreconcilable attitude."
Other military operations of the Bolsheviki have been of a
minor nature. At the beginning of April they launched attacks
on both sides of the River Dvina, apparently opening a drive on
the northern front designed to carry them in the direction of
Vilna. Fighting of an inconclusive character at various points on
this front, has been reported in Lettish dispatches. The Bolshe-
viki also started an offensive against Finland, but this has since
been discontinued.
Novorossisk, the last base in Southern Russia under control
of General Denikin, was captured late in March by the Bolsheviki
and the volunteer force thoroughly defeated. Over 100,000 men
and great quantities of supplies fell into the enemy's hands. With
the remnant of his army Denikin then retreated to the Crimea,
making his base at Theodosia on the Black Sea. Shortly after his
arrival there, however, in the face of a new Bolshevik offensive
in the Crimea, Denikin placed his resignation in the hands of his
councilors and entreated them to select another chief, whereupon
272 RECENT EVENTS [May,
they appointed General Wrangel as commander of the southern
volunteer forces.
General Wrangel is of Norwegian blood, and is such a forceful
character that his adherents believe he can reorganize the
shattered volunteer and Cossack forces better than the Generals
who participated in the campaign around Odessa and Novorossisk,
where the volunteers showed no desire to fight. Volunteer troops
are to occupy Simferopol and Sebastopol. General Alexieff's divi-
sion is to occupy Kertch. Don and Kuban Cossacks are at Eupa-
toria, on the western coast of the Crimea.
According to latest dispatches, the Bolsheviki have not yet
made any headway in the Crimea. Foreign military officers who
watched the evacuation of Novorossisk and other places in the
South, are not optimistic about the defence of the Crimea, how-
ever, because, they assert, the morale of the volunteer troops is
low and there is no general disposition to make a vigorous defen-
sive campaign. On the other hand, the natural defences in this
region are extremely effective, and the Bolshevik army has been
so weakened by the typhus that the volunteers may hold their
ground in spite of the demoralization that exists. It is estimated
that 100,000 refugees are gathered in the Crimea. After his resig-
nation General Denikin went to Constantinople and later, in conse-
quence of the assassination of his chief of staff while visiting the
Russian embassy there, took refuge on a British warship, which
has since been reported to have sailed for Malta.
In the Caucausus the Bolsheviki are advancing rapidly toward
Azerbayan and Georgia. The Georgian Government is so weak
and so hard pressed by its own radical elements that there seems
little hope of successful resistance to the Soviet forces. The
Georgian situation is further complicated by the flood of Cossack
soldiers and civilians fleeing across the mountains ahead of the
Bolshevik advance. Armed Cossacks to the number of 30,000,
moving southward from Novorossisk and to Tuapie are concen-
trated at Sochi, with the Bolsheviki pursuing the Georgians in
their front, the mountains on the one side and the sea on the
other. The Georgians refuse to admit the Cossacks into Georgia
unless they disarm, which the Cossacks decline to do, although
virtually starving. The British have provided a temporary flour
supply to quiet the situation, in the hope of effecting a settlement.
With the sailing of Brigadier General Wm. A. Graves, Com-
mander-in-chief of the American Expeditionary Forces in Siberia,
and about 2,000 men from Vladivostok on April 1st, the evacuation
of American troops from Siberia was completed. A few hours
subsequent to their departure from Vladivostok, a Japanese
1920.] RECENT EVENTS 273
proclamation was posted throughout the city stating that Japanese
troops would not evacuate Siberia at the present time and warn-
ing all inhabitants against any unfriendly attitude on the part of
the Russian population. On April 5th, Japanese troops suddenly
seized Vladivostok in a night attack, ousted the provisional gov-
ernment, which is alleged to have been in communication with the
Bolsheviki, and disarmed all Russians.
The purpose of the Japanese occupation of Vladivostok is
stated to be, to protect Japanese interests, to safeguard the prin-
cipal Japanese base of supplies in Siberia at Vladivostok, to ward
off the threat of Bolshevism which has been advancing steadily
toward the Pacific with the Bolshevik forces through Siberia, and
also to remove the menace to Manchuria and Korea, which lie to
the east and west of Vladivostok. No representations have been
made by the American Government against Japan's action, and it
is not understood that there will be any, as Japan's vital interest
from the point of view of national defence in the maintenance of
troops in Siberia is recognized by this Government. Later dis-
patches state that the Japanese have captured the entire Ussuri
railroad between Vladivostok and Khabarovsk. This line, which
is about four hundred miles long, runs directly north and south
and passes through the important towns of Nikolsk and Ussuri.
The Soviet Government continues to make overtures for trade
to the various countries, neutral and Allied, and recently a Rus-
sian Trade Commission, accompanied by twenty-four experts in
trade and engineering, arrived at Copenhagen from Moscow. It
is the intention of this Commission after a short stay in Denmark
to proceed to London, and perhaps later to the United States.
The Commission will endeavor to get in touch with merchants and
manufacturers in Allied and neutral countries, and start trade be-
tween them and Russia as soon as possible.
In this connection later dispatches announce that the British
delegation has concluded its negotiations with the Russian Soviet
representatives, and that there is good prospect for the early estab-
lishment of trade between Great Britain and Russia. Agreement
for the resumption of commercial relations has been reached also
between Sweden and Russia, providing Great Britain and France
annul the Baltic blockade. Recent dispatches announce the arri-
val of an Italian commercial mission in Athens on its way to Rus-
sia to negotiate with the Soviet Government for the purchase of
raw materials for manufacture. The mission is reported to be
furnished with several million rubles in cash.
The ban on trade relations between this country and Russia
may soon be lifted, according to a report from Washington, al-
VOL. CXI. 18
274 RECENT EVENTS [May,
though the recent American proposal to the Supreme Council for
concerted action to this end by Great Britain, France, Italy and
the United States has temporarily deferred action here. The
Allies are believed to be awaiting a conference with members of the
Russian cooperative mission before replying to the American sug-
gestion. Whatever the Allies decide, however, American officials
say, it is probable that formal notice would soon be given by the
United States that restrictions now in force have been withdrawn.
There will be no objection to the visit to this country of the Rus-
sian cooperative mission, it was added, if the members are able to
prove absence of any official connection between the cooperatives
whom they represent and the Russian Soviet Government.
The principal question before the Supreme
France. Council and the Allied Governments during
the last month (outside the controversy
over the French occupation of towns in the Rhineland already
treated), has been the Turkish problem. Various solutions have
been proposed during the month, and the Supreme Council re-
quested the advice of President Wilson on the subject. The two
chief points of the President's note in reply, were a demand for
the expulsion of the Turk from Europe, and the proposed creation
of an Armenian state with as wide boundaries as possible.
The objection of the Allied Governments to this proposal are
threefold; they contend, first, that the three countries most closely
concerned and upon which the military consequences of any de-
cision would rest, namely, Great Britain, France and Italy, are
united in the belief that the Sultan should not be sent to Asia
Minor; second, that even expulsionists among the Allies place seri-
ous credence in the dangerous effervescence of Mussulman feeling
which the expulsion of the Sultan from Constantinople would
cause; and third, that the retention by the Turkish Government
of Constantinople under Allied control promises better results,
particularly in safeguarding the lives of the Armenians, than the
expulsion policy, which might lead to the establishment of an un-
controlled hostile Turkish Government beyond the Taurus
Mountains.
No reply to the President's note will be sent until after the
conference of the Allied Governments at San Remo, Italy, between
the 19th and 22d of April. It is conjectured that the Allies will
express their sympathy with the giving to Armenia of a state with
boundaries in proportion to her population, but it will be pointed
out that the Armenians from a strict equity point of view have less
1920.] RECENT EVENTS 275
right to the disputed territory than the indigenous Turkish peas-
ants, and that the Armenians are not so numerous as to warrant
giving them such extended boundaries as the President desires.
Of course, the failure of America to ratify the Peace Treaty
and its refusal to accept an Armenian mandate, has thrown Allied
councils into confusion, particularly with regard to the Turkish
question, and in a further endeavor to find a solution for that
question, the Supreme Council early in April addressed a com-
munication to the League of Nations requesting that the League
accept a mandate for Armenia. After several meetings, however,
the League declared that it was unable to accept the mandate be-
cause it lacks the machinery for administering such a charge.
To take over such a mandate would require both military and
financial resources, neither of which the League possesses. The
Council of the League believes it can find a mandatory for Ar-
menia in some neutral State if some one else will pay the ex-
penses, and recommends that the members of the League make
collective arrangements to meet Armenia's needs. As for the
assumption of guardianship of the racial minorities in Turkey, the
Council of the League believes it is within its province to accept
this duty, but cannot definitely commit itself as to ways and
means until the Turkish Treaty has been fully drafted. It is ex-
pected by Allied observers that some kind of Turkish Treaty will
be sufficiently ready by the end of April or the beginning of May,
to invite the Turkish delegation to Paris. The details of the
Treaty it is expected will be finally disposed of at the San Remo
conference. The San Remo conference may also have occasion to
make the final decision on some questions regarding the Hun-
garian Peace Treaty.
Turning to purely French affairs and internal conditions, the
depreciation of French currency, which was checked for a time
after the fall in January, has begun again with doubled velocity.
In the last three sessions of the Exchanges the value of the franc
has dropped fourteen per cent as compared with sterling, and
about twelve per cent as compared with the dollar and Dutch,
Spanish, Swiss and Scandinavian money. At present even Ger-
many gains seven per cent on France. Reducing the French
economic situation to its simplest terms, the principal cause for
the depreciation of the franc is that the country is obliged to buy
abroad nearly six times as much in money value as it sells. That
France has far too much floating paper is merely an additional
handicap, not a basic source of the trouble. There is much talk
about work and augmented production, but production cannot be
augmented unless imports are augmented simultaneously, and
276 RECENT EVENTS [May,
I
when that occurs, the franc, of course, falls faster than ever. Im-
ports have already been reduced to the lowest possible figure, so
that there is no remedy in that direction. Yet, unless a remedy is
found, disaster would seem to be inevitable.
In a recent debate in the Chamber of Deputies on new taxes,
Deputy Auriol, Socialist, asserted that the only remedy for
France's financial situation was the taxation of capital and war
profits. Budget Reporter Dumont's statement on the budget was
well received by the House. It is expected that the Government's
revenues under the new taxes will be increased 8,500,000,000
francs. Among the fresh taxes is one of ten per cent upon the
gross receipts of theatres, music halls, circuses, hippodromes, race
tracks and bicycle races.
Subscriptions to the latest French loan totaled 15,730,000,000
francs, of which 6,800,000,000 francs was in new money. The
new loan subscription included 8,000,000,000 francs in national de-
fence bonds, more than 550,000,000 francs in national defence
obligations, and about 375,000,000 francs in French rentes. Sub-
scriptions totaling 275,000,000 came from abroad, and 84,000,000
francs from the colonies.
The financial situation is the determining factor in French
opposition to President Wilson's proposal that the Allied and
Associated Powers declare forthwith the lifting of all trade re-
strictions against Russia. The French Government is determined
not to participate in any such step, until the Moscow Government
recognizes the debt of 26,000,000,000 francs which Russia owes to
the French Government and other French interests. At the nego-
tiations which will soon be opened in London between representa-
tives of the Allies and of Russia, the representative of France may
be expected to present the French claims with vigor. The Russian
delegation is headed by Krassin, who has been widely quoted as
saying that Russia had wiped all foreign debts off the slate and
would consent to no consideration of them.
Particulars of the distribution of enemy warships among the
Allies have recently been published in Paris. France's share,
which is ten per cent of the total tonnage of all the captured enemy
ships, with the exception of submarines, represents 92,000 tons,
half of which is in German ships and half in Austrian. Five
cruisers and ten destroyers are allotted to France, and the same
number of cruisers and destroyers to Italy. Each of these two
Powers will also receive a light cruiser and three destroyers,
which may be used for a year for experimental purposes, but must
be destroyed when that time has elapsed. France will receive the
cruiser Emden. Forty submarines now in French ports are also
1920.] RECENT EVENTS 277
allotted to France, and of these ten may be put in service. France
is the only Power to which the privilege of using captured sub-
marines has been granted.
According to latest dispatches, conditions
Italy. in Fiume are becoming more critical daily,
owing to factional quarrels among the
d'Annunzio troops, labor unrest and the lack of food and work.
D'Annunzio has sent to Rome a committee headed by Signor di
Ambris, Chief Secretary to Mayor Gigante, to discuss with Premier
Nitti plans for a relaxation of the blockade of the city, which is
paralyzing the activities of the port.
A general strike was recently declared in Fiume, but it lasted
only one day. The workmen demanded restoration of the food
situation to a normal basis, a reversion to the prices prevailing
prior to the local troubles, and the adjustment of the value of
money in exchange, so as to restore the former purchasing power
of wages. It is complained that prices are now quoted in lire,
whereas wages are paid in Jugo-Slav crowns, worth only one-
twelfth of the lire. The National Council promised an improve-
ment in conditions.
The strike leaders asserted they were insistent on having
d'Annunzio leave Fiume. They said if they were unsuccessful
locally, the strike would spread to Trieste, then to Milan and
threaten Italy. The workers say their demand for normal food
rations is impossible of fulfillment while the partial blockade con-
tinues, and that the blockade would continue as long as d'Annunzio
remained. D'Annunzio is also faced with a disagreement among
the troops over Monarchist and Republican feuds. This, coupled
with the attitude of the working groups, places him in the most
serious situation since his occupation of Fiume.
A recent telegram from Trieste asserts that the Italo-Jugo-Slav
Commission, which has been in consultation regarding an Adriatic
settlement, has reached an agreement concerning the Adriatic
ports under which Italy obtains sovereignty over Fiume, while the
Jugo-Slavs receive Susak, the Canale della Fiumara, the Porto-
Baross, the port of Volosca and Scutari. D'Annunzio is declared
to be strongly against the arrangement, of which Premier Lloyd
George is credited to be the author. Italian representatives ex-
press the conviction that the matter will finally be settled by direct
negotiations after the disappearance of the obstacles created by
d'Annunzio's occupation of Fiume. The d'Annunzio movement,
it is added, is now considered in a state of dissolution.
278 RECENT EVENTS [May,
The new Nitti Cabinet has faced several crises during the
last month, but in each case has been given a vote of confidence by
the Chamber of Deputies. The new Government is in favor of a
lenient policy toward Russia and Germany, favors a friendly
understanding with the Jugo-Slavs on the Adriatic question, does
not desire any territorial occupation of Turkey or Asia Minor, and
as regards home policy desires the maintenance of order by all
classes, increased work and production, and diminution in con-
sumption in order to avoid disaster to the nation. In order to
bring these home policies into effect the food-card system has been
revived with an even stricter system than during the War. Coal
cannot be had at any price, and gas for only three hours per day.
Many trains have been suppressed.
Labor demonstrations have been made in various cities
throughout Italy during the month, and at Milan an attempt was
made to set up a Soviet system of control of large industrial con-
cerns. Strikes have occurred also in Bologna, Pisa, Leghorn and
Florence, and there were casualities both to the police and the
strikers. In the Novra, Alexandria, Brescia and Treviso Provinces
a gigantic agricultural strike was called, involving 300,000 work-
ers. Several peasant demonstrations were put down by machine-
gun fire.
April 17, 1920.
With Our Readers
AN important, though short, contribution to the history of
Catholic service in the late War is an article, contributed to
the March Month, entitled "The French Priest in the War," by
the Rev. John Dawson, S.M. The extent of the services of the
Catholic priests and of how that service in turn reflects the Catho-
lic soul of France is by no means sufficiently known or considered.
"What they (the French chaplains) told me and what I saw with
my own eyes, convinced me of one thing: that there is far more
Catholic life in France than we, who judge her by her public acts,
are apt to believe. How it is that so many generous, even fervent,
Catholics exercise so little influence on the public life of their
country remains a puzzle that no French Catholic, priest or lay-
man, has ever been able to solve for me."
The answer might be made that the French Catholic body
has lacked the means of common action in matters of public
legislation.
Whether this be true or not, it is true that an active minority
may rule a country; shape its legislation; control its public
institutions; deprive private institutions of their life, while the
majority are, so to speak, asleep, uninterested and unorganized
for common public action.
IN our own country we have seen that prohibition was made a
federal constitutional amendment by an active minority. The
activities of "foundations," of institutes, of societies and organ-
izations eager to jjush their special object or their particular
measure of reform or supervision are today centred upon federal
legislation. The objective of their activities is the Congress of
the United States. Success there means a short cut to success
in the particular State they seek to affect or in all the States.
Thus do minorities work: framing their proposed legislation in
learned and influential council; far-visioned in the importance
of its phrasing; securing prominent men and women, who know
little of the real bearing of the legislation in question, as their
supporters; impressing the Senator or Congressman with their
repeated appeal, magnifying the volume of public opinion back
of it meanwhile pushing a vigorous propaganda in the press
under various forms and disguises. When the matter is actually
280 WITH OUR READERS [May,
presented in the halls of Congress they who are back of it have
the big advantage of position, of initiative, of planned campaign.
The public sometimes learn of the bill when it is introduced:
oftentimes much later, sometimes they know nothing of it until
it is passed.
* * * *
IN the light of all this, it is increasingly important that organiza-
tions interested in legislative measures should be really in-
terested, and have the means of securing information, even from
the beginning. We speak not in a political way. The political
ends of legislation, that is in so far as they affect candidates or
parties, have nothing to do with the question, at least nothing to
do with it directly, as we treat it here. Legislation is not only
becoming more and more federal, legislation is becoming more
paternal. Time was when the Christian citizen or the Christian
organization might avert its eyes from Washington and go its
undisturbed way, confident that the Federal Government would
not only not interfere with, but would certainly support Christian
principles and Christian morals. Neither the individual nor the
organization can have any such security today. Like Horace,
though in quite a different sense, the Federal Congress considers
nothing human a stranger to itself. As he treasures the sanc-
tities of life, so, therefore, must every citizen be alive to every
matter of proposed legislative action, either national or state.
With equal truth may it be said that every organization really
interested in the true welfare of the country, in the preservation
not only of the fundamental principles of Christian society, but
in the right to educate our children therein with equal truth it
may be said that every such organization should be intensely,
vitally interested and informed on every matter of religious or
moral concern that is proposed as a subject of legislation. Most
truly does it behoove those who watch from the towers of Israel
to regard even the far-off enemies that have their face set towards
the holy city.
* * * *
ONCE legislation affects the sacred and moral rights of
the individual or of the Church, the name political may be
eliminated and religious substituted. Today there is no question
affecting religion at least indirectly that is not being made the
subject of federal legislation. We all know the federal attempts
to control and define the education of the young. The same move-
ment is showing itself in state legislatures. In Michigan far more
than the number necessary have signed a petition which brings
1920.] WITH OUR READERS 281
before the voters next November, a constitutional amendment
which would forbid the very existence of parochial schools in
that State.
Marriage laws are for the present left to the State. Lax
as they are, the tendency is to greater laxity.
Americanization bills are being considered; to the American-
ization portion of them no one would have any objection: but to
the powers which some of them would confer of killing the right
of private schools many would object. Health legislation is on its
federal way; it includes a sex hygiene programme to which no
one can be indifferent who is not indifferent to Christian morals.
This naturally touches the most fundamental questions of ethics,
and not only the physical but the spiritual welfare of the genera-
tion to come. Hospitals; homes for the feeble-minded; segrega-
tion; child welfare; industrial problems concerning women, all
are within the range of national legislation.
Today it is forbidden to send the reading matter of birth-
control societies through the mails. A vigorous campaign will
soon open whereby these societies will seek, and they confidently
expect, the permission of the federal authorities to send through
the mails their obscene and immoral propaganda. The words
are none too strong, for they teach not only contraceptive methods,
but that sexual immorality is not sinful.
OUR aim in these paragraphs is not to point out legislation that
may be harmful and anti-Christian. Legislation may be
good or bad: worthy or unworthy. Our point is that we do not
know its character: we are unable to meet or encourage or
modify or oppose, unless we keep ourselves informed through
channels that capably operate.
Organization, capable and ready representation are needed
if such is to be the case: if we as Catholics are to preserve our
own fundamental religious rights and contribute our preeminent
share to the legislation that will shape and control the destiny
of our country. Organization is not a matter simply of numbers
nor of a national committee nor group. Organization is not a
centralized authority. That would work more harm than good.
Organization demands the constant watchfulness of those who
serve under authority: it demands also the declaration of a pro-
gramme, a line of action, at least on general lines that will be-
speak the aim and purpose of the body Catholic. Unless legis-
lation is radically and thoroughly bad and framers are seldom
so foolish as to permit it to be classified entirely in that category
282 WITH OUR READERS [May,
successful opposition to it means a definite constructive pro-
gramme on the part of those -who oppose. Organization in oppo-
sition, therefore, means constant study of the forces in operation;
of the social conditions to be affected; of how best the reform
looked for may be secured; of full and correct data on the ques-
tion or questions under discussion. Organization demands the
ability to use the means of publicity: the service of those who
can present it capably to the press. It demands further the means
to inform every part of the organization all lay Catholic so-
cieties for example to keep them in touch with national affairs,
readily to secure their aid, their advice, their support.
**.,**
WE have attempted here to show but one reason why the
formation of the National Catholic Welfare Council, com-
posed of the hierarchy of the United States, was not only ad-
visable, but, given the circumstances, absolutely necessary.
Decided upon at the meeting of the hierarchy in September,
1919, the first steps in the actual formation were taken by the
Administrative Committee in the first part of December, 1919.
The Administrative Committee were directed to establish
five departments, the Department of Education, the Department
of Social Action, the Department of Legislation, the Department
of Lay Organizations and the Department of Press and Publicity.
The Chairman of the Administrative Committee is the Most
Rev. Edward J. Hanna, Archbishop of San Francisco. The
Chairmen of the various departments in the order named are:
the Most Rev. Austin Dowling, Archbishop of St. Paul; the
Most Rev. D. J. Dougherty, Archbishop of Philadelphia; the
Right Rev. Peter J. Muldoon, Bishop of Rockford; the Right
Rev. Joseph Schrembs, Bishop of Toledo, and the Right Rev.
William T. Russell, Bishop of Charleston.
* * * *
TO secure unity of action among the five departments, the
Administrative Committee directed a joint national com-
mittee to be formed, consisting of a representative of each of
the departments; that the headquarters of such committee be
established at Washington, and that the conduct of the committee
as a whole should be under the care of a General Secretary
acting as representative of the Chairman of the Administrative
Committee. To this position of General Secretary the Rev.
John J. Burke, C.S.P., Editor of THE CATHOLIC WORLD, was
appointed.
1920.] WITH OUR READERS 283
CONSIDERING the difficulties that must inevitably be met
V_/ with in securing capable men, the plans and programmes
that must be drawn up and carried out in the formation of these
departments, the progress already made is very encouraging.
The headquarters of the joint committee have been established
at 1312 Massachusetts Avenue, Washington, D. C. The Executive
Staff there is practically complete. The representative of the
Department of Education is the well-known authority, Dr. Ed-
ward A. Pace; that of the Department of Social Action, Dr. John
A. Ryan, author of the now classical work, A Living Wage;
with Dr. Ryan is associated Dr. John A. Lapp, whose work on
The Fundamentals of Citizenship is now widely used throughout
the country. This Department has already done remarkable
work in outlining programmes; in providing lecture courses in
our seminaries and colleges; in the definite preparation of two
important volumes; and in the publication of timely pamphlets,
two of which are now in press. This Department shall fix the
standards and programmes for all the social service work of the
Council. The final steps in organizing the Department of Legis-
lation are about to be taken.
* * * *
THE Press and Publicity Department has not only completed
its home organization, with three special Bureaus, but has
begun the issuing of a weekly news sheet to the Catholic press
of the country. The mission of the National Catholic Welfare
Council demanded that existing Catholic organizations should,
through its efforts, be helped and strengthened in their appointed
fields. For years, through much labor and sacrifice, the Catholic
Press Association had done creditable work for Catholic journal-
ism. Only those who were with it in its pioneer days and who
were then encouraged and fortified by the leadership of its
President, the Right Rev. James J. Hartley, Bishop of Co-
lumbus, know from experience the almost insurmountable dif-
ficulties that had to be met.
Almost all the Catholic journals of the country are members
of the Catholic Press Association. Its news service was credit-
ably handled. It asked for the extension of that news service.
This could not be done by the funds at the disposal of the As-
sociation. The Press and Publicity Department of the National
Catholic Welfare Council has undertaken to supply this.
* * * *
BEFORE the work of organization was undertaken, the Na-
tional Catholic Welfare Council through the Episcopal Chair-
man of the Press Department attended the National Convention
284 WITH OUR READERS [May,
of the Catholic Press Association. Eight members of the latter
are members also of the Executive Committee of the Press De-
partment of the National Catholic Welfare Council, and the
agreement made with the Press Department of the Council means
that the Catholic Press Association will be stronger and more
efficient than ever before. To those vital questions of uniform
size; of national advertising; of common purchase of paper, it
will now be able to give its full attention. The Press and Pub-
licity Department has, as we have said, organized an Information
and Clipping Bureau and also a Book and Pamphlet Bureau,
which will not only keep in touch with all Catholic publications,
but will file copies of the same in its library at national head-
quarters. The Executive Committee of the Department will be
announced at a later date.
* * * *
IN the formation of the Department of Lay Organizations it was
necessary, first, to form a National Council of Catholic Women,
which would help in a national way every existing Catholic or-
ganization of women, use existing societies for the national work
that is to be done, and also sustain and direct its own service
department for national social service work. The success
achieved by the women's organizations during the War and in
after-the-war work under the direction of the Committee on Spe-
cial War Activities of the National Catholic War Council, made
imperative the existence of such an organization. The women's
work thus conducted must be sustained and directed after the
active labors of the National Catholic War Council have ceased.
A National Catholic Women's Council that will continue to direct
and supervise it is of supreme importance. That the Catholic
women of the country realize this was evidenced most widely
and most enthusiastically at the national conference held under
the direction of the Episcopal Chairman of the Department,
Bishop Schrembs of Toledo.
* * * *
THE Conference met in Washington, March 5th, 6th, and 7th.
Two hundred attended: of these one hundred and seven were
voting delegates. To its deliberations were invited representa-
tives of all the dioceses of the country, representatives of all
national Catholic women's organizations, and some "unattached"
women who have made their name in Catholic social service.
The mind of the Convention expressed one purpose the for-
mation of a National Council of Catholic Women; a constitution
and programme were adopted; national officers elected; and every
1920.] WITH OUR READERS 285
Catholic organization gladly pledged its fidelity to, and its affilia-
tion with, the National Council of Catholic Women. The work
before it is vast and its difficulties numerous; but evidences are
not lacking, even at this early date, that it will do great work for
Church and for Country.
* * * *
THIS is but a brief summary, necessarily incomplete, of the
formation up to date of the National Catholic Welfare Coun-
cil. The mere recital extends the vision and enlarges the heart.
Face to face with a crisis in our country and our civilization, the
like of which this generation has not seen, looking upon a world
that gives of itself no comfort, but distress and bewilderment, is
it not comforting and inspiring to know that our divinely ap-
pointed leaders have with such foresight prepared us to meet the
nation's problems and enemies with well-buttressed organization?
The National Catholic Welfare Council exists for the service of all,
individual and organization. To the smallest of our Catholic
societies and the largest, in any department where information
or guidance is helpful, it must give all the help at its command.
It has no centralized authority; it seeks not to direct, but to help
and to serve. It narrows no one's field of activity. It enlarges
the broad area of Catholic work, and gives what it can in the way
of opportunity for all to serve more efficiently. Behind every
Catholic organization it places permanently the background of
national organization. Today the local Catholic organization
is refused a share in community chests because it is simply local
and has no national standing. Community work cannot be ex-
tended unless an organization has its trained workers with na-
tional experience, its national service school, its national organ-
ization. A national council provides these. Time and again does
the necessity present itself of common Catholic action; and that
is possible only through a National Catholic Council.
* * * *
SOCIAL service is the common work of all : it is but the channel
whence we bring to men a knowledge and love of the
Faith which inspires us, which is dearer to us than life itself.
Without that Faith it lacks meaning; it conveys no comfort; it in-
creases rather than lightens the problem to which it may apply
itself. The common effort of unified Catholic strength is the
concert of the faith of American Catholics, seeking to express it-
self most effectively for the welfare of Church and of Country.
Trumpet-tongued, its message shall be heard through all the land,
illustrating the saving truth of Jesus Christ and of His Church.
"To become absorbed in worldly pursuits and to neglect those
286 WITH OUR READERS [May,
which belong to our eternal welfare, is the root evil
whence spring the immediate causes of our present con-
dition. God, from Whom all things are and on Whom all
things depend, the Creator and Ruler of men, the source and sanc-
tion of righteousness, the only Judge Who with perfect justice can
weigh the deeds and read the hearts of men, has, practically at
least, disappeared from the whole conception of life so far as this
is dominated by a certain type of modern thought. Wherever this
sort of thinking is taken as truth, there is set up a scheme of life,
individual, social and political, which seeks, not in the eternal
but in the human and transitory, its ultimate foundation." So
spoke the Bishops of our country in their recent joint Pastoral.
* * * *
HRIST must again come to men. He comes through us, for
each and every one of us has life only in Him; each in his
own measure, great or small, is Christ to others. In Him we live,
and as one with Him must we show that He died to give His life
for all. What we work for in the world of externals is but a re-
flection of our spiritual life within. So will the unified,
harmonious action of the great Catholic body of the United States
have its effective share in illustrating to men the Communion of
Saints and our Oneness in the Mystical Body of Christ.
THE injustice of the proposed Home Rule Bill for Ireland, and
the dishonesty of those who claim it gives freedom of gov-
ernment to that country, are glaringly apparent from the fact that
the Bill provides that by English power, "the Free and Accepted
Masons of the Grand Lodge of Ireland and any lodge or society
recognized by that body shall not be included in the enactments
relative to unlawful oaths or unlawful assemblies." In other
words neither of the proposed parliaments in Ireland shall have
the authority to forbid Freemasons from taking "unlawful oaths"
or calling or attending "unlawful assemblies." Such a provision
simply hamstrings the government proposed. It makes the Bill
a farce, and proves again that the English Government is not pre-
pared and does not intend to do justice to Ireland.
DURING the course of their publication, we called editorial at-
tention to the exceptional worth of the papers, entitled "St.
Matthew and the Parousia," by the Rev. Edmund T. Shanahan,
S. T. D., contributed to THE CATHOLIC WORLD.
In the current Dublin Review, Father Hugh Pope writes
1920.] BOOKS RECEIVED 287
"On the Coming of Christ." In the course of his article he states :
"We venture to suggest that this eschatological problem may
have been solved in THE CATHOLIC WORLD'S series of twelve
papers by Dr. Shanahan, entitled 'St. Matthew and the Parousia.'
We say without hesitation that these papers are the work of a
leal exegete."
Father Pope then follows Dr. Shanahan step by step. In the
reconciliation or explanation of the words of the prophets and
the teaching of our Blessed Lord, he finds that Dr. Shanahan has
made a "discovery of immense importance," for it affords us a
test which we can apply at once, and which is found to fit the lock
and open up the secrets in a fashion which might almost be
termed "uncanny." Father Pope "cannot speak too highly of
Dr. Shanahan's work. His methods are highly critical and yet
he has not let himself be misled by the tools he has employed."
Our readers will all share the hope he voices that Dr.
Shanahan's papers will soon appear in book form.
BOOKS RECEIVED.
LONGMANS, GREEN & Co., New York:
Mount Music. By E. O3. Somerville and M. Ross. $2.00. The Skilled Laborer,
1760-1832. By J. L. Hammond and B. Hammond. $4.50 net. From Dust to
Glory. By Rev. M. J. Phelan, S.J. $1.60. St. Luke: the Man and His Work.
By H. McLachlin, M.A. $3.00. Dona Chrtste. By Mother St. Paul. $1.75.
The English Catholics in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth. By J. H. Pollen, S.J.
$7.50.
THE MACMILLAN Co., New York:
Caught by the Turks. By F. Yeats-Brown. $2.00. Armenia ana" the Armenians.
By K. Asian. $1.25. The American Army in the European Conflict. By
Colonel de Chambrun and Captain de Marenchcs. $3.00.
E. P. DUTTON A Co., New York:
The Science of Labor and Its Organization. By Dr. J. loteyko. $1.60 net. The
Worldlings. By L. Merrlck. Red Terror and Green. By R. Dawson. $2.50 net.
Ireland An Knemg of the Allies? By H. C. Escouflalre.
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, New York:
War anrf Peace. By W. Jay. Judicial Settlement of Controversies Between
States of the American Union. By J. B. Scott, LL.D. Effects of the War on
Money, Credit and Banking in France and the United States. By B. M.
Andrews, Jr., Ph.D. War Thrift. By T. N. Carver.
D. APPLETON & Co., New York:
Memories of Buffalo Bill. By his wife, Louise F. Cody. $2.50 net. From Upton
to the Meuse. By W. K. Rninsford. $2.00 net. Siberia Today. By F. F.
Moore. $2.00 net. A Cry of Youth. By C. Lombard!. $2.00 net. Mercler,
the Fighting Cardinal. By C. Kellogg. $2.00 net.
HENRY HOLT & Co., New York:
Jane Austen. By O. W. Firkins. $1.75.
BF.NZICER BROTHERS, New York:
Lady Trent's Daughter. By I. C. Clarke. $1.75 net. Reflections for Religious.
$2.00 net.
COLUMUIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, New York:
Religion and Culture. By F. Schleiter, Ph.D. $2.00 net.
FUNK & WAGNALLS, New York:
Bobbins of Belgium. By C. Kellogg. $2.00 net
288 BOOKS RECEIVED [May, 1920.]
HABPF.R & BROTHERS, New York:
Open Gates to Russia. By M. VV. Davis. 12.00 net. The Doughboy's Religion.
By B. D. Lindsey and H. O'Higgins. .$1.25 net.
THE DEVIN-ADAIB Co., New York:
Just Happy. By Grace Keon. $l.fi5.
GEORGE H. DORAN Co., New York:
Cardinal Mercier's Own Story. By His Eminence, D. J. Cardinal Mercier.
Invincible Minnie. By E. S. Holding. Home Then What? Collected and
arranged by J. L. Small.
FOHDHAM UNIVERSITY, New York:
Puritanism in History and Literature. By T. L. Connolly, S.J. Pamphlet.
BRENTANO'S, New York:
Meslom's Messaces from the Life Beyond. By M. A. McEvlIly. $1.50. The
Standani Operaglass. By C. Aimesley.
ALLYN & BACON, New York:
Evert/day Science. By William H. Snyder, Sc.D.
CHARLES SCRIBNEH'S SONS, New York:
The January Girl. By J. Gray. $1.50. Whispers. By L. Dodge. $1.75 net.
J. B. LIPPINCOTT Co., Philadelphia:
The Eastern Question and Its Solution. By M. Jastrow, LL.D. ?1.50 net. How
to Speak French Like the French. By Marie and Jeanne Yersin.
JOHN JOSEPH McVEY, Philadelphia:
The Pope and Italy. By Very Rev. N. Casacca, D.D. 50 cents.
GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE, Washington:
Industrial Schools for Delinquents, 1917-18. Community Americanization. By
F. C. Butler. Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Meeting of the National
Council of Primary Education, Chicago, III., February 25, 1919. The Public
School System of Memphis, Tenn. Part II. The Accredited Secondary Schools
of the North Central Association. By C. O. Davis.
THE CATHOLIC EDUCATION PRESS, Washington:
A General History of the Christian Era. Volume I.
CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE, Washington:
A Manual of the Public Benefactions of Andrew Carnegie.
THE FOUR SEAS Co., Boston:
East by West. By A. J. Morrison. $1.50 net. Outdoors and In. By J. F. Crowell.
$1.50 net. The Birth of God. (Play.) By V. von Heidenstam. $1.25 net.
Three Plays. By N. Leslie. The Death of Titian. By H. von Hofmannsthal.
BIBLIOTHECA SACRA Co., Oberlin, O.:
Hoses and the Monuments. By Melvin G. Kyle, D.D., LL.D.
EXTENSION PRESS, Chicago:
Spiritism the Modern Satanism. By Thomas F. Coakley. $1.25.
LOYOLA UNIVERSITY PRESS, Chicago:
Catholic Beginnings in Kansas City, Mo. By G. J. Garraghan, S.J. $1.25.
MISSION PRESS, Techny, 111.:
An Appeal to the Catholics of the World to Save the German Foreign Missions.
Pamphlet.
KANSAS STATE BOARD OF AGRICULTURE, Topeka:
Report of the Kansas State Board of Agriculture for the Quarter Ending
December, 1919.
A. R. MOWBRAY & Co., London:
A Dictionary of English Church History. Edited by S. L. Ollard, M.A.
CATHOLIC TRUTH SOCIETY, London:
The Martyrs of Uganda. A Fairy Godmother. By L. Moore. The Failure of
Anglicanism. By F. J. Kinsman. Pamphlet.
BROWNE & NOLAN, Dublin:
St. Bernard's Sermons and the Canticle of Canticles. By a Priest.
M. H. GILL & SON, Dublin:
A Patriot Priest. By Rev. D. Riordan, C.C.
GABRIEL BEAUCHESNE, Paris:
Le Pauvre. Par G. Beam. 1 fr. 50. La Parole Educatrice. Par Abbe F. Delerue.
7 fr. Les Grands Blesses du Lieutenant Kessler. Par A. Boulicaut. 4 fr. 50.
Les Prosateurs et les Poetes Latins. Par C. Callonnier. 5 fr. Genevieve
Bennett de Goutel. Par M. Amalbert. 7 fr. Les Origincs du Dogme de la
Trinite. Par J. Lebreton. 24 fr.
BLOUD & GAY, Paris:
Almanack Catholique Francois pour, 1920.
EXAMINER PRESS, Bombay:
The British and Anglo-Saxon Period. By E. R. Hull, S.J.
THE
Catholic
VOL. CXI.
JUNE, 1920
No. 663
THE REVELATION OF AN ARTIST IN LITERATURE. 1
BY MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN.
T is interesting to observe that Catholics fre-
quently complain, with a certain irritation, that
the Protestant mind seems incapable of under-
standing the essential value of the Church or the
psychology of individual Catholics themselves.
Protestants, it is often said, have an opaque side in their
mentality, "like the moon," and it is frequently turned toward
their Catholic brethren. This is a quotation, and I do not
feel entirely responsible for the metaphor. This is very easily
explained, since the Catholic religion among persons who
have let us say "inherited" it, becomes as easily worn as
an old glove. It answers to every movement of the soul and
the mind. There is very little stiffness about it, and if wrinkles
do occur in its surface there is generally an effective rule for
smoothing them out.
It is not that Catholics are a singular people, set apart,
but that they have a point of view not always easily explained
to other people, and a point of view which they do not, as a
rule, attempt to explain because to them it seems obvious.
On the other hand, it is safe to say that Catholics do not
take very much trouble to study the cast of mind of non-Catho-
1 The Letters of Henry James. Selected and Edited by Percy Lubbock.
I., II. New York: Charles Scrlbner's Sons.
Vols.
Copyright. 1920.
VOL. CXI. 19
THE MISSIONARY SOCIETY OF ST. PAUL THE APOSTLE.
IN THE STATE OF NEW YOBK.
290 AN ARTIST IN LITERATURE [June,
lies. "There's the Catholic Church," they say, "you can take
it or leave it." Of course, some non-Catholics do at times
utter rather banal things which one cannot always take seri-
ously. Some of the things, however, that we say at times must
sound equally astounding to our separated friends. I happen
to know, for instance, a devout Baptist who was shocked be-
yond words when he heard the request a zealous sodalist
made to a pious nun that she might pray for the happy death
of three neighbors. This request, from the Baptist point of
view, confirmed his worst suspicions. It seemed such an
unchristian way of getting rid of obnoxious persons. To speak
in a more moderate manner, however, it is rather inconsistent
that we should constantly complain of being misunderstood,
that our compatriots do not take the trouble to analyze the
reasons for our conviction or the motives for our actions, when
we are so remiss in our study of the mental and spiritual
habits and motives of our companions and friends in every-
day life.
In reading The Letters of Henry James with some Catho-
lic friends, I am very much struck with the truth of this.
I must confess that I found them rather intolerant, rather un-
sympathetic, and rather inclined to demolish all the exquisite
artistry of the author of these letters because he seems to have
left the great question which is the central motive of all Catho-
lics out of his sphere. And it is plain that in these letters,
when he shows himself to be neither a philosopher nor a
mystic, he evinces very little interest in that great matter which
is the chief concern of all of our Faith the union of the
human soul with God.
It is an appalling void, but then it may be that neither in
his books nor in his letters does Henry James reveal his inmost
thoughts.
It is curious that a man so removed from an insight into
the very things that made Italy very beautiful to him, who is
always conscious of the lack of these things in American life,
should have made his one important play, Guy Domville, turn
on the subject of Catholic life in England at the time when
the Church was proscribed. This play was a failure, not be-
cause of its literary faults, but because of its very perfection
and an undramatic end. There are touches of both pathos
and humor when this very precious, exquisite, and meticulous
1920.] AN ARTIST IN LITERATURE 291
artist tried to write down to the taste of the British public in
the theatre.
In his letter written on January 9, 1895, to his brother,
William James, the distinguished apostle of Pragmatism, he
says:
Obviously the little play, which I strove to make as
broad, as simple, as clear, as British, in a word, as possible,
is over the heads of the usual vulgar theatre-going London
public and the chance of its going for a while (which it is
too early to measure) will depend wholly on its holding on
long enough to attract the unusual. I was there the sec-
ond night (Monday, 7th) when, before a full house a re-
markably good "money" house Alexander told me it went
singularly well. But it's soon to see or to say, and I'm pre-
pared for the worst. The thing fills me with horror for the
abysmal vulgarity and brutality of the theatre and its reg-
ular public, which God knows I have had intensely, even
when working (from motives as "pure" as pecuniary mo-
tives can be) against it; and I feel as if the simple freedom
of mind thus begotten to return to one's legitimate form
would be simply by itself a divine solace for everything.
Don't worry about me: I'm a Rock. If the play has no
life on the stage, I shall publish it; it's altogether the best
thing I've done. You would understand better the ele-
ments of the case if you had seen the thing it followed (The
Masqueraders) and the thing that is now succeeding at the
Haymarket the thing of Oscar Wilde's. On the basis of
their being plays, or successes, my thing is necessarily
neither. Doubtless, moreover, the want of a roaring actu-
ality, simplified to a few big familiar effects, in my sub-
ject an episode in the history of an old English Catholic
family in the last century militates against it, with all
usual theatrical people, who don't want plays (from variety
and nimbleness of fancy) of different kinds, like books and
stories, but only of one kind, which their stiff, rudimentary,
clumsily-working vision recognizes as the kind they've had
before. And yet I had tried so to meet them! But you
can't make a sow's ear out of a silk purse. I can't write
more and don't ask for more details.
At several times in his life Henry James desired earnestly
to write plays. He believed that he had the dramatic gift;
but nobody who reads The Wings of the Dove or The Golden
292 4 AT ARTIST IN LITERATURE [June,
Bowl or The Awkward Age will believe this. It is true, how-
ever, that some of his long, early stories and some of his
shorter ones fall naturally into theatrical form; but that he
could ever have been induced in later life to create characters
who acted directly, or who were permitted to act without
finesse, is doubtful. There came a tune when he looked on
Daisy Miller a very direct tale and until recently the most
widely read of all his stories as an indiscretion of youth,
and regarded Washington Square and The Portrait of a Lady
and even The Ambassadors as not quite worthy of the per-
fected artistry of his later years.
It was the fashion some years ago for the more cultured
of the ignorant to dismiss Browning with a sneer, and later to
yawn over Francis Thompson; and it is the fashion of the
same class of people, who exist in great numbers today, to
treat Henry James as the representation of a school of affec-
tation as outworn as that which produced the preciosity of
Madame de Rambouillet.
It is not probable that this kind of person will read these
letters, or try to pluck out the heart of the mystery of the
great talent of this very unusual American. James has been
declared to be the first of literary poseurs, when in fact he
seldom poses. Those who dislike his works have been known
to say that he was the most egoistical of authors; but a careful
reading of these very interesting letters though there are too
many of them will show that he is neither a poseur nor even
an egoist.
In fact, the letters are disappointing because they reveal so
little of the inner soul of Henry James, from the fact that while
he may become unconscious of himself, he is always borne
down by the consciousness of other people. It is evident that
his main defect is the fear of life; he constantly speaks of
himself as "crouching" in his little garden-house at Rye. He
could not live without society, but this society must be a
society of conventional refinement, of conventional culture;
he always seems to be afraid to go beyond the surfaces of life.
He was constantly engaged in polishing these surfaces. But
a book is not a useless book if it gives us new light on the
types of mental growth cultivated by circumstances which
surround us in our own country, and in other countries. And
whether a serious reader may like or dislike the productions
1920.] AN ARTIST IN LITERATURE 293
of Henry James, it would be careless of him to neglect the op-
portunity of discovering the effect of educating environments
on such a sensitive man as this most distinguished of all
American prose writers.
It would be difficult for the serious reader, if he is not a
student of literature, to disregard all the productions of Henry
James, for his "first" manner is so reasonably realistic, that
one can always see the wood for the leaves, whereas, in the
later, or "second" manner, the leaves curl and twist and ara-
besque and lose themselves and their shapes into such
wreathes of mist as to make the twigs, as well as the branches
and trunks of the trees, seem impalpable. But, as an artist
of his "second" manner, he always drew real trunks of trees
in his academic groves; they are there, though clouded; he
was not that kind of artist whose slovenliness in drawing
obliges him to slur the anatomy of his subject. And this fact
leaves us with a certain admiration of those nebulous crea-
tions of his "second" manner, What Marie Knew, The Awk-
ward Age, The Golden Bowl. Few persons have discovered
what Marie really knew, and The Golden Bowl one may, not
irreverently, compare with "Sordello" which even Browning
never really understood. Henry James' attitude towards the
public in the later books was probably like that of Lord Dun-
sany when two enterprising young geniuses, energetic students
of literature, said to him in one rapturous voice: "We love
your works, but we don't understand them." "Understand
them!" repeated the author of "Why the Milkman Shivers at
the Sight of the Dawn," in a sepulchral voice. That was
enough !
In his later novels, Henry James aimed not at the under-
standing but at the temperament and the emotions, and it is
only justice to look at them from this point of view. One may
dislike the music of Debussy even "The Afternoon of a
Faun" but that is no reason why the beauty of its art should
not be acknowledged. And the same dictum ought to apply
to The Wings of the Dove, The Sacred Fount, and The Awk-
ward Age.
When Henry James devoted himself both to the telling of
a story and the creating of an atmosphere, he was an exquisite
artist in letters. There is no better short story in any language
than "The Turn of the Screw" and there are other short
294 AN ARTIST IN LITERATURE [June,
stories of his that approach it in merit. There is nothing in
Poe more gruesomely pathetic or pathetically terrible, than in
this story. When you have finished it, you shudder, and thank
God that the story of the "possessed" children is not true.
Of this story, James writes to Mr. Arthur Christopher Benson,
in 1898:
But apropos, precisely, of the ghostly and ghastly, I have
a little confession to make to you that has been on my con-
science these three months, and that I hope will excite in
your generous breast nothing but tender memories and
friendly sympathies.
On one of those two memorable never to be obliterated
winter nights that I spent at the sweet Addington, your
father, in the drawing-room by the fire, where we were
talking a little, in the spirit of recreation, of such things,
repeated to me the few meagre elements of a small and
gruesome spectral story that had been told him years be-
fore, and that he could only give the dimmest account of
partly because he had forgotten details, and partly and
much more because there had been no details and no
coherency in the tale as he received it, from a person who
also but half knew it. The vaguest essence only was there
some dead servants and some children. This essence
struck me, and I made a note of it (of a most scrappy kind)
on going home. There the note remained till this autumn,
when, struck with it afresh, I wrought it into a fantastic
fiction which, first intended to be of the briefest, finally be-
came a thing of some length, and is now being "serialized"
in an American periodical. It will appear late in the spring
(chez Heinemann) in a volume with one other story, and
then I will send it to you.
In all these letters, which concern his books, one finds a
disdain of the public mingled with a desire for its approba-
tion. Except in his plays, he will not go one step forward or
backward as he might have said to gain this approbation.
He tells us that the faculty of attention has vanished from the
Anglo-Saxon mind. He pictures the newspaper, the maga-
zine, "who keeps screaming, 'Look at me, I am the thing, and
I only the thing!' " He insists that, for the people, the fineness
of art does not exist. To love an imitation of art for they
can love only imitations it must be thrown bodily at them.
1920.] AN ARTIST IN LITERATURE 295
Mr. James had not, before his death, realized the despotism
of the "movie" that most degenerate form of public art.
Mr. Henry James never actually visualized anything, ex-
cept his friends and his attitude to his friends. We read that
his flower garden at Rye, which was probably, after conversa-
tion, the principal joy of his life, was ablaze with color. He
loved "Lamb House," Rye. He liked the society of London,
but he was really never happy in London; yet he was much
happier in the fogs of London and in the close quarters of De
Vere Gardens than he ever was in his own country. His dis-
like for the United States and its crudities of atmosphere he
cannot conceal, even if he would. He found some compensa-
tion for being in his native air in the splendors of California;
but New York, with its horse shoe tiers, in the Metropolitan
Opera House, blazing with diamond tiaras, because there was
"no court in which to display them," almost made him
"crouch."
He deliberately expatriated himself, and he frankly gives
his reason for this. Any one who knows both London and
New York, both Surrey in one place and Ulster County in
another, can understand very well why his temperament suited
Surrey better than Ulster. His point of view was distinctly
artificial, every action and word seemed to have been carefully
analyzed and reduced to a uniformity of social color; but in
his letters to his friends he lets himself loose and yet with a
certain restraint. Strictly speaking, he ought to be less ex-
aggerated than he is in his epistolary expressions; and yet he
restrains himself from being restrained. It seems scarcely
possible that the meticulous ironing out and attenuating of
phrases so characteristic of his later work, could exist in the
same atmosphere with the exaggerated generosities, over-
statements and superfluous phrases in his letters. Verbally,
he throws himself at the heads of his friends. A small present
fills him with ecstasy. An amiable line or two is "splendid;"
a slight defect in something, "positively hideous." There is
no happy medium between a moderate feeling expressed in a
friendly way and the high notes of exaggerated affection.
Of the women in Catriona, by Robert Louis Stevenson, he
says: "They are quite too lovely and everyone is running
after them. In David not an error, not a false note ever;
he is all of an exasperating truth and Tightness." James has
296 AN ARTIST IN LITERATURE [June,
a passion for distinctions, very subtle and not very convincing
distinctions. Of Catriona he subtilizes :
The one thing I miss in the book is the note of visibility
it subjects my visual sense, my seeing imagination, to an
almost painful underfeeding. The hearing imagination, as
it were, is nourished like an alderman, and the loud audi-
bility seems a slight the more on the baffled lust of the
eyes so that I seem to myself (I am speaking of course
only from the point of view of the way, as I read, my im-
pression longs to complete itself), in the presence of voices
in the darkness voices the more distinct and vivid, the
more brave and sonorous, as voices always are but also
the more tormenting and confounding by reason of these
bandaged eyes. I utter a pleading moan when you, e. g.,
transport your characters, toward the end, in a line or two
from Leyden to Dunkirk, without the glint of a hint of all
the ambient picture of the eighteenth century road. How-
ever, stick to your own system of evocation so long as what
you positively achieve is so big. Life and letters and art
all take joy in you.
Every friend he writes to is a swan, and he tells him so;
and it is quite evident that he is not consciously insincere in
this attitude. He seems to be grateful for the shortest line
that anybody addresses to him in a letter. He is benignant,
kind, simple; but there are times when you read between the
lines and discover that he may be at times a little sulky, some-
what easily offended by difference of opinion in regard to his
art, and always contemptuous of that rude public which
might easily become dear to him were it to throng in large
numbers to the plays which he has written for it. But his
judgments on the contemporary drama in England, though
over colored by his own artistic tint, are generally just. He
sees an "Ideal Husband:" it was a raging success; the fine
flower of fashion bloomed in its presence, and yet in spite of
the popular acclaim he found it clumsy, feeble and vulgar,
and he was right.
He delays writing a letter to Edmund Gosse, and he hopes
that Gosse will not think him "a finished brute or a heartless
fiend or a soulless one" because he has not answered it; he
has pressed the letter to his bosom again and again; and
then he makes some very exaggerated excuses. Mrs. Humphry
1920.] AN ARTIST IN LITERATURE 297
Ward consults him as to some detail in the American back-
ground of her novel, Eleanor. He writes:
For it's well generally to keep in mind how very dif-
ferent a thing tnat is (socially, aesthetically, etc.) from the
American free (and easy) multitudinous churches, that,
practically, in any community, are like so many (almost)
clubs or Philharmonics or amateur theatrical companies.
I don't quite think the however obscure American girl I
gather you to conceive would have any shockability about
Rome, the Pope, St. Peter's, kneeling, or anything of that
sort least of all, any girl whose concatenations could, by
any possibility of social handing-on, land her in the milieu
you present at Albano. She would probably be either a
Unitarian or "Orthodox" (which is, I believe, "Congrega-
tional," though in New England always called "Orthodox"),
and in either case as Emersonized, Hawthornized, J. A.
Symondsized, and as "frantic" to feel the Papacy, etc., as
one could well represent her. And this, I mean, even were
she of any provincial New England circle whatever, that one
could conceive as ramifying, however indirectly, into Villa
Barb. This particularly were her father, a college profes-
sor. In that case, I should say "The bad clothes, etc., oh,
yes; as much as you like. The beauty, etc., scarcely. The
offishness to Rome as a spectator, etc. almost not at all."
All this, roughly and hastily speaking. But there is no
false note of surface, beyond this, I think, that you need be
uneasy about at all. Had I looked over your shoulder I
should have said: "Specify, localize, a little more give
her a definite Massachusetts, or Maine, or whatever, habita-
tion imagine a country-college-town invent, if need be,
a name, and stick to that." This for smallish, but appre-
ciable reasons that I haven't space to develop but after all
not imperative. For the rest the chapters you send me are,
as a beginning, to my vision, very charming and interesting
and pleasing full of promise of strong elements as your
beginnings always are.
He meets Zola and finds him sane, and common, and in-
experienced; nothing has ever happened to him in this world
except the writing of his succession of "scientific novels." In a
letter to his friend, Howells, he tells him that he is not as
"big" as Zola, but that he has certain compensating qualities.
One can understand why Henry James admired the re-
298 AN ARTIST IN LITERATURE [June,
straint, the sincerity, and the subdued vitality of Howell's pic-
tures of life, but we cannot comprehend why a man of his fas-
tidious temperament could have endured the crudeness and
lack of reality in Zola's experiments in realism but it was the
fashion of the '80's to speak of Zola as one of the seculse of
Science!
He closed Meredith's Lord Ormont and His Aminta with a
furious "bang." He finds this much-vaunted novel of Mere-
dith is full of extravagant verbiage, of airs and graces, of
phrases and attitudes, of obscurities and alembications. He
thinks that no author ever told the reader less of what the
reader needs to know. This last bit of censure might easily
be turned against James himself in his later works. But
underneath all his statements of admiration for certain Eng-
lish authors, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that there
is really no great literature for him except the French.
Of his own works he gives a list to a gentleman who wants
to read them in philosophical rotation; he is a young Texan,
and that a request for this information should come from
Texas causes Henry James to comply with it very pleasantly.
"Come to me about that dear young man from Texas, you shall
have your little tarts when you have eaten your beef and
potatoes." But his list, when we consider that he tried to
revise all the direct characteristics of simplicity from his
earlier books, is of no special value. He puts The Golden Bowl
at the end.
There are allusions to politics in his letters. He may
allow himself some criticisms of England and the Eng-
lish, but he evidently looks on all political manifestations in
the United States, which are not sympathetically English, as
nefarious. In August, 1913, he writes :
I take you all to have been much moved by Woodrow
Wilson's fine, and clearly so sincere, even if so partial and
provisional, address yesterday. It isn't he, but it is the so
long and so deeply provincialized and diseducated and, I
fear in respect to individual activity and operative, that is
administrative value very below-the-mark "personalities"
of the Democratic party, that one is pretty dismally anxious
about. An administration that has to "take on" Bryan
looks, from the overhere point of view, like the queerest
and crudest of all things!
1920.] AN ARTIST IN LITERATURE 299
He is a friend and admirer of H. G. Wells. He tells Wells
that his generosity in sending him a book has reduced him to
"mere gelatinous grovel," and he is amiable when Miss Hen-
rietta Rubell tells him that she is bewildered over The Awk-
ward Age. He says that the book has excited nothing but be-
wilderness, except in England, "thick-witted denunciation."
He declares that a work of art fails in its mission if it has to
be explained. He tells her, in the kind of French he occa-
sionally drops into, that he had in view a highly modern and
actual social London group which seemed to him to se preter
a merveille to an "ironic" lightly and simply ironic treatment
and that clever people at least would know "who, in general,
and what, one meant." But here, at least, it appears "here
are very few clever people."
At times, one sees that Mr. James was disappointed even
in the English mind. The average clever person takes the
attitude of the serious Scot in the presence of a joke when he
approaches The Awkward Age. James is disappointed when
he discovers that his novels do not pay, and yet he would
have been even more disappointed if they were not "caviare to
the general."
His letters to his brother, the philosopher, Mr. William
James, are really the most sincerely human in the book; and
his discovery that he has been all his life a Pragmatist without
knowing it, is very delightful. Of the real problems of exist-
ence the problems which at some time or other must have
concerned nearly every one of his correspondents especially
men like Bourget and Barres, whom he admires so much, he
seems in his letters to have no conception. He breaks out into
a burst of admiration of a figure of the Crucified in the Boston
Library; but this admiration is founded on the artistic con-
ception of it rather than the awfulness of its symbolism.
To us, desiring to understand the attitude of a very dis-
tinguished artist in letters, who had a purity of outlook which
may be called Emersonian, a hatred of vulgarity which pre-
vented him from presenting a sensual scene, and an exquisite-
ness of perception which made him very susceptible to the
glow and glory of Venice and of Rome and to the loveliness of
Italy, it seems strange that there is no hint that he believed in
the actuality of the life to come; sometimes he almost seems
to say with Autolycus, in a Winter's Tale "for the life to
300 AN ARTIST IN LITERATURE [June,
come, I sleep out the thought of it:" for his fineness of analy-
sis, his immersion in a world of characters who were sublim-
ated dreams, seems in a sense to have been a refuge from the
grave thoughts that occasionally must have oppressed him.
He loved life, but only the well-ordered beauties of life; but
he dwelt in a valley arranged like the landscapes in the poems
of Alexander Pope; the light of the sublime or of the highest
exaltation seems never to have touched him.
In very few ancient or modern artists of the brush or of
the pen do we find, judging from their confessions, so little of
those touches of light which is never seen on land or sea than
in the revelations of Henry James. He was not English in
temperament, though he loved England. He was not Latin in
character, though he adored the literature of France. He was
always an American. And he never could if he wanted to
rid himself of his Americanism. His peculiar state of mind,
the especial values of his characteristics, could never have
been produced outside of New England; therefore his letters
offer a most interesting study to us to whom the things of the
soul are the greatest of all, and the promise of a future life
the one thing that makes us not afraid to live in this.
One leaves these letters with a certain regret and a certain
doubt. With regret, because they contain such an embarrass-
ment of riches that no review can do justice to them; with a
certain doubt because it almost seems that a more careful ex-
amination would reveal the real man who must exist some-
where among their exaggerations, their half truths, their
charming touches of humanity, and their insincerities which
are only the shadows of the sincerity that evidently lay deep
in the heart of this very precious and fine artist.
IS MARS INHABITED?
BY OTHMAH SOLNITZKY, M.A.
JHE strange signals which have been picked up by
wireless stations recently have been repeatedly
declared to come from the planet Mars. This be-
lief has been strengthened by the regularity and
insistence with which these signals manifest them-
selves. That these signals may come from the sun, which
displays prodigious activity, has been denied by such men as
Marconi and Flammarion. The belief that they come from
Mars presupposes not only that Mars is inhabited, but also that
the inhabitants, if any, have at least reached a state of civil-
ization similar to our own.
During the last fifty years it has been repeatedly claimed
by astronomers of great fame that Mars is inhabited by beings
not only equal, but far in advance of us in the journey of life.
This claim is based primarily on the supposed existence of
canals on Mars. A canal is an artificial waterway, designed
for navigation or for irrigating land. The word canal implies
in the first place, artificial construction by conscious, rational
beings, working knowingly toward a definite, useful end. In
the second place, a canal supposes the presence of water. A
canal is, as a rule, long, narrow and of approximately equal
width. However, the question of size and shape is entirely
subordinate to that of artificiality. A natural waterway is
never called a canal, but a channel, strait, river, or canyon.
In other words, before a canal can exist at all there must be
conscious effort directed towards its construction, and there
must be water to flow through it.
On the surface of Mars there have been observed faint,
narrow, seasonal markings. If these markings were canals in
the true sense of the word, then there would be no doubt
whatever of the existence on Mars of conscious beings, en-
dowed with intelligence and practical ability to construct such
artificial waterways. But the most critical studies of these
Martian markings point to the conclusion that they are not
true canals.
The markings on the surface of Mars were first discovered
302 IS MARS INHABITED? [June,
by the Italian astronomer, Schiaparelli, in 1877. He called them
"canali" and likened them to the English Channel, or to the
Channel of Mozambique. Although he regarded them as per-
manent features of the planet, he did not declare them, at
first, to be of artificial origin. In his later days, however, he
changed his view and considered the markings to be artificial
waterways. His view has also been endorsed by Flammarion
in France, and Lowell in the United States. All three became
convinced that Mars was peopled by a race of superior beings.
The markings of Mars, as studied and drawn by Lowell,
with the aid of a most powerful telescope, appear as geometric
lines and look as if they had been laid down by rule and com-
pass. Each line is of uniform width all along its course, and
stretches across the planet's surface in an undeviated, un-
broken direction. The lines vary in actual width from two to
forty miles. Their length is also enormous; the longest ex-
ceeds 3,500 miles, and many stretch 2,000 and even 3,000 miles
across the surface of the planet. These lines always take the
shortest route between the two points they join. On the earth
some of these lines would stretch from London to Calcutta,
crossing mountains, plains and seas, in an unbroken straight
course forty miles wide.
These lines form a network over the surface of Mars.
They never cross each other, but intersect at their ends. Near
the poles of Mars the mesh of lines becomes smaller and
smaller and the lines more and more numerous. They seem
to proceed to or from the poles. No part of the surface of
Mars is free of these lines.
At the principal intersections of the lines have been ob-
served dark round dots, which have been called "oases." In
all, one hundred and twenty-one oases have been noticed.
What is more peculiar about the Martian lines is the fact
that at times they appear double, as two close parallel twin
lines. Thus where before only one line was present, there
appear two, one the exact replica of the other. The twin lines
are but a short distance apart, are of the same size, of the.
same length, and parallel throughout their entire course.
When once seen as double, a line remains so for a period of
four or five months. But not all lines appear double; in fact,
many never do. Only certain lines display this peculiar prop-
erty of doubleness, and no others.
1920.] 75 MARS INHABITED? 303
The peculiar appearance of double lines occurs only dur-
ing certain Martian seasons. In one season one line of the
pair may appear relatively stronger than the other, and may
give the impression of a single line. In other seasons the two
lines are equally strong, giving the impression of being twin
lines. It is during late Martian summer and fall of the north-
ern hemisphere that the double lines appear clearest.
Lowell claims that the lines on the surface of Mars are
real canals because of their straightness, their individually
uniform size, their position in regard to the planet's funda-
mental features, their relation to the oases, the dual char-
acter of some of them, and above all, because of the syste-
matic networking by both lines and oases of the whole surface
of the planet. The last point is especially emphasized. Lowell
describes the lines and oases as a system whose end and aim
is the collection of the water let loose by the semi-annual
melting of the snow at the north and south poles of Mars, and
its distribution to the different parts of the planet's surface.
One of the greatest stumbling-blocks in considering the
Martian lines as true canals, is the fact that many astronomers
have failed to confirm the existence of most of the lines.
Young, of Princeton University, found that the lines could be
observed only with the aid of low powers. With high powers
the lines became mere shadings, undefined and irregular.
Keeler and Barnard could see only soft, irregular shadings and
some broad, hazy, ill-defined streaks. Maunder denies the
existence of any lines, and explains their appearance to be due
to optical illusions. Thus, when viewing very faint shadings
and scattered dots, there is often a tendency to "see" imag-
inary lines connecting them.
Another strong objection against the reality of the canal-
like lines is the fact that strikingly similar lines have been ob-
served on the planets Mercury and Venus. That one planet
should display such curious markings is very strange, indeed,
but for three planets to have similar markings is incredible.
The regularity and straight course of the lines is by no
means a proof of their artificial character, but rather a proof
that they are due either to some optical effect or to some
natural cause or causes. In the first place, Mars is not a per-
fectly smooth globe. Its surface has hills, valleys and moun-
tains, some of which are as high as 4,000 or 5,000 feet. Arti-
304 IS MARS INHABITED? [June,
ficial waterways constructed by intelligent beings, would fol-
low and be conditioned by the natural contour of the surface.
This is the case with all artificial constructions on our own
planet, the earth. Where the surface is dotted with hills,
valleys, and mountains of several thousand feet altitude, it is
plain that the shortest distance between two points is often
the most difficult, and the longest way around is frequently the
quickest way home. The lines on Mars always take the short-
est course between two points, regardless of valleys, hills, or
mountains. This certainly does not indicate the presence of
conscious, intelligent beings.
The geometrical character of the lines also is no proof
of their artificiality. Geometrical shapes and forms, such as
snowflakes and rock crystals, are found everywhere in nature
and they can be explained by the operation of natural forces.
Moreover, Mars is a dry planet. If any water is present
at all, it would be due to the melting of the snow at the north
and south poles of Mars. During northern summer the water
would have to flow from the north through the canals in the
temperate zone, past the equator and fertilize the plains to
some thirty-five degrees south latitude. During southern sum-
mer, on the other hand, the water would have to flow north-
ward, reaching thirty-five degrees north latitude. In other
words, if the lines on Mars were true canals, the water flowing
through the canals lying in the region between thirty-five
degrees south and thirty-five degrees north, would have to
flow up-hill as readily as down-hill. Such a supposition would
do away with the force of gravitation entirely. To overcome
this difficulty Lowell asserts that the flow of water on Mars
is not conditioned by natural forces, but propelled artificially.
But such an assertion presupposes feats of engineering that
stagger the imagination.
To push speculation and imagination to such extremes, in
order to make facts suit a theory, is farcical, when the most
fundamental conditions of the planet are still unknown.
There is no undisputed direct evidence that water even exists
upon the surface of Mars. Its presence is inferred from the
behavior of the polar caps. This inference itself is still a
mooted question. The polar caps are more or less circular
brilliant white spots observed near, but not at, the poles of
Mars. These spots vary in size according to the Martian sea-
1920.] 75 MARS INHABITED? 305
sons. During the long northern winter the polar caps increase
in size and diminish during the alternate period when con-
tinuously exposed to the rays of the sun. Similar phenomena
occur on the earth. Each winter immense fields of ice are
formed and vast quantities of snow are deposited over great
regions in the northern hemisphere, thus forming a brilliant
white cap around the north pole. During summer much of
this ice and snow melts and the cap diminishes in size. By
analogy it has been inferred that the brilliant polar caps, vis-
ible on Mars, are also due to the formation of real snow and
ice during Martian winter. But such an explanation of the
polar caps on Mars necessarily implies the existence of an
atmosphere around Mars similar to that surrounding the earth.
That is to say, an atmosphere in which the vapor of water is
carried from the hot regions of the equator and deposited as
snow at the poles. There is no doubt that Mars is enveloped
by an atmosphere, but it is equally certain that the latter is
not similar to the terrestrial atmosphere. The Martian atmos-
phere is exceedingly rare and transparent. If any clouds
exist in the Martian atmosphere they are exceedingly rare,
thin and semi-transparent. Storm clouds have never been ob-
served in the atmosphere of Mars.
The presence of water vapor in the Martian atmosphere is
also a matter of dispute. The light which we receive from
Mars is the reflected sunlight which necessarily has to pass
twice through the atmosphere of Mars. Any vapors in that
atmosphere will absorb their own characteristic rays from the
sunlight and make their presence known by modifying the
solar spectrum. But vapors in the atmosphere of the earth
also produce such changes in the solar spectrum, so that it is
exceedingly difficult to decide as to whether an observed
modification is due to vapor in the atmosphere of Mars, or of
the earth.
Further, the gravitation on the surface of Mars is only
about four-tenths that of the earth. In other words, a man of
average weight of one hundred and fifty pounds transported
to Mars, would weigh only sixty pounds. As a result the atmos-
phere of Mars is as thin and rarified as at the tops of the
highest mountains on earth. The temperature on Mars would,
therefore, be far below the freezing point of water, especially
so since Mars is a little more than one and a half times as far
VOL. CXI. 20
306 IS MARS INHABITED? [June,
from the sun as the earth, and receives only about forty-three
per cent as much heat as the earth. Since the sun is the only
source of heat on Mars, the temperature on the surface of
Mars would have to be some fifty-four degrees below the
freezing point of water. Under such conditions how can it be
maintained that there are true canals on Mars? What would
be their purpose? Lowell explains the artificiality of the
Martian canals by the scarcity of water upon the planet, by
the necessity of saving every drop of the precious fluid; to
account for the temperature necessary for the existence of
free water he assumes an atmosphere laden with water vapor.
In other words, he conjures up a dry, parched desert, covered
with a moist, saturated atmosphere!
But no such atmospheric envelope exists on Mars and
hence the daily variations between day and night must be
enormous, as is the case with the moon. During the day the
surface would be heated to a high degree by the direct rays
of the sun, but at night this heat would be radiated forth into
the surrounding atmosphere and the temperature fall to one
hundred or two hundred degrees below zero.
From these considerations one conclusion can safely be
drawn, namely, that very little is actually known concerning
the conditions on Mars. There is a great mass of observations
and many beautiful drawings, but a satisfactory explanation
of them has not yet been brought forth. Such being the case
it is very unscientific to assume that Mars is inhabited.
That life may exist on other planets than our own is not
in the least impossible, or even improbable. Like the earth,
there must be many bodies of similar general characteristics
in the universe. Life, even human beings, exist under the most
diverse conditions on the earth, and it is hardly conceivable
that among the countless millions of heavenly bodies, forming
the solar system, the earth is the only one capable of support-
ing life. But the possibility that life may exist on other planets
than our own, does not prove that life actually exists on a
particular planet, like Mars. Whether life exists on Mars is a
question of evidence, pure and simple, and the evidence rests
upon the alleged canals. Since they are not true canals, there
is no foundation for the belief that Mars is inhabited by con-
scious, rational beings, like ourselves, much less by superior
beings.
BLESSED OLIVER PLUNKET.
BY A. I. DU P. COLEMAN.
HEN, a few months ago, Lord Dunsany was trav-
eling from city to city in America, it is probable
that few who did honor to him as a distinguished
author knew the titles to fame that cluster round
the family to which he belongs. It would take
us far too long to trace to its source in dim antiquity the race
of Plunket. They were known in Rome six centuries before
the sojourn there of Blessed Oliver. Donogh, son of Brian
Boroimhe, the one hundred and seventy-fifth monarch of Ire-
land, says O'Hart, became king of Munster in 1022, married the
sister of Harold, the last Saxon king of England, and after a
reign of forty-nine years laid down his sceptre, took the mon-
astic habit, and died in the Roman monastery of St. Stephen.
From his son, Pluingceid, have descended not only the barons
of Dunsany, not only the bearers of the name who, in recent
years, have been so loyal to the ancient Faith, down to the
pure-souled young poet who stood with MacDonagh and
Pearse, but the venerable prelate whose name last month, in
the same Eternal City, was written forever in a still more illus-
trious roll of fame among the Blessed Ones of God.
Born in 1629, at Loughcrew, County Meath, he was edu-
cated by his uncle, Patrick, titular abbot of St. Mary's in Dub-
lin, afterwards Bishop of Ardagh and of Meath. In the com-
pany of Father Scarampi, the Oratorian sent to Ireland as
Internuntius by Innocent X., he went to finish his studies in
Rome. Here he spent some time in the Irish College founded
by Cardinal Ludovisi twenty years before, and in the Gre-
gorian University under the Jesuits. Ordained priest in 1654,
for twelve years he taught dogmatics and apologetics in the
College of the Propaganda, while his talents were recognized
by an appointment as consultor to the Congregation of the
Index.
He was, however, no mere bookworm. The zeal for souls
which was to lead his feet so many a weary mile, shone
brightly in these younger days. Ever since his coming to
308 BLESSED OLIVER PLUNKET [June,
Rome in the company of one of their number, he had been
closely allied with the Fathers of the Oratory. In fact, so close
was his attachment to them, he had asked and gained special
permission to tarry longer in Rome in order to make further
studies in their house of San Girolamo della Carita, where
St. Philip himself had taken up his abode in 1551.
An ancient and unquestioned tradition affirmed that on
this very site had stood the house of St. Paula, the Roman
matron who, in the fifth century, became a saint under the
direction of St. Jerome. It is hard for us Americans to realize
the stratum upon stratum of history in Rome, age piled on age
from the dim past. The hospital of Santo Spirito, to which
the young Irish priest made many a visit for the consolation of
the sick, though as a hospital it dates only from 1198, stands
where still earlier was the hostel for the reception of Anglo-
Saxon pilgrims, and there lay buried two Saxon kings who had
died in Rome before the king of Munster came there. Even in
England, the home of a younger civilization, the same is true.
I could take you to a corner in London where, in the seven-
teenth century, stood the town house of a great nobleman;
where, in the eighteenth, the tide of fashion having flowed
westward, the same mansion was one of the most famous
gambling houses of the day; and where in the early nine-
teenth, on the very same piece of ground, was erected, under
the invocation of St. Patrick, the first Catholic church built in
London since the so-called Reformation.
At the end of 1668, the Church's work in the land of St.
Patrick was so crippled by the intolerance of those who ruled
the island that of twenty-six bishops who should have been
there, only two were able to be in residence one of them the
very Patrick Plunket who laid the foundations of the career we
have set out to trace. The next spring there died in exile at
Louvain Edmund O'Reilly, Archbishop of Armagh a see with
an inheritance of ancient and glorious traditions, and marked
with recent stigmata of suffering for the Faith. Founded by
the Apostle of Ireland himself about 44-5, it had numbered
among its rulers the great St. Malachy O'Morgair, who died at
Clairvaux in the arms of his friend, St. Bernard, in 1148. In
the troublous times, Richard Creagh, steadfastly refusing to
acknowledge Queen Elizabeth as head of the Church, was car-
ried to London and thrown into the Tower, where he sue-
1920.] BLESSED OLIVER PLUNKET 309
cumbed to ill-treatment in 1585. His successor, Edmund
Megauran, a Franciscan, consecrated at Rome in 1588, could
not reach his diocese for six years, and was foully murdered
soon after his arrival. Archbishop O'Reilly, consecrated at
Brussels in 1654, had been three times a fugitive. Clement IX.
chose Oliver Plunket to be his successor in the high and
perilous seat, apparently of his own motion and solely because
of the virtues and learning he had discovered in him.
When the archbishop-designate went to make his fare-
wells at the hospital of Santo Spirito, the chaplain, a saintly
Pole, Father Jerome Miskovio, said to him with sudden vision :
"You are going, Father, to a place where you shall shed your
blood for the Faith." But this was not the first time that the
thought of martyrdom had been close to him. It is recorded in
the articles of his process that during all the twenty-five years
in Rome he had specially loved to visit the Catacombs and
there give free rein to his imagination mentis habenis re-
laxatis as he tried to evoke the shadowy figures of the far-
away heroes of the Faith who lay buried there.
He desired to be consecrated in Rome, but this, it was
thought, might only increase the antagonism of the English
Protestants, so he was raised to the episcopal dignity in the
Low Countries probably at Ghent, on the feast of St. Andrew
another Irish prelate, Dr. French of Ferns, acting as one of
the consecrators. Tarrying a while in London in the house of
the confessor of Charles H.'s Catholic queen, in the endeavor
to mitigate the hostility he had only too much reason to antic-
ipate, he reached his see in the following March.
Here he found his work cut out for him. The flock had
been long without a shepherd. The discipline of the clergy
had been relaxed to an alarming degree. Four years later he
wrote to Cardinal Barberini, Cardinal-Protector of Ireland,
that he had already confirmed nearly fifty thousand people,
many of them gray-haired men and women, often under the
open sky; and that, in the province, almost as many were still
awaiting an opportunity to receive the sacrament.
Persecution at first was intermittent, depending somewhat
on the temper of the Viceroy of the moment. The second dur-
ing his episcopate, the Earl of Essex "a sober, wise, judicious
and pondering person," Evelyn calls him wrote in 1673 from
Dublin Castle to his brother, Sir H. Capel :
310 BLESSED OLIVER PLUNKET [June,
Here is one Oliver Plunkett, y e Romish Titular Primate
of this Kingdome, who seems to be one of the best men of
his Persuasion I have mett w tt ; & tho' I doubt not but he
is industrious enough in promoting his owne Religion, yet
I could never finde but he was of a more peaceable temper
& more conformable to y e Government than any of their
Titular Bishops in this Country. ... I should be glad for
y e reasons above-mentioned you would your selfe, and
some of our Friends, secure this Gentleman from any such
severitie, w ch should be singly and personally inflicted on
him.
There were times, however, especially after Lord Essex
had been recalled, when, like those who governed the Church
under the pagan emperors, he was obliged to fly for his life.
Indeed, like the Son of Man Who had not where to lay His
head, he never had a house of his own. At times he wandered
(in company with Dr. Brennan, then Bishop of Waterford,
later Archbishop of Cashel), from one thatched cabin to
another, often glad of a frugal meal of oatcake and milk, but
always safe in trusting to the loyalty of his poor.
Like the very different man who came from London to
Dublin a generation after Oliver had left it under guard-
Jonathan Swift he was known to the poor and the outcast as
their friend. He made more than one journey on foot among
the lonely northern hills to visit the "Tories." This name was
soon to gain a much more widely-known application in Eng-
lish, and even in American, history, from its use by Titus
Oates for those who disbelieved in the "Popish Plot," and then
for the Irish Catholic friends of the Duke of York. Originally
it was a corruption of the Irish toiridhe, a pursuer (hence a
plunderer). It had been used in Ireland, at least since the
Elizabethan days, to designate the dispossessed natives who
had been driven as outlaws to the hills, there to live after the
manner of Robin Hood.
The Archbishop sought them out in their retreats in order
to persuade them, for their own sakes, to make the best,
not the worst, of their situation. For some of them he got
pardons, for others he made arrangements to transfer them to
new homes beyond the sea. These journeys to the hills, so
worthy of a good shepherd, although undertaken with the ex-
press sanction of the Viceroy, were brought up against him on
1920.] BLESSED OLIVER PLUNKET 311
his trial, in an attempt to prove that he had plotted to raise
armed rebellion with French aid.
It was a work of mercy that delivered the Archbishop into
his enemies' hands towards the end of his ten years' episcopate.
He was summoned to Dublin to console the last hours of his
uncle, the Bishop of Meath. He was warned that he took his
life in his hands, yet he went as unhesitatingly as he had
always done at the call of duty. The clouds, however, were
lowering enough to have terrified a heart less stout. Arch-
bishop Lynch of Tuam had been driven out of the country;
immediately before Archbishop Talbot of Dublin had been
thrown into prison, where he died. And now Blessed Oliver
was arrested on a charge of high treason and confined in
Dublin Castle.
One may readily see how great would be our loss did we
know no more of this valiant confessor of the Faith than the
name of a new accession to the ranks of the Blessed. We
should like to know much more of him than we do; it is tan-
talizing to be told that there are some hundreds of his letters
extant in the archives of the Vatican and the Propaganda,
waiting till some one has time and energy to transcribe and
publish them. Cardinal Moran, Archbishop of Sydney, has,
to be sure, written his life, and not a little has been published
about him since, on December 9, 1886, Leo XIII. conferred
upon him the title of Venerable Servant of God. But perhaps
the most vivid realization of the conditions under which he
fought his last fight, may be gained from Monsignor Benson's
Oddsfish!
The fury of the English populace against Catholics and
their insane belief in the "Popish Plot" was still raging fiercely,
though it had but two years more to burn. It is difficult for us
to imagine how people could have credited the cock-and-bull
stories that were told; could have seriously believed that the
great fire of London was deliberately caused by the Catholics,
and recorded their belief on the base of the monument which,
said Pope half a century later,
Like some tall bully, lifts its head and lies.
It is incredible how they could have swallowed the monstrous
inventions they did on the testimony of men like Gates and
312 BLESSED OLIVER PLUNKET [June,
Bedloe, who "stand highest," says the agnostic Goldwin Smith,
"of all vile informers in the pillory of history." But mob
psychology is a strange and irrational thing.
Politics, of course, was at the bottom of the whole thing.
Strong men were playing a reckless game for high stakes. On
the one side, Charles II. was fighting desperately to save the
royal power, and his brother's succession which he thought to
be bound up with it. On the other, the iniquitous Shaf tesbury,
In friendship false, implacable in hate,
Resolved to ruin or to rule the state,
(as Dryden painted him in that merciless and scathing indict-
ment four months after Oliver Plunket had gone to his re-
ward) had seized with avidity on the story of a plot as his
surest means of carrying the country with him. When the
corpse of Godfrey, the magistrate before whom Gates had
laid his evidence, was found in a ditch with a sword through
his heart, panic broke loose. Let me quote Mr. Trevelyan's
vivid picture of it:
"Terror of death took hold of the inhabitants of London.
It was thought that the execution of the plot which Gates had
detailed had already begun, and that Godfrey had been the
first victim. Night after night, each householder lay down half
expecting to be awakened by the alarm of fire or massacre.
The cheerful tramp of the train-bands echoing down the frosty
streets as he lay awake seemed to him the only reason why
that mad Christmas passed in safety. When his prentices
came in from patrol duty at dawn, he rose and prayed that all
the household might be preserved that day from sudden death."
The unlucky discovery of a batch of letters written by an
indiscreet namesake of my own, who was secretary to the
King's brother, gave a handle to Shaftesbury and his friends,
and formed the first link in the long chain of disasters to the
Catholic cause. "If Coleman had been acquitted," thinks Mr.
Pollock, a careful student of this whole period, "there could
have been no more to come. Had they not secured his convic-
tion, the Jesuits, Mr. Langhorn, Lord Stafford, and Archbishop
Plunket would have gone unconvicted also." But, although
he had taken the alarm in time to destroy a great part of his
papers, enough remained to inflame the passions of the people.
It was known that in 1675 he had written to Father La Chaise,
1920.] BLESSED OLIVER PLUNKET 313
the confessor of Louis XIV., to ask him to obtain from the
French king a sum of money large enough to enable Charles to
govern without having recourse to Parliament and allow the
Duke of York the chief influence in the kingdom. Passages
like the following were read:
"We have a mighty work upon our hands, no less than the
conversion of three kingdoms, and by that the subduing of a
pestilent heresy, which has domineered over a great part of
this northern world a long time. There was never such hopes
of success since the death of Queen Mary as now in our days,
when God has given us a prince who is become (may I say a
miracle) zealous of being the author and instrument of so
glorious a work."
These may seem harmless enough designs to us, who be-
lieve that the reclaiming of England to the Faith would have
been the greatest of blessings; but to the ignorant prejudices
of the mob, and even of better educated leaders, such phrases
seemed damning evidence. One of the cleverest of them, Hali-
fax, who voted "Not guilty" at Stafford's trial, because he could
not swallow the accusations of a plot for murder and mas-
sacre, yet told Sir William Temple that "the plot must be
handled as if it were true, whether it were so or no."
Coleman, in any case, paid dearly for his zeal, dying,
says Mr. Airy, "the first victim to the Terror." This is not
strictly accurate, however. A week earlier (November 26,
1678) he had been preceded on the scaffold by a man named
Staley "a great Roman Catholic banker," Macaulay calls him,
in his usual sketchy way; really the son of a goldsmith, who
was supposed to have vowed in an eating-house in Covent
Garden, in the hearing of all the guests, to kill the heretical
tyrant.
But now all England was launched on a mad career; and
even Charles, whose cool, keen common sense picked flaw after
flaw in Gates' testimony, and who told his friends that he did
not believe a word of all these stories, was helpless before
the power of the mob. A few weeks later the blood of the
innocent began to flow more freely. If there were space, it
would be full of interest to recite the heroism of the Jesuits,
always in the front of a forlorn hope, who were done to death
in December, 1678, and June, 1679. But the man who is our
special subject must not be left to lie too long in a prison cell.
314 BLESSED OLIVER PLUNKET [June,
His first trial was in July, 1680, at Dundalk, in his own
diocese. Here he and his accusers were equally well-known.
As a natural consequence no one appeared to testify against
him except the unfrocked wretches viri perditissimi, the
articles justly call them MacMoyer, Murphy, and Callaghan,
who were seeking their revenge upon him for the discipline he
had inflicted; and nothing could be done. The whole monstrous
romance, however, was dependent upon the maintenance of a
belief in the possibility of a great Irish rising and the letting in
of a foreign army. 1 And who more likely to be at the head of
such a plot than the Primate of All Ireland?
He was accused of having obtained his see for the purpose,
and on the express condition, of raising seventy thousand men
in Ireland by the contributions of the Catholic clergy, "whose
whole revenues," says an eighteenth-century Protestant his-
torian, "could not equip a single regiment." This formidable
body of insurgents were to join twenty thousand men to be
furnished by France, who were to make their descent at Car-
lingford in Armagh, "a place the most inconvenient, and even
impossible for the purpose." His accusers were so eager to
have him in London, where they could do as they pleased with
him, that, since he had spent during his imprisonment all his
scanty savings, they were only too glad to transport him to
London at the State's expense.
The result of the first attempt, coupled with the fact that
more than one Catholic prisoner had been acquitted in the
last twelvemonth, might have afforded ground for hope. But
little more than a month after his arrival in London came
another trial which may well have shown the Archbishop's
friends that the storm was not yet over.
While Blessed Oliver in his prison was probably thinking
and praying over his work for God, on the eleventh anniver-
sary of his consecration, and while in another part of London
a few calm philosophic gentlemen were attending the annual
meeting of the Royal Society and electing as president "that
excellent person and great philosopher, Mr. Robert Boyle," the
stage was set in Westminster Hall for the first act of one more
tragedy. On the same trumped-up charge of conspiring to
1 It reflected particular discredit on the "Popish Plot" in England that a year
had passed before any evidence could be found of any such conspiracy in Ireland,
where Catholics were so numerous that their brethren of England would naturally
have resorted to them for assistance.
1920.] BLESSED OLIVER PLUNKET 315
murder the King, the aged Lord Stafford, bearer of one of the
noblest names in England, was put on trial for his life. There
were some of the strangest and most dramatic coincidences
about this trial. It was held in the same place, and, notes
Evelyn, just in the same manner as the trial of Charles I.'s
mighty minister, Lord Strafford, forty years before. The sim-
ilarity of the names of the prisoners is a little thing. More
remarkable is it that Stafford's father, the Earl of Arundel, had
presided over the earlier trial as Lord High Steward, and,
what is even more stirring to the imagination, the prosecuting
attorney was the same in both cases Sir John Maynard, now
nearly eighty years of age. As a poem of that year has it,
The robe was summoned, Maynard at the head,
In legal murder none so deeply read.
Arundel, of course, had been long in his grave; but the gray-
haired lawyer, as "his accumulative active tongue" rehearsed
the iniquitous evidence against Stafford, must have had a vivid
memory of that earlier scene.
What is more in the line of our special study is the fact
that Stafford's grandfather, the first Earl of Arundel of the
Howard line, had been committed to the Tower nearly a cen-
tury before, on an equally flimsy charge of treason against
Queen Elizabeth, and had died there, a venerable confessor
of the Faith and a martyr in will, if not in deed. Discredited
and rebuked as Gates had been by this time, he had not quite
lost his diabolical power over inflamed minds. His evidence
prevailed, although the sober Evelyn, who sat through it all,
concludes gravely in his diary : "And verily I am of his Lord-
ship's opinion: such a man's testimonie should not be taken
against the life of a dog." On December 29th, the feast of
the martyred archbishop, St. Thomas of Canterbury, Lord
Stafford was beheaded on Tower Hill. Macaulay accepts the
old and picturesque tradition that when he solemnly protested
his innocence for the last time, the multitude cried out, "God
bless you, my lord! We believe you, my lord!" It is an ami-
able touch amidst all the horrors, and we should like to be-
lieve it. Unfortunately the best modern research denies it,
and shows the thirst for blood still unslaked.
On May 3d, and again on June 8th, Blessed Oliver was
brought up for examination before the court of King's Bench.
316 BLESSED OLIVER PLUNKET [June,
The judges were Sir Francis Pemberton, newly appointed
Chief Justice, Dolben, and Jones. Maynard once more as-
sisted the attorney-general with his legal knowledge; and so
(though he played no prominent part) did Jeffreys, then thirty-
three years old and King's Serjeant, on whose name such a
lurid light was to be cast by his severities in the Tory reaction.
Even the credulity of panic might have seemed to be stag-
gered at last, for at the same time and before the same court
was tried and condemned a perjured informer, named Fitz-
harris. He had improved on the usual tale of assassination,
burning, and massacre, by solemnly deposing that he knew of a
plot by which several members of parliament were to be
boiled down to make a sort of holy oil to be used at future
coronations.
Yet the evidence against the Primate was hardly less far-
cical than this. Since various "untoward accidents" had pre-
vented the arrival of the witnesses he had wished to have from
Ireland, he could do little but assert his innocence throughout
(as did every single one of those who suffered in the Terror),
and point with well-merited scorn to the inconsistencies of his
accusers. He freely confessed that he had done everything that
an archbishop of his Church was bound to do, but denied the
slightest treasonable intention, strong in his good conscience
like that other martyr referred to above. When the
four knights with drawn swords ran through the shadowy
aisles of Canterbury cathedral, crying fiercely: "Where is
Thomas? Where is the traitor?" their victim's voice came to
them calm and clear out of the gathering dusk: "Here am I,
the Archbishop but no traitor!" So Oliver Plunket, strong
in the same strength, received his cruel sentence of hanging,
drawing, and quartering with a serene "Deo gratias!"
Lord Essex besought Charles to pardon him, declaring
from his own knowledge that the charges were false. "Then,
my lord," replied the King gloomily, "be his blood on your own
head. You might have saved him if you would. I cannot
pardon him, because I dare not."
But the martyr was past all thought of earthly favors, his
mind wholly turned to his journey home. The day of his exe-
cution arrived, July 1st (old style July llth by the new calen-
dar) ; and Captain Richardson, governor of Newgate prison,
tells us how it found him: "When I came to him this morn-
1920.] THE WORLD 317
ing, he was newly awoke, having slept all night without dis-
turbance; and when I told him he was to prepare for execu-
tion, he received the message with all quietness of mind, and
went to the sledge as if he had been going to a wedding."
We have not space to tell at length of his memorable
speeches, both at his sentence and on the scaffold, breathing
the untroubled dignity of a conscience void of offence; nor of
how a just nemesis overtook the man most deeply guilty of
his blood, the wicked Shaftesbury, who slept (if he could sleep
at all) a prisoner in the Tower on the martyr's second night in
Paradise. But we have said enough to show that, asking his
good prayers for us who are still in our pilgrimage, we may
well take the last martyr for the Faith in England as a model
of zeal for the salvation of souls and of inflexible courage in
the defence of the Truth against whatever odds.
THE WORLD.
BY J. CORSON MILLER.
THE world's a garden, green and gold,
Where God the Gardener daily strays;
His gesture makes the dawn unfold
A bloom of rose and chrysoprase.
He takes the sunlight's roving beams,
And sprinkles all the world with fire
The seeds that breed men's noble dreams,
By which they labor and aspire.
For robe, He dons the sunset's pall,
To wear across the fields of night;
The clouds are but His mansions tall,
For His contentment and delight.
Sometimes a rainbow glimmers sweet
To carpet soft His path awhile;
The stars are candles for His feet,
The moon's a mirror for His smile.
A DRAMA WITH AN IDEAL. 1
BY MAY BATEMAN.
DEALS however much we try to hide our faith
in them from the world rule our lives. The
man with no vision to guide him is scarcely a
man at all. However much we scoff outwardly at
dreamers, the most unyielding keeps, apart in his
soul, some dear dream of perfection to lend enchantment at
unexpected moments to the day's actions and touch them with
glow.
Acts of faith come to fruition in the secret places of men's
souls.
But the true test of an ideal's worth is its workaday value
in our lives. Dreaming is not enough. We must live true to
the faith that holds us. Vague hopes, too sterile to produce
even a sickly blossom, give life neither perfume nor beauty.
We come upon this tragedy of inactivity and listlessness, of
mental anaemia, in Tchekov's Three Sisters. No single person-
age in the play has the real courage of his convictions. Not
one with any flickering consciousness of purpose is able to
carry his purpose through. The catch-phrase of, "I'm tired,"
echoes throughout like a monotonous refrain. Tired ! Who is
not tired who dwells upon his tiredness?
What the three sisters want, what their friends and com-
panions want, too, are real things in their way, but their own
shifting glances fail even to focus what is material. Work
Moscow love are tangible, but the sisters, with vague in-
stincts which never crystallize in resolution, do not achieve
even a train journey. Life, fluid, drips through their open
fingers just as water from a mountain stream filters through
the hands of those who will not hold them cup-wise.
One critic called the play a tragedy of "stuffy and stag-
nant inaction." "Spiritual dry-rot," follows inevitably in the
wake of "sickly lack of motive and direction." Leaving the
1 The Higher Court, by Miss M. E. M. Young, a noteworthy play, of special
interest to Catholics, was produced by the Pioneer Players at the Strand Theatre,
London, April 11, 1920.
1920.] A DRAMA WITH AN IDEAL 319
theatre, some such sense of impotent despair comes on us as
we feel when leaving the Lock Hospital. "How long, O Lord,
how long?" The Lock Hospital suffers unjustly in comparison.
A gallant fight is being put up there. The gloom in one's
heart comes through the initial ill which makes such places
necessary. All the same, we crave for the tang of clean wind
sweeping over mountain heights, for space where we may
stretch the soul, as after the last tremulous whispers at the
close of the Three Sisters. "We remain alone . . ." "It's all
the same! It's all the same!" ... "If only we could know!
If only we could know !"
Tchekov's three sisters are left clinging to each other be-
cause they have nothing else to which to cling. There is
something cankerous and stifling about a play like this.
And yet, withal, Tchekov has the supreme art of making
his nerveless creatures live, does undoubtedly possess that
power "of magical selection of minute and significant touches,"
which Miss Young has in common with him touches which
haunt us, which are even beautiful, which move us even in
our worst impatience at what, if it were merely pose, would
be intolerable. He throws a dozen stage conventions to the
winds. His characters talk naturally, follow their own cur-
rents of thought as we do in real life, so that, while our con-
fidante is deploring the ills which have befallen her, we answer
in terms indicative of our own remembrance of past wrongs.
Olga, Masha, Irina, Chebutikin, and the others in Tchekov's
play are real in the trend of their ramblings, even though it
be the reality of egotism. This quality gives distinction to the
play. We are thankful for small mercies in modern drama
when comparing it with classic art. What tragedy of the past
fifty years has any claim upon the interest of an unborn
generation? How many plays have phrases that go home,
that deserve to live? We have almost lost the art of writing
"for all time" in these negligent days. The written word in
nine out of ten cases has no more permanency than the paper
upon which it is typed.
The modern dramatist's sense of vocation is lost in his
alarming consciousness of what the public pays to see.
Miss Young's play, simple, poignant, depends for its suc-
cess on that rarest of all qualities, its startling and uncom-
promising definition of Truth. Now Truth, as we know, fright-
320 A DRAMA WITH AN IDEAL [June,
ens most of us. It is so seldom met with face to face that it
makes us shrink. The merest handful "serve the Truth be-
cause it's true," and for no other motive.
I foresee a wave of discussion about Miss Young's play
which, to an enterprising manager, should spell worldly suc-
cess.
The Higher Court is a drama of sincerity set in conven-
tional middle-class surroundings. It possesses the essential
of real drama in its conflict between great issues. In the prob-
lem play, as we usually know it, in ordinary drama, the super-
natural element either does not enter at all or is so camou-
flaged with the trappings of what is currently known as
mysticism an artificial thing more far apart from real mysti-
cism than clay from flesh that it merely appeals to our love
of sensation. Or if "religion" is brought in as a weapon with
which to combat some existing wrong, it is, in nine cases out
of ten, dressed up in pantomimic garments intended to rouse
laughter. Take the reasonable views of the husband in the
crisis of that delightfully amusing play of Mr. Pirn Passes By,
for instance. The audience rocked with laughter when he
diffidently suggested that he couldn't go on living with a
woman whom he had believed to be a widow when once he
had learned that her husband was not dead, and that they
were not married at all. Respect of the ordinary decent usages
of society to take the question from the lowest standpoint-
seemed to the audience mad and indefensible.
Miss Young, in The Higher Court, presents, starkly, the
Catholic view of divorce. The play opens in humdrum sur-
roundings Mr. Pryce-Green's shabby West Kensington flat.
The family lives on next to nothing with a certain air, mainly
through the cleverness of Idalia, the "commonplace" daughter
with the romantic name which everyone agrees doesn't at all
suit her. Polly, her sister, is romantic. Polly, occupier of
the best room and owner of the only "new" suit the sisters
can buy, is just starting off to Paris to study art, having bor-
rowed the money from the one soluble member of the family,
a ship-steward brother. Mr. Pryce-Green's small salary in a
business firm scarcely pays the way. His remaining son's,
frankly doesn't pay his. If it were not for Idalia's scraping
and saving, her happy knack of making galantine from odd-
ments, to give an example "If you only knew what she makes
1920.] A DRAMA WITH AN IDEAL 321
it out of," say the family, pressing it on an unwilling guest-
there would be nothing at all left in the rent envelope at the
end of the quarter.
An aunt, who became a nun in a convent, was the means
of Idalia's getting her education free and becoming a Catholic
in childhood. The family suffer this quite patiently. But
Polly openly rebels when, on this wet morning, it having been
lapidly decided she is to leave for France by the morning
boat, she finds Idalia has gone to Mass as usual.
But "it was some good after all, Idalia going to Mass,"
for on her way she meets the young doctor Polly loves, and
tells him of the hastened departure, and he blurts out the
truth when she asks him aloofly the reason of his coming.
Dr. Foster (explosively). You, Polly you!
Polly (facing him, kettle and teapot in either hand).
Oh, Fred!
Dr. Foster (making such advances as he can to a lady\
thus occupied). I I haven't a penny in the world. Don't
say anything! I don't want anything! Only to tell you
once, right out, before you're off to Paris till nobody knows
when. Only to say that if ever I could keep a wife, Polly
if ever I could !
Fred Foster, with his knack of telling rich hypochondriacs
there is nothing wrong with them, who will sit up all night to
nurse a patient without a penny, is no matrimonial catch.
Unworldly as he is, Mr. Pryce-Jones has, regretfully, to forbid
him the house. Idalia, coming in fresh and rosy into the tense
atmosphere, gives the keynote of her character in a phrase :
Idalia. How I used to howl when I had to start for
school! All the same, once I got there! . . . Paris will be '
just like that. You'll see!
Polly Like the Convent ! Paris!
Idalia (comfortably). Like anything you're frightened
of but you're all right when you get there !
Explanations follow. And Idalia, exuberant, breaks out:
Idalia. What does anything matter? Oh! Oh! Give me
some of that ham !
Ethelbert (darkly). The girl who can eat that dry old
ham !
VOL. CXI. 21
322 A DRAMA WITH AN IDEAL [June,
Strange noises are heard outside tramping of feet. All
listen. The heavy steps go first upstairs to Dr. Foster's flat,
and then down again, to pause at the Pryce-Green's door.
Idalia opens it upon a stretcher borne by policemen, bearing
a man who looks at the point of death, if not already dead.
A stranger has been knocked down in the street an ob-
viously shabby stranger who was run over by a motor-car
hard by. Picked up, he gave quite clearly the unusual name
of these flats. The policeman had tried every door before
coming to the Pryce-Green's, and nobody will take him in.
He is a "stranger." . . . The eyes of father and daughter
meet. Fussy, overworked little Mr. Pryce-Green has his ideals,
too.
Idalia. Papa! The best room! Polly's!
Mr. Pryce-Green Bring him in, constable.
Dr. Foster comes hurrying up with a nursing sister, a nun,
whom he has collected en route. Idalia wrenches herself free
from thought and equips Polly with a luncheon-basket that
will mean "going without" for the rest of the family for days.
The man in the next room is dead by now, perhaps. She prays.
Foster pokes in his head:
"He's coming round!"
The curtain falls upon the practical Idalia making her
list of what "the patient" will need.
Macmanus, the multi-millionajire, financier, and news-
paper proprietor of the Meteor, has been working himself to
a shred. And, surrounded on the one hand by sycophants
and on the other by men to whose advantage it would be were
he quietly "got out of the way," he at last distrusts even the
decision of the expert he has consulted about his health, who
orders him a trip in his yacht "on the coast of Spain." A
man such as he is can wear anything he pleases; he has to
account to no one for his actions, and has nothing resembling
a home, though he lives in a mansion in Park Lane. One
morning early, near the Fulham Road, he leaves his car and
goes to call at the house of a hard-worked general practitioner,
called Weston, who, judging him by his "half -starved condi-
tion" and seedy garments, gives him a "complete overhauling,"
orders "an hour's run daily before breakfast," and, feeling
1920.] A DRAMA WITH AN IDEAL 323
diffident about accepting a half-crown fee, offers him the loan
of his own old sweater and shorts.
Macmanus, with an eye to character, sees Weston's hon-
esty. Against the grain, next morning he gets up and slips
out of the house. No one misses him at first. With interests
in every quarter of the globe, he takes mysterious journeys
frequently. Rounding the corner of the North End Road, he
is aware of a sudden flash of pain, and then knows no more
till he awakes to see Sister Gertrude's hood dark against the
light of the little window, and presently the glow of Idalia's
"morning" face. He is quite unaware that, in a moment's
consciousness, the odd name of some flats, mentioned in the
Meteor of the previous night, leaps to his lips, and accounts
for his presence there.
Here at last is amazing, unforeseen "charity." Bringing
nothing into this world but borrowed clothes, he is wholly,
blissfully dependent upon a family of complete strangers for
board, lodging, nursing, and all. No self-seeking here. These
amazing Pryce-Greens give what they have without stint, and
everything centres round Idalia. Sister Gertrude nurses him
back physically, Dr. Foster superintends the work scrupu-
lously, but Idalia's youth and gayety, her transparent soul
and its strange workings, are the revelation.
He tells them to call him "The Stowaway," saying that,
though he remembers his name and where he lives perfectly,
he is deliberately withholding it. They don't believe him.
A man at the point of death, with nobody near and dear to
inquire for him! and wanting nobody! Why, it's incredible.
The Stowaway is, of course, ashamed to admit his mind isn't
clear yet.
Meantime, Foster, coming in and out daily, anxiously
sees the growing strain on the household resources. There is
no money left in the rent envelope, and March quarter-day,
"the worst quarter for coals and light," at hand. Ethelbert,
the brother, has to walk into business daily because Idalia
can't raise the price of his fare. Something must be done.
The stranger's smashed leg can't be moved with safety yet.
But he is an educated man; there is work he could do, there
in the flat, to pay for some of the long list of delicacies he has
had, Dr. Foster thinks.
Idalia, talking to the stranger, solemnly enters up any-
324 A DRAMA WITH AN IDEAL [June,
thing which can give a clue to his identity in her little book.
Reasonable things, not absurdities, as when he tells her, with
a twinkle, that he is a "millionaire in hiding who has run away
from his job, and come to a haven where he can lie at anchor,
and nobody send him yachting to the coast of Spain."
Spain, for Idalia, means "all the wonderful people St.
Dominic, St. Teresa, St. Ignatius."
Macmanus. Ignatius Loyola? You think Jesuits sound
nice and sensational? No? What's your idea, then?
Idalia (puzzled). I haven't an idea. I know Jesuits.
Heaps of them. I generally go to confession to Jesuits . . .
Macmanus. Good Lord! Do you mean to say you're a
Roman Catholic? You! The one out-and-out transparent
person I have ever come across?
If much in the household bewilders Macmanus, one thing
is clear: Dr. Foster and Idalia are in love with each other.
Polly whom he has never seen is a remote abstraction.
The one thing in the world he wants, Idalia, his money can't
buy. She so obviously is another person's property! But he
lacks the courage to leave her, all the same and the lame leg
is a lucky excuse.
Foster comes in upon them in high glee. He sends Idalia
off and makes Macmanus aware, at last, in the plainest terms
that the family he is living on is crudely poor, that it is up to
him "to turn to as soon as possible and pay a little of his
debt." Here is the chance. (He can explain this part with
Idalia in the room.) The papers are full of the Macmanus
mystery. He gives the details to Macmanus. And Foster has
a clue which could be worked up into a good newspaper story.
When the seedy clerk went to call upon Dr. Foster's
friend, Weston, in the Fulham Road, he left on the table a
gold cigarette case. The cigarette case is engraved with the
Macmanus crest. It has never been reclaimed, nor the lent
clothes returned. Foster's theory is, "Find that man, and
you'll hear something of Macmanus." Here is the very ciga-
rette case. He begins to read the description of the million-
aire as seen through the eyes of the Meteor employees. A
tattoo mark
(Macmanus hastily draws down his sleeve. Idalia takes
the paper away.)
Idalia. We don't want all that, really!
1920.] A DRAMA WITH AN IDEAL 325
The chief story-writer of the Meteor, known to Foster, is
ill. But he'd willingly give a guinea to a man who would
draft out the case. Will "The Stowaway" take on the job?
There's writing paper and pen anu ink handy, and the ciga-
rette case Where is the cigarette case, by the by?
Idalia (half -impatient, half -pitying, to Macmanus). Oh,
dear! You've put it in your pocket, of course.
It is the beginning of the end. Next morning a detective
appears with the constable who brought the injured man to
the Pryce-Green's flat, and an unwilling Dr. Weston to identify
him. They believe he has murdered Macmanus. There is
nothing for it but for him to disclose his identity and make
preparations to go "home" that afternoon.
He and Idalia are left alone.
Macmanus. So you found me out last night? . . Didn't
you think I was a pretty mean case? . . . Obtaining charity
on false pretences?
Idalia. I didn't think it was false pretences.
Macmanus. What did you think?
Idalia. That you were hard up, somehow. It took so
little to please you.
Macmanus. Is this to go on all the time? Giving on
your part, and your father's part, and your brother's; and
taking and taking and taking on mine?
Idalia. Oh! Must I? I must. (With difficulty.) I
want you to give me the money for a bill, please. I'll make
it out. . . . For some things you had.
It has never occurred to her that he could mistake her
friendship for Foster, and wounded, but acquiescent, she takes
his decision that from today they must never meet. Later,
by chance, she mentions Polly and Foster's "understanding."
Macmanus. My God! It's true! You're free! And
you'll marry me!
Idalia (breathless). Marry! . . . You! (Drops her face
in her hands.)
Macmanus. Give me a minute, dear, and I'll talk sense.
Oh, my God! You do see, don't you, that two minutes ago
I was never going to set eyes on you again in this world?
326 A DRAMA WITH AN IDEAL [June,
Idalia (the past anguish in her tone). You said that.
Why?
Macmanus. Will anybody tell me what I've done to
have such a to have a woman like to have you care
for me?
They are like children in their happiness. Macmanus
rushes on, planning, scheming. Why can't they be married
that morning? It could be done. He's so lonely. They'll
wait months then, if she prefers. Since he met her he has
begun to believe in (she looks up hopefully) men and
women. Her face falls.
Words don't mean the same to him as to her. Take
"money," for instance.
Macmanus. There come into your mind all sorts of
comfortable, gentle things. Little reliefs of mind, and kind-
nesses, and attentions. Or valiant things like asking
for that bill! A person says "money" to you. And the
thing you hear is "Love." Well (his voice hardens)
they said "Love" to me. And they meant money. . . .
My wife did that.
Idalia (startled to understand him a widower). Your
wife?
Macmanus. Yes. That's all over, thank God!
Idalia (wincing) . Oh don't !
She must have time to think to consider. There is that
question of the "mixed marriage" to talk out with the priest.
But before that, in this supreme joy, as in each other action
of her life or any purpose, she wants, quite naturally, to tell
Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament about it first.
She leaves him, vaguely apprehensive. She is going to
church. What for? If that Church of hers attempts to sepa-
rate them !
He comes next morning at the appointed hour. Mean-
time, Polly, with the account of the Macmanus mystery in the
Paris Meteor at hand, has read between the lines, and caught
the early train back to use her influence with Idalia. A new
Idalia meets her. One look at her face is enough for a fellow-
lover. It is all settled. The family has just been told. Ethel-
bert guessed it, because there was such a "gorgeous spread at
breakfast" that Idalia had actually dared run into debt to get.
1920.] A DRAMA WITH AN IDEAL 327
Macmanus hardly dares to face her. He is scared, like a
schoolboy. If these priests of hers have put any obstacles in
the way! He can hardly believe that the vision he sees is real.
He had never dreamed of love like this, of mating such as this
will be. And every unconscious word she says breaks down
the habit of a lifetime.
Idalia. If it's a laugh you want, just you wait till you see
Father Burke's face when you go up and tell him about
your enormous richness.
Macmanus. Our enormous richness.
Idalia. My enormous richness, I meant! You see, he
had only just got to asking me whether you could keep a
roof over my head when
Macmanus. What! You have seen your priest, then?
He detests the thought of his affairs being talked out with
a stranger. But Father Burke has climbed down, it seems,
though Idalia will put things so oddly.
Macmanus. You think that Father Burke didn't know
my name?
Idalia. I know he didn't.
Relieved and happy, he gives her an amazing check for
twelve hundred pounds to wipe off the debt on the church
schools. The years drop from them both in their happiness.
And Idalia, looking on into the future, sees visions and dreams
dreams.
Idalia (hushed with wonder). I bought this for you in
the church porch before breakfast. . . . The Penny Cate-
chism. (She laughs.) Price twelve hundred pounds to
you.
He turns to the "marriage" part and reads it. "No human
power can dissolve the bond of marriage, because Christ has
said, 'What God hath joined together, let no man put
asunder.' "
Macmanus. Human power is dissolving marriage every
day! (His words fall like separate blows.)
Idalia (with quiet certainty). No. It can't do that.
328 A DRAMA WITH AN IDEAL [June,
Macmanus (roughly). It does. What's divorce?
Idalia. Nothing. That's what the answer tells. There
is no divorce.
Macmanus (roughly). No divorce! I'm divorced. . . .
Idalia. Your wife is living?
Macmanus. She's not my wife! Do you mean you
didn't know? . . . (Silence. Then) Good Lord! (He tries
to see it. Then) But it was all in the Meteor! In plain
words! (Silence.) Foster read it to you. (Silence. He
remembers.) No. He didn't. But he told you! . . .
(Silence. Then he remembers:) He didn't. I stopped
him.
Follows inevitably, when once and finally she understands,
the Catholic's decision. No appeal against it. A delicate girl
grown adamant. No more to be said. Nothing to be done.
All the tears, all the reproaches, useless. All the foreshadowed
human charitable acts less than nothing in the scale. God's
Will God's Words who, with a due sense of proportion,
can even contemplate balancing against their finality, the little
sum, of even the fiercest or most glowing human love?
Yet, being human, how the knife turns in our heart when
we choose!
Polly and Fred come in radiant, when Macmanus has
gone. Fancy Idalia being sensible, in spite of all. They see
her face and understand what has happened. The check has
been burned. All is over.
Polly (roughly buttoning her into her coat). Here. You
go to church.
Idalia. I'd like to ...
(The front door closes.)
Polly (turns, sobbing, to her lover). She cared so! I'm
frightened! I'm frightened!
Foster. She isn't.
Miss Young's play is the more gallant in that she has given
us an extremely hard case from the human view. Macmanus
has always had a "rotten time," as Idalia said; his wife was
in the wrong. He is generous and grateful. " Idalia had already
broken down many of his prejudices against her faith; she
1920.] WERE YOU TO BE OUT 329
would in time have probably helped to make him see things
still obscure in a clearer light could they have been together.
But to the Catholic the marriage of divorced persons is no
marriage at all.
A fanatical creed? A heaven of brass against which poor
bruised humanity hurtles its prayers in vain? Who that has
made the choice, and abided by it, thinks so?
He may not pick nor choose his steps who takes the Way
of the Cross. We cannot accept the nailing of our hands and
feet and avoid the scourging and the mockery and the thirst
and desolation. God's words are final and unalterable for all
the ruling and the compromise of all the churches that seek to
modernize them and bring them like the music-hall revue
whose book is no longer topical up-to-date.
Out of humiliation may dawn glory, and a light never yet
on land or sea. "He that believeth God taketh heed to the
commandments; and he that trusteth in Him shall fare never
the worse."
. WERE YOU TO BE OUT.
BY FRANCIS CARLIN.
WERE you to be out when a dirge in the trees,
A bum-beetle's hum and a crake's double cry
Are mingled as one troubled tune in the breeze,
'Tis yourself that would sigh.
But were you to be in at the Mass for to hear,
"You're a thousand times welcome" from
peasants who greet
The coming of Christ in the Gaelic, each tear
Of your tears would be sweet.
THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND SCIENCE.
BY FRANCIS AVELING, S.T.D.
HE relations of the Church to modern science
forms a theme upon which much has been writ-
ten that is both fabulous and inexact. It is a
theme hackneyed and, indeed, frayed at the
edges by constant repetition and restatement.
Especially is this true when the statement and repetition have
been made by anti-Catholic warriors of the materialistic
stamp. Catholics who think at all about these matters, as a
rule, have had the antidote the more correct and infinitely
saner view put before them; and could be expected to know
that the Church never has, and never has had, any quarrel
with science : that there is, and can be, from the nature of the
case, no antagonism between revealed truth and truth to
which man is led by the right use of his reason.
Nevertheless, it can hardly be denied that outside the
Church there is the very prevalent notion that the Church, in
philosophy and in science, is out of date and quite negligible;
that, where not positively inimical to the progress of discovery
and advance of knowledge, she divorces her own teaching
from the march of scientific progress, taking refuge from as-
sault in a fortress that is only impregnable because so abso-
lutely out of touch with all reality. This notion is such a com-
monplace of anti-Catholic controversy and is so insistently
kept before the public, that it tends to deceive even the elect.
It is like the advertisements of So-and-So's Soap, or Pills, or
Memory System. And, as does the reiterated advertisement,
so does it, in virtue of a well-known law of psychology, im-
press itself upon, and in time influence, the mind. Even know-
ing quite well that there is an answer to every objection
perhaps with the answer quite clearly before the mind there
is an atmosphere created which subtly minimizes the worth of
the answer and enhances the weight of the objection. This is
so well known a fact to controversialists that, whether con-
sciously or not, both objection and answer are so framed as to
square with it, and thus carry the greatest conviction.
1920.] THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND SCIENCE 331
For a number of decades past the supposed antagonism
of the Church to science has, in the main, been advanced by
materialists. The vulgarizations of materialistic theory have
been insistently reiterated. Supreme pontiffs have defined the
dogma of evolution, and their sycophants and acolytes have
preached it in and out of season. Mind has been degraded to
a "function of the brain;" free will to a delusion due to the
mechanically conceived laws of association; and so on. Con-
ceptions such as these latter have done little to advance the
science in which they made their appearance; and material-
ism, at any rate in psychology, is now practically a thing of the
past. But, in the sciences of nature, there was a reason other
than the mere dogmatizing of metaphysical scientists and the
insistence of their assertions that helped to make materialism
a plausible explanation of the universe. It worked.
The advance of the experimental sciences during the time
that materialism held the field as a philosophical explanation
was prodigious. The applications of science to the affairs of
life to invention, to manufacture, to art was unparalleled.
One has only to compare the standard of living and of com-
fort today with that of former times to appreciate what the
progress of science has meant to the world. All this, in virtue
of another well-known principle, has militated for the accept-
ance of the theories which were put forward as a philosophical
explanation of the phenomena with which the sciences dealt.
And it was, as it very generally is, quite forgotten that phil-
osophical explanation is not science at all, and has nothing
really to do with its progress. Indeed, many people who knew
quite well the phenomena of the sciences, came to conclusions
radically opposed to those of the materialistic school, and with
quite as good a right. Undoubtedly, materialism worked; but
other systems of philosophy would work quite as well, for, as
far as science is concerned, it is indifferent to philosophy;
and materialism, idealism, and so on, must stand or fall on
their own merits. The phase, however, in which an abrupt
opposition existed between religion and materialistic "science"
has closed. Echoes of the old assertions will doubtless make
themselves heard for a long time, but there will be no
serious menace in them when the thinkers of the world have
passed on to a new and more scientific point of view.
Nowhere, perhaps, is this transition to a new standpoint
332 THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND SCIENCE [June,
so marked as in the science of psychology. It might be ex-
pected that materialism would find support from the phe-
nomena of the material. Perhaps it was not a matter for as-
tonishment that, at a time when everything was being treated
"materially" and mechanically, the psychology of the day
should have been conceived on lines of atomism and mechan-
ism. When Hume and Hartley reenunciated the laws of as-
sociation, the temper and bias of the moment suffice to explain
why the associationist school of philosophy became so easily
the vogue. It was easy to picture ideas associating together;
easy to imagine them to be the resulting compound of simple
sensations; and not difficult to account for the emotions in a
scheme in which all was to be accounted for by combination of
simple elements. Besides, the hypothesis fitted in well with the
imaginative correspondence between the mind and the brain.
Here, too, are simple elements; and they are connected. What
more specious than that they are exactly parallel to the con-
tents of "mind?" And what less preposterous than that a
thoroughgoing consistence in principle should warrant the as-
sertion that the brain is an organ which secretes thought as
other organs produce their appropriate secretions?
It is true that the associationists left out of their view
considerations which told against their hypothesis. But they
had not in their possession the observed facts in virtue of
which the science of psychology has now far outstripped the
school of associationism. Of late years the advance that has
been made in this science has been enormous. Not only has
painstaking and exact experimentation in the laboratories of
Europe and America brought to light a vast amount of new
data; clinical work performed by the psychiatrists has opened
quite new vistas before our eyes. And, if the conquest of
new territory has been great in the past few years, there are
still uncharted regions awaiting the explorer. But the work
already done has shown the inadequacy of the materialistic
explanations; and psychologists in general appear to have
orientated themselves accordingly.
I may be permitted to quote a few lines from a paper in
the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, 1918, 1 con-
tributed by one of our leading British psychologists, Dr. Wil-
liam McDougall, F.R.S. In the course of his paper, "The
Vol. xli. (Section of Psychiatry), pp. 1-13.
1920.] THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND SCIENCE 333
Present Position of Clinical Psychology," he says: 'The other
great problem is that of the constitution of man, the age-long
controversy between materialism and what, in the widest
sense, may be called spiritism. For so long as it is held, with
the mechanistic psychology, that congenitally the mind is a
tabula rasa and the brain little more than a mass of indifferent
nerve-tissue waiting to be molded by impressions from the
outer world, it may seem plausible to hold that all mental po-
tentialities are somehow comprised in the material structure of
the germ-plasm. But, with every addition to the demonstrable
wealth of innate mental powers and tendencies, this hypothesis
becomes more impossible and incredible. And it may safely
be affirmed that, if anything like the wealth of innate endow-
ment claimed now by some e. g., by Jung in his latest work
should become well established, then all the world would see
that the materialistic hypothesis is outworn and outrun, and
that each man is bound to his race and ancestry by links which,
conceive them how we may, are certainly of such a nature that
they can never be apprehended by the senses, no matter how
refined and indefinitely augmented by the ultramicroscope or
by the utmost refinements of physical chemistry. I venture to
insist upon this contribution of clinical psychologists towards
the solution of those great problems, because few of them
seem to have adequately realized the bearing of their work
on those issues, which so far transcend in interest even the
fascinating and important questions with which they are more
directly concerned."
The tabula rasa, to which McDougall here refers, he tells
us is that as conceived by Locke "a blank sheet on which
experience writes as chance determines;" and what he is
opposing to it is the discovery that mind does not begin
as an entirely passive thing, to be wrought upon by
chance impressions, but as an activity, as the Scholastics might
put it, awaiting release. Little by little, as McDougall shows,
the successive discoveries of Janet, Freud, Adler, Trotter, Sidis,
Jung and others in clinical work, have led away from the old
position to one remarkably like that of the Scholastics. And
while clinicians have been led to the conception of activity
in consciousness by their observations, the main stream of
normal psychology has been flowing in the same direction.
Not only have the theoricians drawn nearer to the traditional
334 THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND SCIENCE [June,
teaching of the School; the results of laboratory work have
forced them towards that same goal.
That to which I wish to direct attention in the present
article, however, is not so much the rapprochement of recent
psychological discovery and theory with a system which,
whatever it was, was not in any way opposed to the teaching
of religion. That in itself is interesting enough as a sign of
the changing temper of "Science." What appears to me as
likely to be of interest and of use is a descriptive account,
necessarily very brief, of the science of psychology as it is
shaping today. Here, indeed, if contradiction between science
and religion were likely to be found, would be the very place
to look for it; for doctrines concerning the soul and its destiny,
its nature and survival which must be envisaged by rational
psychology, at least, if anywhere within the domain of science
and philosophy, are most closely bound up with religion;
and the whole concept of the spiritual must be profoundly
modified, if, indeed, it has not its origin, in notions derived
from our own activities, by indications which psychology is
able to afford us as data.
In the first place, it may be said that the main business of
the psychologist is to observe and compare mental phenomena.
Like any other man of science, he has to observe them in their
concomitances and successions, quite indifferent as to what
conclusions, if any, they will lead him. And, as a psychologist,
he is not directly interested in any philosophical doctrines
which later on may be based upon his facts and data. Of
course, as a matter of fact, he is and must be interested in the
larger questions which are of the greatest interest to all think-
ing human beings; and his work in psychology may, and prob-
ably will, lead him, as it has sooner or later led others, to
philosophical super-construction upon the groundwork of his
science. But, in the meantime, he limits himself to the phe-
nomena. These he strives not only to observe when they hap-
pen in a casual manner. He attempts to produce them by plac-
ing his "subjects" in circumstances, which will result in the
occurrence of the phenomena he wishes to observe. Thus he
is enabled to study the same fact, if necessary, over and over
again, and with different "subjects." In this way a great
variety of problems connected with sensation and the special
senses, with memory and the higher processes of thought, with
1920.] THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND SCIENCE 335
attention and will, have been successfully studied. It is not so
easy to "produce" emotions for the purpose of investigation;
but something has been done even here to complete the results
of occasional observation and analysis.
In this way, researches planned and carried out in many
laboratories and by many competent students during a num-
ber of years, have yielded now considerable results in the
way of data; and it has been possible to enunciate and prove a
series of laws of great interest and utility, theoretic and prac-
tical. As example of the former, Weber's Law might be cited,
by which a relation is established between the proportional
series of stimuli, or excitants, and the proportional series of
just perceptible differences in sensations: while the laws of
association and preferential revival of experience, in their
application to memorizing, are good samples of the latter.
Indeed, while there must always be a theoretic interest
attaching to every science, psychology, like the sciences of
nature, is becoming more and more practical in its outlook.
There have grown up of recent years sciences, or arts, of
pedagogics and psychiatry, and attempts have been made to
found a science of criminology, upon the basis of psychology.
The two former, at least, have been conspicuously suc-
cessful. But for these applications, no less than for the pure
science itself, it is not necessary to go beyond the immediate
phenomena concerned. It is certainly not necessary to pre-
suppose any particular system of philosophy.
When it is ascertained, for example, that in learning by
heart material of a logical character, saving in time and effort
is gained by "learning as a whole" rather than in parts, and
that "spacing out" spreading the number of repetitions over
a number of days is more economical than making all the
repetitions at once, we have surely reached a very practical
and useful result; but it in no way follows that we must adopt
any conclusion as to the relation of conscious memory and the
brain cells or connecting axis-cylinders, which in some way,
we agree, are correlated with it.
Similarly, when we find large and increasing schools as-
serting, as the result of observation, experiment and analysis,
the synthetic creativeness of mind, the occurrence of "image-
less thought," and activity as the fundamental characteristic
of consciousness, we are warranted in turning away from the
336 THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND SCIENCE [June,
mechanistic enticements of associationist philosophy; but we
are not justified in jumping to the conclusion of spiritualism 1
while we remain within the prescribed boundaries of psychol-
ogy, the science. We may go beyond those boundaries, carry-
ing our new facts and our new knowledge with us. We have
every right to speculate as to the nature of the real thing or
principle which makes the occurrence, and the observation,
of such data possible. But then we are making an excursion
into the realm of philosophy, where the data of science must
be treated by philosophical method and with philosophical
exactness. It may be said in parenthesis that psychological
data of the kind to which reference has been made, lend them-
selves singularly well to the philosophical construction of
spiritualism, and not to any form of materialistic interpreta-
tion.
Interesting in this connection is the application that has
been, and is still being made, of psychological method and data
to the problems of industrialism. In order to understand the
method by which psychology proceeds here as, indeed, also
with regard to the problems set by pedagogics and psychiatry
and criminology it should be borne in mind that mental phe-
nomena are, as a rule, given in the gross, so to speak. Con-
sciousness is rather like a kaleidoscope of patterns than a
series of discrete sensations or feelings. Indeed, though we
know what we mean by "sensation" and can define it, we prob-
ably never experienced a mere sensation, and we certainly
have no memory of it if we ever did experience such a thing.
It is the aim of the psychologist to isolate, as far as possible
the precise point, phenomenon or mental content with which
he wishes to experiment. Take a case in point. Fatigue is a
state which we have all experienced. And fatigue enters
largely into the problems of industrial production. What is
fatigue: physical i. e., muscular cerebral or mental? And
how increase work done, and consequent output, without a
corresponding increase of fatigue?
Very simple experiments were devised to isolate the fac-
tors of fatigue and to enable its study in the simplest forms.
The ergograph was devised by Mosso to this end. It consists
in a simple apparatus in which a weight is supported, attached
1 "Spiritualism" and "spiritualistic" are here used to designate the truth that
the soul is a spiritual, not a material, entity.
1920.] THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND SCIENCE 337
to a string running over a pulley. At the end of the string is a
ring into which the subject inserts his finger, the arm being
supported in a suitable rest. The instruction given to the sub-
ject is that he is to flex his finger, and consequently lift the
weight. This he does until fatigue supervenes, and he is
unable to flex his finger further.
Recent research has shown that the "work curve" falls
fairly sharply towards the beginning, and then remains, with
fluctuations, almost stationary for a very considerable period,
when it declines again sharply. This plotting of the curve has
reference to what is called "objective" fatigue: and, indeed,
the second fall of the curve marks a very real loss of efficiency
a danger point for the organism. Meanwhile "subjective"
fatigue manifests itself much earlier, with all its symptoms of
tedium, disinclination to continue the task in hand, wandering,
headache, and so on. In spite of this latter, the work can be
continued. That true objective fatigue has not set in may be
shown by muscle preparations stimulated electrically; and
that this is probably due to a toxin (lactic acid) is to be in-
ferred from the fact that, by washing the preparation out,
further contractions can be obtained on stimulation. The
point is that the muscles involved in work have certain limits
to their endurance. They constitute a machine which might
be likened to a clock that can run down. A similar remark
may be made with regard to the brain. But the fatigue first
becoming "unbearable" is neither muscular nor, presumably,
cerebral. It can be overcome by revived interest, stimulation,
etc. It is physical, not physiological, in character: and in
appropriate circumstances could be overcome so as to allow
of the working of the machine to its breaking point.
Further experiments with the ergograph have been done
to show the effect of such stimulants as alcohol, or of lack
of proper oxygenation of the atmosphere upon the quality
and output of work. Similar experiments have been made
also with the typewriter, which, of course, is a far more
complicated kind of "work" from the psychological point of
view. A comparison of the two goes far to provide the lines
of principles for industrial psychology.
Other experiments, bearing more on mental fatigue than
on physical, have been made with simple "tests." A sheet of
foolscap printed with lines of letters in irregular order is given
VOL. cxi. 22
338 THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND SCIENCE [June,
to the subject, with instruction to cross out, say, all the "e"
and "x" characters. His fatigue can be measured, in varying
circumstances, by the rapidity and accuracy with which he
performs his task. Or columns of figures are given to him
which he is required to add up, two at a time, noting the answer
of each addition. Here, again, accuracy and speed are the
tests of his fatigue, in this case mental. Other and more
complicated "tests" are also employed; but these suffice.
In actual conditions of industrial labor, there is nothing
so simple and easy as these tests. Complicated and skilled
movements, into which both coordination of muscular actions
and judgment enter, are involved. The speed and accuracy
of typewriting falls closer to the actual condition here. But
the principles are discovered in the isolation of the most ele-
mentary operations in standard conditions. These principles
are exemplified, however, in all work in which mind is re-
quired as well as body. And this is true of most, if not of all,
work. It is only in the comparatively rare cases of auto-
matization of muscular movements that consciousness seems
to be absent; and, even then, if the chain actions which are
being performed, as in knitting or bicycling, are for any
reason interfered with or interrupted, consciousness at once
appears and again takes charge of the action. In most occu-
pations a coordination of muscles and eye is necessary. Such
coordination is not merely mechanical: it has to be learned;
and it is not always learned so as to secure the best results
with the minimum of effort. Especially is this true in the
cases of complicated actions involving several muscle systems.
We invent machines and make them to save labor, and
their several parts are interrelated and coordinated, so that
each subserves not only its own purpose, but also the need of
the next. In performing the actions which are necessary in
tending the machine, the worker theoretically should reduce all
his movements to the fewest possible consistent with the
greatest accuracy and efficiency. And this is precisely the
great problem to be studied in industrial psychology a prob-
lem that varies with the character of the work to be performed.
What is of importance in this connection is that the purely
scientific part of the work consists in the isolation of the com-
ponent factors of complicated movements, on the one hand,
and the recognition of consciousness, on the other, by which
1920.] THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND SCIENCE 339
the movements are coordinated to the best possible advantage.
Man may be regarded as a machine, the parts of which func-
tion one after another, and with regard to which the object is
to eliminate friction and waste of power. But all this can be
done without reference to philosophy, in the sphere of science,
pure and simple. And if any philosophical system seems to be
indicated, the reference to consciousness and the activity of
consciousness in coordinating and short circuiting for the
purpose of labor saving, would seem not to be in contradiction
with anything that has been claimed or taught by religion.
Again, the important advances of psychiatry, as has al-
ready been seen, have led practitioners to the assertion of the
"Activity" principle. From the phenomena of split-off, or dis-
sociated personality, to the establishment of psychic "forces"
beneath the threshold of manifest consciousness; from the pos-
tulate of one such driving energy, with the wealth of theat-
rical circumstance with which it obtrudes itself, disguised
and distorted, into our dreams, to the assertion of several,
and even many, of such active tendencies : the whole tendency
of modern "abnormal" psychology has been towards the new
orientation. There is something which cannot be explained
on the grounds of mere chance association, something which
is not accounted for on the grounds of brain physiology.
But here again, for a complete conclusion to be reached,
the confines of psychology, the science, must be overstepped.
The further investigation is a philosophical one. In the terms
of the division of philosophy familiar to our ears, it is to
rational, and not to experimental, psychology that we must
look for our final explanations.
However that may be, it is clear that there is no contra-
diction between the teaching of the Church and science, as
long as science limits itself to its proper sphere. All its theo-
retical advances, all its practical applications, all the service it
has rendered, and will render, to mankind, are independent
of trans-phenomenal theory. And this is true of science in all
its branches, the sciences of nature as well as those of mind.
Their data form the foundations upon which the philosophical
disciplines are raised: and, if there is contradiction, or ap-
parent contradiction, between religion and any so-called
human knowledge it is here, where the superstructure of
speculation is raised upon the basis of fact.
340 THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND SCIENCE [June,
In treating of the known universe as a whole, as any ade-
quate system of philosophy any stream of ultimate explana-
tions is bound to do, no fact or phenomenon should be left
out of account on penalty of stultification. Men of science
have not always in the past paid sufficient attention to this
truism. Whole systems and partial systems of what must be
called philosophy, since it is not science, have been built upon
the slender foundations of a few facts belonging to a particular
group; and it is in these, mainly, that apparent opposition to
revealed religion has been found.
To leave out facts such as those to which reference has
been made in the present article, is to doom oneself before-
hand to a false system. And yet, from the nature of the facts
employed in building up these "anti-religious" systems, there
seems to be no compelling reason for the anti-religious stand-
point, other than a limitation of outlook or an intellectual or
moral prejudice. There are physicists today of no less but
far greater ability, and with a far greater range of expe-
rience and data, than their materialistic predecessors, who see
in the teachings of their science nothing whatever to militate
against a philosophy, both theistic and spiritualistic. The
amazing spread of "Spiritism" in these recent times is proof
of it. No one, least of all men of science eminent in a sphere
which they have made their own, could accept the "evidences"
put forward in behalf of the soul's survival of bodily death by
Spiritists if there were any shred of real evidence against
immortality afforded by the data of science.
After all, what does religion teach to limit our question
here to psychology with regard to the human soul? That
it is an immortal spirit which makes man what he is, an
intelligent, moral being, responsible to his Creator for his
actions in this world, to be rewarded or punished in accord-
ance with the way in which he fulfills his moral obligations.
That the soul will once more reanimate its "body," so that
man himself, and not the soul alone, will be immortal. It
is not necessary to make allusion to any of the doctrines of
grace concerning the soul in this connection, since objections
are rarely, if ever, made against them; and science, as far as
I am aware, has never been made the excuse to attack them.
What have the "scientific" philosophies to urge against
any of the positions asserted by religion?
1920.] THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND SCIENCE 341
1. That the soul is mortal because it is a function of mat-
ter? The observed activity, creative synthesis, imageless
thought, negative such inferences.
2. That man is not intelligent? The objection would
hurtle back upon its framer.
3. That he is not a moral being, perhaps because his free
will is the delusion of the idea of an action preceding its accom-
plishment in consciousness? An active, creative, phenomenon
points to an active, creative something behind it; and the
psychiatrists are on the right path when they reject the ma-
terialistic hypothesis for one more in accord with the facts.
4. That he is to be the subject of rewards and punishments
according to the way in which he has fulfilled, or neglected
to fulfill, his obligations in this life? The objection can only
have a meaning if science or "scientific" philosophy have dem-
onstrated that there is no one to reward or punish in short,
if it is avowedly atheistic. But science has moved far from
that position now; and, even if mechanistic theory could
afford to dispense with the idea of a God, it was only because
mechanistic theory was founded upon a partial and even
then, misunderstood group of the total facts of the universe.
The philosophy the metaphysics which leaves out of its
consideration the facts and phenomena of psychology, pursues
a tortuous road, and handicaps itself though the goal is pos-
sible by the very inertia of the matter in which it struggles.
5. Finally, that the soul, even if it did persist in being after
death, could not reanimate its body? The hydra-headed
forms of this objection are hardly to the point as evincing any
opposition between science and religion, because, whatever
"body" may mean to the scientist other than the collection
of its properties, it is quite clear that religion does not teach
this. And, while the Church goes no further than to teach
that the body of the resurrection is a "spiritual" as opposed
to a "natural" one, the scientist must confess to a total ignor-
ance of the nature of either. That Catholic philosophers
have speculated deeply upon the meaning of "body" in this
connection is not to be denied; and that they have elaborated
a very convincing natural argument to show that it is man
as a complete person, with soul and body, who is immortal
is true; but the Church has never so defined the doctrine that
any science or philosophy has the right to cavil at it.
342 THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND SCIENCE [June,
The upshot of the matter is, with regard to the experi-
mental sciences, and psychology in particular, that there is
no contradiction no ground of contradiction between the
exact results of observation and research, on the one hand,
and religion on the other. Any difficulty arises only in the
further explanation of the scientific data treated by philo-
sophical method. And all the most striking findings of psy-
chology, at any rate, make for an interpretation that is in no
sense against, but rather in entire accord with the doctrines
of the Church Catholic.
The experimental researches will without doubt continue
to be made in the laboratories of psychology; and we have
every reason to hope for the greatest advances and the further
enriching of our knowledge. Psychological theory will be
developed and completed. Information acquired will be ap-
plied to the practical problems of education, of healing and of
labor saving and economical production. The discoveries of
the past few years give us to hope that the dawn of a brilliant
day of discovery and invention in matters of the mind has be-
gun, and that the progress of the science in the near future
will not disappoint those who have witnessed its achievements
in the immediate past.
But whatever information study and painstaking research
may have in store for us, of this we may be certain, that the
positive acquisitions already made have given the lie to the
negative and unfounded statements of a previous generation.
The progress of human knowledge may be painful and slow,
but it is always towards the light. The Catholic has nothing to
fear for his faith from the march forward of science as a
whole, or of philosophy founded upon its discoveries and
justified by them.
THE EARLY JESUIT MISSIONS IN CANADA.
BY G. ALEXANDER PHARE.
T the foot of the great rock of Quebec, where, in
1608, Champlain founded his colony, five men
are on their knees with their lips to the soil of
New France. Round them are grouped several
friars in coarse gray robes, with the knotted
cord of the Recollets about their waists, peaked hood hanging
from their shoulders and rough wooden sandals on their feet.
And the traders sturdy, picturesque old Huguenot pioneers-
stand by scowling, as they survey the strangers with their
wide black hats caught up at the sides with strings, the long,
closely-fitting, black frocks, the corded girdles and the swing-
ing rosaries. Far better could they tolerate the humble, men-
dicant Recollets than these new-come Jesuits aggressive,
powerful, and uncompromising opponents of Calvinism.
Long before this, Jesuits had disputed in theology with
the bonzes of Japan and studied astronomy with the man-
darins of China, labored patiently and long among the fol-
lowers of Rrahma, preached the Papal supremacy to Abys-
sinian schismatics, carried the cross among the savages of
Caffraria, wrought reputed miracles in Rrazil and gathered
the tribes of Paraguay beneath their paternal sway. And
now, by the aid of the Virgin, they would found another em-
pire among the tribes of New France.
Before the little trading village that nestled beneath the
base of the great cliff at Quebec a tiny, blunt-prowed, high-
pooped vessel lay at anchor, and these black-robed priests
who had just landed were the first followers of Loyola to
enter the St. Lawrence Fathers Charles Lalemant, Enneniond
Masse, Jean de Brebeuf, and two lay brothers of the Society
of Jesus. They were the vanguard of an army of true soldiers
who, bearing the Cross instead of the sword, and laboring at
their arduous tasks in humility and obedience but with daunt-
less courage and unflagging zeal, were to make their influence
felt from Hudson Bay to the mouth of the Mississippi, and
from the sea-girt shores of Cape Breton to the wind-swept
344 THE EARLY JESUIT MISSIONS IN CANADA [June,
prairies of the Great West. The Jesuit missionaries in North
America had no thought of worldly profit or renown, but,
with their minds fixed on eternity, they performed their tasks
ad majorem Dei gloriam for the greater glory of God.
For the first seven years Champlain's colony lived with-
out priests. Perhaps the lack was not so seriously felt, for
most of the two-score inhabitants of the settlement were
Huguenot traders. But out in the great land, in every direc-
tion from the rude dwellings which housed the pioneers of
Canada, roamed savage tribes who, as Champlain said, "lived
like brute beasts." Ardently desirous of reclaiming these chil-
dren of the wild, he invited the Recollet community near
his native village of Brouage to send missionaries to Canada.
Three friars and a lay brother responded to his message, and
landed at Tadoussac in May, 1615. To these four men is due
the honor of founding the first permanent mission among the
Indians of New France an earlier one in Acadia under
Father Biard having met with entire failure. The Canadian
mission is usually associated with the Jesuits, and rightly so,
for to them belongs the most glorious history; but it was the
Recollets who paved the way.
During the next year a chapel was built, in what is now
the lower town of Quebec, and here the brothers labored to
minister to the needs of the Indians camped in the vicinity of
the trading post. In this their reward was chiefly suffering
every possible obstacle being set in their path, both by the
traders and by the medicine men of the various Indian tribes.
The friars' endeavor was to persuade the Indians to settle near
the villages in order that they might more easily be reached
with the Gospel message. The traders had but one thought
the profits of the fur trade and, consequently, anything
that changed the Indian from a nomadic hunter, met with
their bitterest opposition.
The acquisition of the language was of tremendous dif-
ficulty. From the simple pens of the brothers we have the
picture of the priest seated, pencil in hand, before some
Indian squatting on the floor, who had been cajoled into the
hut with biscuits, there to be plied with questions which fre-
quently he neither could nor would answer. What was the
Indian word for Sacrament, Eucharist, Trinity, Incarnation,
Faith? The perplexed savage, instructed by the medicine
1920.] THE EARLY JESUIT MISSIONS IN CANADA 345
men, who regarded the gray-robed friars as rivals, gave him
scurrilous and filthy phrases as the equivalent of things holy.
These, studiously incorporated into the Fathers' catechism,
produced we are naively told very small good effects, and
but few converts were brought in. Nevertheless, they labored
incessantly among the Montagnais, the Micmacs, the Abnaki,
the Algonquins and the Nipissings the work growing more
and more discouraging. At last they saw that the field was
too large and the difficulties too great. And, after invoking
the light of the Holy Spirit, they decided says Sagard "to
send one of their members to France to lay the proposition
before the Jesuit Fathers, whom they deemed the most suit-
able for the work of establishing and extending the faith in
Canada." On June 15, 1625, their plea for assistance was
answered, as we have seen, by the representatives of the great-
est of all the missionary Orders an Order which "had filled
the whole world with memorials of great things done and suf-
fered for the Faith" the militant and powerful Society of
Jesus.
Quebec, as these aggressive pioneers of the Church first
viewed it, must have given them a severe disappointment.
It was now seventeen years since it had been founded, yet
it had fewer than one hundred inhabitants. In the whole of
Canada there were but seven French families, and only six
white children. Agriculture had hardly been attempted, and
the colony was almost wholly dependent on France for its
maintenance. The traders, when not actively engaged in the
fur industry, lounged in indolence around the trading posts
and created an atmosphere of laziness and discontent. Sorely
were the self-sacrificing Jesuits needed. To them, indeed,
Canada owes its life, for when the King of France grew weary
of spending treasure on this unprofitable colony, the vivid ap-
peals of the Jesuit reports moved both King and people to
support it until the time arrived when New France was valued
as a barrier against New England.
Scarcely had Lalemant and his associates made them-
selves at home in the convent of the Recollets, than they began
planning for their mission further afield. Less than a month
after landing Brebeuf set out for Three Rivers, where he
joined a party of Montagnais hunters and spent the winter of
1625-26 with them. He suffered much from cold and hunger,
346 THE EARLY JESUIT MISSIONS IN CANADA [June,
and from the unsanitary conditions under which he was forced
to live, in the smoky, filthy, vermin-infested abodes of the
savages. But an indomitable will and a deep devotion stood
him in good stead, and he returned home none the worse for
the experience, and with a fair knowledge of the Montagnais
dialect.
In July, 1626, the little band was gladdened by the
addition to their numbers of two more of the Order, and
some twenty carpenters and lay brothers, who had come with
Champlain to erect suitable buildings for the Jesuits' own use.
And so, on a bend of the St. Charles River, about a mile from
the fort, Notre-Dame-des-Anges was built of rough-hewn
planks the seams plastered with mud, and the roofs thatched
after the manner of Old France with grass from the meadows.
In this humble abode men were to be trained to carry the
Cross into the Canadian wilderness, and from it they were to
go forth for many years in an unbroken line, blazing the way
for explorers and traders and settlers.
Father Brebeuf and his original associates did not re-
main idle while their building was slowly rising. In the end
of July, accompanied by some of the Huron tribe, they set out
on the almost impossble journey to the shores of Georgian
Bay. Brebeuf was overjoyed. It was to the Hurons that he
felt himself particularly called, and for twenty-three years
this magnificent son of the Church devoted his life to the task.
Huronia lay in what is now the county of Simcoe, Ontario.
On the east and north lay Lakes Couchiching and Simcoe, the
Severn River, and Matchedash Bay; on the west, Nottawasaga
Bay. And in the little village of Toanche, about a mile and a
half from Nottawasaga Bay, Brebeuf made his headquarters.
He found the Huron Indians of the most primitive type,
living in utter filth and with an entire disregard for the ele-
ments of sanitation, morality or health. Their religion con-
sisted in the main of superstitions, fostered by the medicine
men. They had but a vague conception of God, a conception
which had no influence on their conduct for even in their
worship they were often astoundingly vicious. But they were
entirely self-satisfied, and strongly resented the presence of
the three black-robed friars, who had come to them with their
message of good will and virtue.
In 1627, Brebeuf was left alone among the savages;
1920.] THE EARLY JESUIT MISSIONS IN CANADA 347
Father Daillon going on a mission alone to the Niagara Penin-
sula, and Father Noue returning to Quebec on account of ill-
health and age. In this awful solitude Brebeuf labored with
indomitable will, ministering to his flock, studying the lan-
guage, compiling a Huron dictionary and grammar, and win-
ning his way into the hearts of his people. In time the Indians
recognized in him a friend; and when he passed through the
village ringing his bell, young and old followed him to his
cabin to hear him tell of God, of heaven, the reward of the
good, of hell, the eternal reward of the unrighteous. And,
though he made few converts, he endeared himself to his
people, living as one apart from their savagery, yet always as
a sympathetic friend. In 1629, he received word from Quebec
that he was sorely needed there. Full of misgivings and appre-
hension, he bade farewell to his people and took the trail
southward.
He found that evil days had fallen upon the Jesuits in
Canada. In France, the Huguenots were in open rebellion,
and Cardinal Richelieu was sufficiently harassed by them to
give a ready ear to the suggestion that they should be sup-
pressed in New France. The Company of One Hundred Asso-
ciates was formed, having a grant from the King of a domain
from Florida to the Arctic Circle, and from Newfoundland to
the sources of the St. Lawrence. Only a far-off circumstance
prevented the birth of a new Catholic empire. The revolt of
the Huguenots of La Rochelle had drawn England into war
with France, which gave Alexander, Earl of Stirling, the op-
portunity he desired. In 1621 he had received a grant from
James I. of Nova Scotia or Acadia, and now he saw the pos-
sibility of driving the French, not only from Acadia, but from
the whole of North America. To this end a company was
formed under the name of the Adventurers of Canada, and
when Brebeuf came within sight of Tadoussac, their fleet was
keeping grim and deadly blockade outside Quebec. The gar-
rison was starving, the gunpowder was exhausted, and the di-
lapidated fort could not be held by its sixteen defenders. On
July 22, 1629, the fleur de Us was hauled down from
Fort St. Louis to give place to the Cross of St. George, and,
for the time, the hopes of Champlain perished, who for twenty
years had wrought and fought and prayed that Quebec might
become the bulwark of French power in America. The terms
348 THE EARLY JESUIT MISSIONS IN CANADA [June,
of surrender imposed the removal of all the missionaries, and
by November of that year both Recollets and Jesuits were in
their various colleges in France, patiently waiting the time
when they should be permitted to return to Canada.
Three years later, after the Treaty of St. Germain en Laye,
the French King took steps to repossess Quebec, and found it
in a sad condition. During the English occupation the ground
had been uncultivated, the buildings were in ruins, and, worst
of all, the Indians had been badly treated, and many years
of patient work had been undone. The Hurons and the Iro-
quois were at war, and a pestilence was playing havoc in the
Huron villages. Despite all the unfavorable circumstances,
however, the devoted Fathers returned to their labors and scat-
tered through the smitten country.
For the next seventeen years the work was carried on
indomitably the difficulties growing more and more perilous
each year. The feud between the Hurons and the Iroquois
was becoming more bitter, and kept constantly at fever heat
by acts of savagery and treachery. So far, however, hostility
towards the missionary Fathers had been of a covert order,
restricted mainly to the medicine men, who alleged that the
bells on the little chapels frightened away the good spirits
and brought pestilence and drought. The Fathers lived in con-
stant fear of death, and the ringing Iroquois war-cries sounded
perpetually through the forests. On the upper Ottawa a
party of Iroquois, twelve hundred strong, were encamped,
and, as the snows began to melt in the spring of 1649, the in-
satiable warriors directed their steps towards Huronia. On
March 16th the inhabitants of St. Ignace had no thought
of impending disaster. Brebeuf and Lalement slept in their
mission house. They were wakened at early sunrise by the
war-whoops of the Iroquois. The Hurons resisted stubbornly,
but the defenders were outnumbered ten to one, and the vil-
lage was soon a shambles. The few remaining Hurons were
captured, and with them Brebeuf and Lalement.
The Indians bound the two priests and led them about
three miles back, beating them as they went. Then they
stripped them and tied them to stakes. Brebeuf knew that
his hour was come. The savages made him the especial ob-
ject of their diabolical cruelty. Standing at the stake amid his
yelling tormentors, he bequeathed to the world an example of
1920.] THE EARLY JESUIT MISSIONS IN CANADA 349
fortitude sublime, unsurpassed and unsurpassable. Neither
by look nor cry nor any movement did he give sign of the
agony he was suffering. To the reviling and abuse of the
fiends he replied with words warning them of the judgment
to come. They poured boiling water on his head in derision
of baptism. They hung red hot axes about his naked should-
ers; they made a belt of pitch and resin and placed it round
his body and set it on fire. By every conceivable means they
strove to force him to cry for mercy, but not a sound of pain
could they wring from him. At last, after four hours of tor-
ture, a chief cut out his heart, and the noble servant of God
quitted the scene of his earthly labors.
Lalemant, a man of gentle and sensitive character, as
delicate as Brebeuf was robust, also endured the torture. But
the savages administered it to him with a refined and pro-
longed cruelty, and kept him alive for fourteen hours. Then
he, too, entered into his rest.
Three years before, Brebeuf had made a vow to Christ:
"Never to shrink from martyrdom if, in Your mercy, You deem
me worthy of so great a privilege. Henceforth, I will never
avoid any opportunity that presents itself of dying for You,
but will accept martyrdom with delight, provided that, by so
doing, I can add to Your glory. From this day, my Lord
Jesus Christ, I cheerfully yield unto You my life, with the
hope that You will grant me the grace to die for You. Since
You have deigned to die for me. Grant me, Lord, so to
live, that You may deem me worthy to die a martyr's death.
Thus, my Lord, I take Your chalice, and call upon Your name.
Jesu! Jesu! Jesu!" Nobly was the vow kept.
With the death of Brebeuf the chronicles of the earlier
missions in Canada come to an end. In looking back over
the lives of the missionaries in New France it would seem that
their harvest was a scant one, since the Indian races for
which they toiled have disappeared from history and are ap-
parently doomed to extinction. But their priceless contribu-
tion lies in the example they gave to the world. During the
greater part of two centuries they bore themselves manfully,
and fought a good fight, and in all that time not one of all
the men in that long procession of missionaries is known to
have disgraced himself or to have played the coward in the
face of danger or disaster.
350 THE EARLY JESUIT MISSIONS IN CANADA [June,
Their memories are living lights illuminating the paths of
all workers among those who sit in spiritual darkness. Bre-
beuf still lives and labors in the wilderness regions of Canada;
Lalemant still toils on into the unknown.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents Reuben G. Thwaites.
(In 73 volumes.)
Les Jesuites el la Nouvelle France Camille de Rochemonteix.
Pioneers of France; The Old Regime; The Jesuits in North America;
La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West; Frontenac and New
France Francis Parkman.
Pioneers of the Cross in Canada William Richard Harris.
Old Huronia Arthur E. Jones.
Christian Missions in Canada Thomas William M. Marshall.
Pioneer Priests in North America Thomas Joseph Campbell, S.J.
Histoire du Canada Gabriel Sagard.
The Programme of the Jesuits W. B. Neatby.
The Jesuit Missions Thomas Guthrie Marquis.
The Catholic Dictionary William E. Addis and Thomas Arnold, M.A.
Encyclopedia Britannica Eleventh Edition.
CHURCH CONDITIONS IN JUGO-SLAVIA.
BY ELISABETH CHRISTITCH.
HE latest link in the ever progressing chain of
events that draw the new State of Jugo-Slavia
closer to Rome, is the appointment of Monsignor
Francesco Cherubini as Papal Representative in
Belgrade. For several years Serbia has had her
representative in Rome; and now Dr. Bakotic, her present
Minister to the Vatican, has been raised to the rank of pleni-
potentiary of Jugo-Slavia. The Concordat signed by Serbia
before the outbreak of war, to be extended soon to the South-
ern Slav lands with which she has amalgamated, is so liberal
in tone that the Holy See has expressed a wish to have it
serve as model for other Balkan States not yet in official rela-
tions with the Vatican. The text of this Concordat is actually
being studied by Rumanian authorities, and it will be difficult
indeed for any of the Orthodox Balkan States to hang back
where Serbia has set a generous example.
The collapse of Russian Imperialism removed a strong bar
to the conciliatory policy of Serbia towards her Catholic kin
subject to Austria; and the disruption of Austria, the prime
factor in religious problems of the Near East, leaves the Slav
Catholics free to join with their non-Catholic brethren. One
must not forget that Serbia proper was almost wholly Ortho-
dox until her successes in the Balkan War of 1912 brought
her a goodly Catholic population in Macedonia. Now her
fusion with the Catholic Croats and Slovenes makes her the
first Catholic Power in the Near East. Her Catholic popula-
tion is numerically equal, if not superior, to her Orthodox
population. Correct and cordial relations between the new
State of Jugo-Slavia and the Holy See are therefore of the
first importance.
The Concordat drawn up in 1914 was, in the opinion of
some, a deathblow to Austria, inasmuch as it removed the in-
sidiously-fostered fear of Catholic Slavs that union with schis-
matic Serbia would restrict their religious liberty. Once Serbia
had made clear that the Catholic faith would be recognized
352 CHURCH CONDITIONS IN JUGO-SLAVIA [June,
henceforth and protected by the State equally with the Ortho-
dox, the people of Croatia and Slovenia, harassed by German
and Magyar attempts to crush their nationality, turned with
confidence to Serbia which had ever been the beacon of their
racial aspirations. But would Serbia, once her national as-
pirations were attained, persevere in the path of large-minded
tolerance voluntarily inaugurated while she was still a small
and struggling state?
The best answer to this question is contained in the two
supplementary paragraphs drafted with a view to the adop-
tion of the Serbian Concordat for the State of Jugo-Slavia.
One assures perfect freedom to Jugo-Slav citizens who desire
to pass from one Christian creed to the other. As the apostolic
spirit of the Catholic clergy, contrasted with that of the Ortho-
dox clergy, leaves no doubt as to which side will benefit most
by this clause, the attitude of the Belgrade Government
towards Catholics must be acknowledged as liberal. More-
over, the presence of Catholic members in the Cabinet is a
guarantee that public offices will not be reserved exclusively
for the Orthodox, as hitherto. Great interest attaches likewise
to the second supplementary paragraph of the Concordat.
This permits the introduction into Serbia of communities of
monks or nuns judged needful for the spiritual welfare of their
flocks by the Bishops of Belgrade and Skoplye (Turkish:
Uskub).
Were Russia still paramount in the world's councils,
Serbia could hardly afford to treat with the Vatican on such
broad, statesman-like lines. Under Russian influence the pro-
ject of Southern Slav union was concerned chiefly with the
Serbs, i. e., those of the Orthodox persuasion. Thus, Greater
Serbia, as the new State would have been called, was meant
to comprise the inhabitants of Serbia proper, Macedonia,
Montenegro, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Siriem, and Banat, exclud-
ing even Dalmatia, although Dalmatians are proud to call
themselves Serbs while, nevertheless, professing the Catholic
faith. Russian autocracy would have been satisfied, had
Austria survived, with the emancipation of Austria's Orthodox
subjects and their incorporation with Serbia. It was the dream
of the Holy Synod to create by means of Serbia a bulwark of
Orthodoxy in the South, similar to, and dependent on, the bul-
wark of Orthodoxy in the North. The Catholic Slavs would
1920.] CHURCH CONDITIONS IN JUGO-SLAV1A 353
have received some form of autonomy within the Hapsburg
Monarchy, for this had only been withheld from them in the
past through Magyar opposition. Had the Central Powers
triumphed in the late War, the Catholic cause might, indeed,
have obtained some political advantages due to Austria's post-
poned demise; but its present ascendancy is of a more assured
and lasting nature, being the outcome of the national will of
a united people.
There is now no danger of the Catholics sprinkled in
the Serb lands of Bosnia, Herzegovina, etc., being absorbed
by the Orthodox element. Closer acquaintance is bound to
dispel bigotry and prejudice. The Balkan Christians, left to
themselves, will inevitably gravitate towards tolerance and
Rome. Already we hear the words, "Serbian Catholics," freely
employed in a State where they had been deemed not only
incongruous but unrealizable. Catholics who styled them-
selves "Latins" in Macedonia or "Croats" in Dalmatia to vin-
dicate their faith, can at last avow their nationality without
fear of misinterpretation. They are Catholics, but they are
also true Serbs, and the Church to which they adhere is a
State Church, enjoying all the privileges hitherto reserved to
the Orthodox- State Church of Serbia.
It is true that some political factors, few in number and
gradually decreasing, still maintain that there can be no true
solidarity between the Serbs and their kindred so long subject
to Austria-Hungary, and imbued with an older civilization.
The mass of the people, however, recognize that common in-
terests, traditional customs, and racial aspirations are bound
to weld together the various elements of a single nation. They
have an identity of speech, not possessed by the Flemings and
Walloons, who form nevertheless the compact kingdom of Bel-
gium; nor by the Italians, Germans, and French who form the
Swiss Republic. Political unity between the Southern Slavs
has de facto been reached, and, with regard to Catholics, the
next problem to be solved is that of Church unity.
Dr. Vladimir Nikolic, a distinguished authority on Church
matters, discusses in a recent publication the advisability of
one paramount Catholic authority for the three political divi-
sions, whether a federal or a centralistic form of government
be chosen by the forthcoming Constituent Assembly. He re-
calls that in the past the Serbian Catholic Church was unified,
VOL. cxi. 23
354 CHURCH CONDITIONS IN JUGO-SLAVIA [June,
and that Pope Alexander IV., in the year 1034, raised the
Bishop of Bar in Montenegro to the rank of Primate of all the
Serbs. Although this title gave no effective jurisdiction over
the Serbs subsequently conquered by Turkey or absorbed by
Austria, it was maintained and is extant today. Catholicism
declined after the Turkish invasion, all harassed Balkan Chris-
tians looking to Russia as their only effective protector, so
that the Serbian Primate in 1914 had charge of no more than
ten thousand souls. Nevertheless, his title was assured, Pope
Leo XIII. having directed at the Council of 1870 that the Arch-
bishop of Bar take his seat among the Primates. At present,
since the Serbs of Montenegro, by the unanimous vote of their
National Assembly, have declared for union with the sister
State of Serbia, the question arises whether the Primacy of
Bar should be transferred to the capital, Belgrade, in order
that the Primate of all the Serbs be enabled to fullfil more
effectively his role of national leader. But apart from this, a
matter to be decided between the Serbs themselves, there is
a movement for the restoration of the Croat Primacy, fallen
into disuse under Hapsburg dominion. ("Spalatanus enim
non Dalmatise solum sed etiam Chrobatise Primus vocatur."
Farlatti: Illyr. sacr. Tom. III.)
Dr. Nikolic does not foresee any hindrance to the State's
political unity in the establishment of two Primates, one for
the Serbs and one for the Croats, although ecclesiastical in-
terests might be served by a sole Primate for Jugo-Slavia,
resident in Belgrade. The Church in Croatia and Slovenia
will benefit greatly by the application of the Serbian Concor-
dat. For these lands were hitherto regulated by the Austrian
Concordat of 1855, whose liberal text was often nullified by
specially contrived State laws that frustrated the intentions of
the Holy See. The Catholics in Serbia suffered likewise under
this Austrian Concordat, for they were withdrawn from the
jurisdiction of the Serb Primate in Bar and subjected to that
of an Austrian bishop. As one of the many consequent abuses,
Austria claimed Catholics born in Serbia as her subjects.
Since she hindered the erection of any Catholic places of
worship other than her own, the baptismal registers appar-
ently recorded Austrian citizens domiciled in Serbia, hence the
males were called upon to serve in the Austrian army.
Not only did this militate against the extension of the
1920.] CHURCH CONDITIONS IN JUGO-SLAVIA 355
Catholic faith in Serbia, but it led to numerous apostasies.
Even when Catholic settlers from the adjoining territories re-
mained faithful to creed, parents allowed their children to be
baptized in the Serb Orthodox churches to escape Austrian
conscription. Thus, in the light of Austria's designs on Serbia,
especially after her seizure of the Serb provinces of Bosnia
and Herzegovina, the name of Catholic became synonymous
with that of enemy to the Serbian State. Repeated attempts
of far-sighted Serbian statesmen to get into direct touch with
Rome, were baffled by strong Austrian pressure at the Vatican
until, by the feat of arms which delivered Macedonia from the
Turks, Serbia saw herself in a position to accentuate her
claim and obtain the removal of the Austrian religious Pro-
tectorate. Negotiations for a Serbian Concordat were eagerly
entered upon by the Government at Belgrade, but, although
concluded, it was not yet ratified at the outbreak of the Great
War. Despite Austria's strenuous efforts to prevent the rati-
fication, His Holiness Benedict XV. gave his approval and
signature on March 20, 1915. From the days of Dushan the
Mighty in the twelfth century to this memorable date, there
had been no direct relations between the Serbians of Serbia
proper and the Chair of St. Peter.
By Article IV. of the Serbian Concordat the Holy See
grants the use of the Glagolite, or Old Slav, Liturgy in those
regions where the need is felt. This beautiful Liturgy was
used in the time of Pope Innocent III. (1198-1216) as it is
today in Dalmatia, notably in the dioceses of Zara, Spalato,
and Sibenico. A like privilege is desired by Slovenes, Croats,
and Czechs. The two former, some decades ago, presented a
memorial on the subject which the Austrian Government did
its utmost to counteract. The Emperor Francis-Joseph, ever
on the alert for signs of the impending union of the Slavs,
wrote a private letter to Pope Leo XIII., requesting that the
Old Slav Liturgy be categorically forbidden except in Monte-
negro. This request was not acceded to, but a compromise
was effected by a Statute of the Congregation of Rites con-
firming the Glagolite where it had already been introduced in
Croatia, and forbidding its adoption by any other Slav people.
In 1900 a Catholic Congress in Agram (Slav: Zagreb), capital
of Croatia, again brought up the question of the Glagolite
Liturgy, and eight hundred priests, Croats and Slovenes, signed
356 CHURCH CONDITIONS IN JUGO-SLAVIA [June,
a document praying for its recognition, which document was
forwarded to Rome. A little later the episcopate approved
the movement and officially represented to the Holy See the
religious advantages likely to accrue, were the petition granted.
In order to escape Magyar opposition it was resolved to hold
the Episcopal Council in Rome instead of in Leybach (Liu-
bliana) capital of Slovenia, or in Spalato (Splitt) as had been
originally planned. Pope Pius X. appointed Cardinal Van-
nutelli to preside, and the three Slav provinces, as divided by
the Austrian Government, Croatia, Slovenia, and Dalmatia,
were represented. Bosnia and Herzegovina were prevented
from participation, by the policy of isolation that tended to
estrange them from their Slav kin. (The Bosnians were said
to be a people apart, speaking the "Bosnian" tongue and bound
for ever to the Empire.)
Fourteen Southern Slav bishops and archbishops, never-
theless, assembled at the Vatican on May 21, 1905, to debate
on the importance of the Old Slav Liturgy. Among them were
some Germans and Italians who opposed the concession of a
special Liturgy to the Southern Slavs, while no other existing
ethnical group of the Roman Rite pretended to such a favor.
The Council separated without definite result, and its failure
has been attributed by some to the Holy Father's Venetian
sympathies. Pius X. certainly was less disposed to accede to
Slav aspirations than his predecessor, Leo XIII. The Serbian
Concordat even of June, 1914, gives no definite promise of
free use of Glagolite in the Serbian dioceses of Belgrade and
Skoplye (Turkish: Uskub), although it is allowed in "certain
parishes to be afterwards named."
In the new arrangements for the extension of the Serbian
Concordat to all Jugo-Slavia, Serbian, as well as Croat and
Slovene, patriots look for a general application of the above
indefinite ruling. Every national argument will be used in the
forthcoming negotiations with the Vatican to obtain frank per-
mission for, instead of mere toleration of, the Glagolite. It will
be pointed out that insistence on uniformity is not always the
best step to unity; that the use of the Glagolite is no innovation,
since it is hallowed by time, and is as old as Slav Christian-
ity itself. It is not a question of celebrating the Sacred Rites
in a modern tongue, as has been irreverently proposed else-
where, but of maintaining a Liturgy endeared to the people
1920.] FOR YOUR BIRTHDAY 357
by many sacrifices made for its preservation through cen-
turies of oppression. No other nation can or does put for-
ward a similar claim. The Glagolite has been religiously
guarded since the days of SS. Cyril and Methodius and is a
link between Catholics and Orthodox. It would facilitate
reunion of the Churches, as it already conduces to closer
fraternity of the clergy. The great pioneer of Slav reunion,
Bishop Strossmayer, was an ardent advocate of the Glagolite.
He considered it a valuable asset for strengthening the re-
ligious faith of the people.
Should the Holy See, nevertheless, not see its way to
encourage a wider use of this ancient Slav heritage, the faith-
ful, loyal clergy of Catholic Jugo-Slavia will unhesitatingly
and whole-heartedly abide by its decision.
FOR YOUR BIRTHDAY.
BY S. M. M.
DEAR, I would spread the wide earth for your table,
And light the stars for tapers, every one,
And kindle, at their dying, were I able,
The lordly sun.
And I would set a banquet for your pleasure,
Brave with brave things my soul is dreaming of,
Glad as my heart is glad, above all measure
Sweet with my love.
But through the dawn I see two candles burning
At a white board where you with Christ are fed;
Lo, how your heart is filled and all its yearning
Is comforted!
"LES JONCHEES."
BY HENRIETTE EUGENIE DELAMARE.
WILL not attempt to translate my title because
there are no proper jonchees here in America,
although their origin conies from the Gospel
itself; where, speaking of Our Lord's triumphant
entry into Jerusalem, the Apostles tell us that the
enthusiastic multitude cut down branches from the trees and
strewed them upon the road to welcome the coming of the
Redeemer. France is the only country I know of which has
kept up the custom of thus preparing for nearly all the more
important events of life, and the very word jonchee brings
back to my mind a thousand touching recollections of my own
dear country, poor stricken France!
My first sweet memory is that of a glorious summer even-
ing in June, when, as a little child of six or seven, I was sent
out with my nurse to gather basketsful of blue corn flowers
out of the wheat fields surrounding a peaceful village in Nor-
mandy. The glory of that summer evening is present with
me to this very day a whole lifetime afterwards ! the fertile,
far-reaching plain with its fields of luxuriant wheat waving
softly in the breeze, splashed here and there with the brilliant
red of the poppies, the deep blue of the corn flowers, and the
white and gold of the tall marguerites. Beyond these verdant
fields, which seemed as endless as the sea, the dense foliage
of the distant woods was dark and mysterious on the far
horizon, while the setting sun and gorgeous crimson and gold
sky above us bathed the foreground in a flood of light.
The twilight is a long, long one over there; it gave us
plenty of time to fill our large market baskets with the deep
blue blossoms, which were gathered with loving thoughts of
the dear Lord at Whose feet they were to be strewn.
"You know, Aglae, they are for the sweet Jesus," I prattled
away, eagerly, "and we must pick lots and lots of them, for
we want to make a bright blue path right in the middle of the
road for Him to pass upon, a path as blue as the beautiful
heaven! Isn't it lovely to think of His passing just before our
house like that?"
1920.] "LES JONCHEES" 359
"Yes, Mademoiselle," answered Aglae, "but you must be
careful not to push too far forward and trample down the
wheat. The good God would not like you to cause the poor
farmer a loss; and see, we can gather plenty of flowers by
just going along the edge of the fields."
So we labored on until our baskets were brimful and our
arms were very tired; then on our way home in the gloaming
we stopped at the little road-side chapel to say our evening
prayer before the statue of Our Lady, and leave a pretty bunch
of wild flowers at her feet. The light was fast fading out in
a pale golden glow, the swallows flew twittering to their nests
beneath the eaves, and on all the country round there fell a
great and solemn stillness, an indescribable sense of blessed,
restful peace.
But when we neared the village we found an unusual
bustle; the sound of hammering, and people hurrying busily
back and forth, some laden with huge bundles of foliage,
others working at the temporary altars erected here and there
for the resting place of the Blessed Sacrament, for tomorrow
would be Its feast, the Sunday after Corpus Christi.
I could hardly sleep for excitement. Next morning very,
very early everyone was up and about, placing the flowers and
garlands and putting finishing touches to the altars, sweeping
the streets through which the procession was to pass, and
covering the front of the houses with snow white sheets, to
which were pinned great sprays of roses, tall white lilies or
other choice blossoms. The church bells pealed merrily and
those who could hurried to the early Masses. Soon little girls
in white began to flit about the streets, their long tulle veils
falling almost to their feet, their childish faces aglow with
happiness, and just at the last minute when the bells rang out
for High Mass, the jonchee was thrown down, plentiful and
thick, a dense carpet of foliage and sweet-scented fennel on
the top of which were scattered thousands of brilliant-colored
flowers to make a fitting pathway for the God of love. A
happy memory, this, cloudless as was the brilliant blue sky
above us on that perfect day in June.
Perhaps no one in the whole procession had been more
earnest, more rapt in prayer and adoration than Ldonie, a
beautiful girl of sixteen, who enjoyed the privilege of carrying
Our Lady's banner and heading the long line of girls in white.
360 "LES JONCHEES" [June,
Leonie was acknowledged to be the belle of the village, not
only because of her beautiful face, but because she was so tall
and strong, such a splendid type of a country-bred girl. Her
tall, lithe, alert figure, her blooming complexion and spark-
ling eyes seemed to radiate health and happiness, and Leonie
was as good as she was pretty, which was saying a great deal.
How I envied her, though I knew the banner must be heavy
and tiring to carry during the long procession! How I
dreamed of a time when I should be a big girl myself and the
proud bearer of our Blessed Mother's banner!
The following year deep pathos shadowed the village on
the great day of the Blessed Sacrament, for Leonie lay dying,
a shade of her former bright self. Her one desire had been to
live to see once more the Feast of the Blessed Sacrament, and
to preside at the erection of an altar of repose at her very door.
She wished to give that last loving homage to her Eucharistic
Lord before she passed away from earth.
Some weeks before, she seemed so ill her friends despaired
of her wish being granted, but her own confidence never
failed. A day or two before the great event she had one of
those wonderful rallies which so often precede the death of
consumptives, and was able to superintend and direct the
making and trimming of the altar one mass of pure white
lilies. She planned everything, even to the jonchee before
the house, which she ordered to be of lilies and deep red roses
the lilies for purity, the roses for love, she explained. Then
she lay and watched for the procession. When the Blessed
Sacrament approached, she was able, with the help of her
dear ones, to kneel while It was exposed on her altar. She
listened to the singing of her favorite Tantum Ergo, and re-
ceived with tears of joy the blessing given with the Sacred
Host. Now she could die happy, her last wish was fulfilled!
My thoughts carry me next to a day when, as a grown
woman, I followed with a heavy heart a sad procession pass-
ing over a carpet made of the foliage of a special kind of
laurel, with light green leaves splashed with white, the jonchee
of the dead.
In a village in the southwest of France, the whole popula-
tion was following to his last resting place, the saintly old
cure, who had been their pastor for over thirty years. Humble,
mortified, charity itself, he was a gentleman to his finger tips,
1920.] "LES JONCHEES" 361
refined and highly educated, and had never been able to
understand his rough, uncultured flock, nor had they ever
appreciated him until now. Now everyone was ready with
some touching story of his devoted charity, his patience with
wrongdoers, and his generosity to the poor.
His life had been a pathetically sad and lonely one, for
he mourned bitterly over his inability to draw more souls to
God, and he had few friends. His own family was far away,
in quite a different part of France, and thought little of the
humble country cure who had left them so long ago. He had
outlived most of the priests of his generation, and the young
rectors of the neighboring parishes, mostly peasant-bred like
their flocks, were almost afraid of his asceticism and deep
spirituality, and thought him exaggerated, old-fashioned and
peculiar. So he seldom saw them, and he would have died
alone and without the Sacraments had not the master of the
Chateau happened to call on him that afternoon. Finding
him very sick, he sent in hot haste for the doctor and the
nearest priest, who arrived in time to give him absolution just
as he was passing away with an act of love upon his lips.
The very elements mourned, for it was a bleak November
day, with a cold wind howling dismally among the trees, and
bringing down the last brown leaves of autumn. Lowering
clouds threatened every minute to burst forth in a deluge of
rain, and the whole country wore a dark and gloomy mien and
struck a chill to one's very heart.
"Why! They are carrying the coffin the wrong way,"
whispered one of our party.
"No," answered another, "not for a priest. They are
always carried head first, turning their face towards their
flock to the very last. Didn't you know that?"
My eyes filled with tears, it was so like him!
In this same village, some months later, it was my painful
duty to visit occasionally a poor little martyr girl, dying slowly,
oh, so slowly, of an agonizing disease. She was very resigned,
but it was misery to see her suffer thus, a mere child of
twelve. One day, I had dragged my unwilling feet almost to
her door, when I stopped with a beating heart, for on the steps
and surrounding the sidewalk was yet another jonchee; a
beautiful one this time, of rose petals, pink, white and crim-
son. I turned away, making the sign of the Cross, while tears
362 "LES JONCHEES" [June,
rushed to my eyes. I knew the message of those rose petals!
She had no need of my visit now, the great Lord of heaven
itself had come to the bedside of the little peasant girl, and
giving Himself to her in Viaticum, was helping her on that
last great journey to eternity. Less than an hour later she
was dead, on her face a smile of ineffable happiness and peace.
Once more a jonchee, and this time a joyful, triumphant
one, scattered plentifully for more than two miles, from a
prosperous farmhouse to the village church. It is a jonchee
of plain green foliage for the passage of the bridal pair and
their crowd of guests. Ah ! here comes the bride, a beautiful,
young country maiden, in as elegant a white satin gown as any
rich lady could wish to have, her long tulle veil pinned up with
a wreath of real orange blossoms. She leans on the arm of her
father, his bronzed, weatherbeaten face glowing with pride,
though he feels and looks rather ill at ease in his new cloth
suit. Next comes the bridegroom with the bride's mother,
and then all the merry, gayly-dressed wedding guests, fifty
or sixty of them, from all the country round. They chatter
merrily as they walk over the jonchee. All is joy! The
birds sing merrily, the country wears that soft, rich green of
spring and early summer, and the crops have never looked
more promising greatest of all delights to the farmer's eye.
Farmer's daughter though she is, this bride will have as
fine a nuptial Mass as if she were the daughter of the Chateau
folk, for this is the good Rector's gift to all his "Children of
Mary" who have never once broken the rules and regulations
of the Sodality, and this is the bride's record. Never has
she been to a public ball; never, without serious cause, has she
missed the monthly Communion or even the meetings, trudg-
ing bravely through beating rain or blinding snow to the vil-
lage church. Now she is to have her reward, for her com-
panions have decorated the altar beautifully with white
flowers, and there will be the organ and full choir, and the
church filled as on a Sunday.
Later, what a feast is served to the guests! A great barn
cleared of its contents is the only place big enough to contain
the long tables fairly groaning under the weight of the sump-
tuous repast, which lasts for hours. The cows look out of their
stalls at the side of the barn, heads and horns decorated with
flowers and ribbons, and moo softly as if quite enjoying the
1920.] "LES JONCHEES" 363
unusual sight. Then follows a walk in the fields, dancing all
night, and, the next morning, the walk to the church over the
now fading jonchee, to hear a Mass of thanksgiving. Scarcely
a week later, I see the bride tossing a great bale of hay from
the tip of her pitch-fork onto a high wagon which her husband
is loading. She is working hard again, but she looks as beam-
ingly happy as on her wedding day.
Yet another jonchee comes to my mind, a happy one
again, more deeply, serenely happy than even the wedding
scene, worthy to be the crowning climax of my memories.
It is a jonchee of foliage and pure white flowers strewn
from the rectory of a charming seaside resort on the Bay of
Biscay to its beautiful church, whose pointed steeple stands
out sharply against the blue sky and can be seen for miles out
on the bay, reminding the mariners of the loving protection
of Our Lady Star of the Sea. Behind the town rise the densely
wooden dunes, redolent with the spicy scent of the pine trees
and undergrowth of white hawthorne and yellow broom, and
further down, in front of the church, stretch the yellow sands
and beyond them the brightly sparkling bay, blue as the sky
itself, with fishing boats and pleasure yachts dancing on its
foamy-capped waves, for the sea is fresh today.
Around the church stands an eager, expectant crowd,
watching the rectory door. It opens at last and out comes the
procession, headed by the Cross, and a whole troop of altar
boys, followed by a long double line of priests, and last of all,
with clasped hands and downcast eyes, a young priest so
rapt in prayer that he treads almost unconsciously over the
flower-strewn ground as he goes to say his first Mass in the
church where he was baptized and made his first Communion,
and where his mother now kneels with tears of joy stream-
ing down her face. A poor widow and a seamstress, the labors
and sacrifices that have earned the honor of having her only
son a priest are now forgotten. One thought alone possesses
her: that she is about to receive from the consecrated hands
of her son that same Divine Master, to Whom she has given
her all.
AFTER SEVEN CENTURIES.
BY E. F. MACKENZIE.
OME one has written recently about the "puzzled
American." There is a deal of truth behind the
critic's quasi-humorous observations. The aver-
age man, depending on the daily press reports
of current history, is indeed puzzled by the end-
less array of impossible contradictions facts denying facts,
explanations denying explanations. He grows dizzy in the
whirl of it all. There are international conferences, new
leagues, new boundaries, new standards of life and thought,
new relations between the classes. There are enough new
economic, social and political difficulties to vex a century, and
they have sprung into being within a few short months.
Perhaps Bolshevism is the chief of these difficulties. Cer-
tainly it is the most dangerous. It is no longer the vague
illusory thing it was thought to be a few months since. It is a
vital world- wide movement; not a mere peasant uprising
amid the snows of Russia, but a mania that has disturbed even
stolid, orderly Germany. It is the giant child of oppression
and ignorance, a torch-waving, bomb-throwing demon of de-
struction. It overran Russia in an orgy of fire and blood.
It is the force behind risings all over Europe. Its propaganda
has prompted outbreaks even here in America. It flourishes
among our working classes. It is a menace not only in the
factory city of New England, but in the farming country of
the West as well. Those who, having eyes, also see, are
studying its nature and its tendencies, and evolving measures
to meet it. It is too dangerous to be allowed to grow un-
molested.
Its leaders, Lenine and Trotzky, and the rest, boast that
it will vitally affect the life of every nation. We pray and trust
that they are wrong. Americans are fundamentally too con-
tent with their government to entertain any such doctrines as
the radical Socialists preach. But though we may discount
the possibility of any ultimate success, we cannot discount
the possibility of a struggle and a conflict. There are too
1920.] AFTER SEVEN CENTURIES 365
many members of our society who are ignorant of, if not
mistakenly opposed to, our ideals and our institutions. "The
Bolsheviki," ex-President Taft tells us, "are crusaders, pushing
their propaganda in every country, seeking to rouse the law-
less, the discontented, the poor, the lazy, the shiftless, to a
milk-iiium of plunder and class hatred." The world, after
four years of war, cannot afford to let such a movement
succeed. This is no time for anarchistic social revolution.
The Bolsheviki are our latest menace. Yet in a sense,
Bolshevism is not new. It is as old as history. As we turn
back the records of the past, we find the Bolsheviki burning
and plundering even as now. They bore other names, and
they lived in other climes. Still, their signs and earmarks
are the same. And their history teaches lessons that he who
runs may read lessons not without value even today.
They called themselves Cathari or Albigenses in the early
thirteenth century. Their home was not in Russia, for the
north country of Europe was scarcely part of the civilized
world. They infested instead the southern part of France,
and northern Italy. Historians are divided as to their origin.
Whether they were lineal descendants of the Manichaeans of
the East, by way of the Borgomili and Paulicians, or whether
they sprang from the sectaries of northern France, is an open
question. They were long a secret society, and only became
prominent when already strong in numbers and influence.
The times were favorable to Bolshevism. On the surface
it was an age of brilliance and greatness. It was the time when
the Church and the Pope dominated Europe. The Popes
were the victors in the long fight against imperial aggression.
They were masters of extensive Papal states, and overlords
of Sicily. In 1213, England and Ireland declared themselves
fiefs of the Holy See, not only in matters spiritual, but in a
political and a feudal sense as well. In 1204, Philip of Aragon
acknowledged the Pope's temporal supremacy by laying his
crown on the Tomb of St. Peter and promising an annual
tribute. Leo of Bulgaria declared his kingdom a fief of
Rome in the same year. At this time, too, the Latin League of
Constantinople was formed, which acknowledged the nominal
supremacy of the Holy See. The Emperor of Germany, John
Lackland of England, and Philip Augustus of France might
and did oppose the Pope, but the Pope was always so strong
366 AFTER SEVEN CENTURIES [June,
as to hold them in abeyance. And so it was that at the
Council of the Lateran in 1215, the Pope's was the greatest
temporal power in Europe.
Of this union of spiritual and temporal powers were born
the Crusaders; and these worked out to the greater unity of
Christendom. Our present day separation of the social, po-
litical, economic and religious spheres was unknown. Life at
that time was dominated by religion : and this not so much in a
speculative system of thought as in actual belief and practice.
It is hard for us to conceive society in these terms. Re-
ligion today is considered a minor part of life. Men think of
it as calling for certain observances on the consecrated first
day of the week and on a few major feast days. Occasionally,
some principle of belief or practice must be controlled by a
religious code. But aside from this, life is business and pleas-
ure, politics, and economics, and what else you will. The
Pope, the bishops and priests are secondary figures, dim in
the background of life. They are held in reverence and re-
spect. But our leaders in most spheres of life are not clerical.
Spiritual leaders are expected to concern themselves only
indirectly with the ordinary affairs of life. It was not so
seven centuries since. Churchmen were leading figures in the
State: the teachers and rulers of the people, the councilors
and support of the princes. They were responsible not only
in matters spiritual, but in many matters temporal. This is
the keynote to the understanding of the thirteenth century.
The social order of the times was not as perfect as we
should expect. Even under the leadership of the Church,
strong tides of discontent were, in certain places, sweeping
along beneath the surface. Some there were of high dignity
and office who thought of little else than enriching themselves
and extending their worldly possessions. There were hireling
pastors who thought not of their flock, but of themselves:
who forgot that riches were but a stewardship to be exercised
for the relief of the poor. Beyond this, too, men saw monas-
teries and churches possessed of vast riches of land and treas-
ure, and too readily forgot to what good and charitable uses
these riches were devoted.
For let us not misunderstand. The Church was by no
means corrupt. These were but individual failures. Her min-
isters then, as now, were human: and some of them, in carry-
1920.] AFTER SEVEN CENTURIES 367
ing the common purse, were tempted and traveled not the
narrow way of justice. The Church herself was holy; and if
there were sinners, there were also saints. Witness St.
Bernard, with his admirable spirit of reform. Witness St.
Dominic and the other founders of Mendicant Orders. Wit-
ness the admirable councils of the Lateran, of Westminster,
of Rheims. Still abuses existed, and the age-old story of
Dives and Lazarus had its too common repetition among the
worldly churchmen of the day.
The mediaeval Bolsheviki seized upon these outstanding
abuses as a basis for their propaganda. They took up the
spirit of discontent and drew it to themselves by captivating
and revolutionary doctrines. "Jura, perjura, secretum prodere
noli!" they said. They sowed in secret, and none knew of
them till the field was white for the harvest. And they reaped
the whirlwind.
The Cathari, like all Bolsheviki, were of a mind to undo
the old adage that one should not cut off one's nose to spite
one's face. Because there were abuses, they set about to,
destroy society altogether. It was the old fallacy of arguing
from particular premises to a universal conclusion. They
harped and harped on the theme of hoarded riches and un-
worthy rulers. They bade all men share all their riches with
all the world, as they professed to do. They would have no
one to reign in the seats of the mighty save only the just and
pure of heart. And needless to say, they in their "apostolic
simplicity" were the only just and pure of heart. Society as
constituted would not hear of their project. Therefore society
must be overthrown. Here was a simple and appealing doc-
trine. Here was a solution of social ills to please "the lawless,
the discontented, the poor, the lazy, the shiftless."
Nor was this all. They had a religion and a ritual, too,
based on the dualistic principle of a co-eternal Evil Spirit,
who was the creator of the visible world, who entrapped our
souls into bodies, who organized family and state, and brought
on mankind all the evils of life. Dualism is always an easily
understood, attractive philosophy in answer to the problems
of life; and in this case it had behind it a concerted organiza-
tion, based on secrecy, which had all the fascination of de-
structive, revolutionary conspiracy. It was a religion of anti-
social, anti-Christian anarchy. And though Catharism clam-
368 AFTER SEVEN CENTURIES [June,
ored for a new distribution of worldly goods a communism
not very different from the Soviet regime today, the religious
element was made to obscure the social. The attack centred
on the Church and on Christianity, because society was built
on the Church and on Christian teaching and authority.
Church and State were therefore equally concerned in
this propaganda. Both Church and State banned and pro-
scribed its sectaries. The social order being what it was, the
denial of Catholic faith was a serious social offence. But
beyond this was the greater social danger, in that the Cathari
sought to undo all authority and order. Strong measures were
the natural result. The Inquisition was the direct product of
Catharism, the means adopted to discover and punish the
offenders. Seen thus in the light of true history, it was not
the cruel instrument of bigotry and tyranny that it is generally
conceived to have been. There were mistakes and excesses it
is true; but mob violence and abuse by civil powers are the
all-sufficient answer. The fact of the matter is that the In-
quisition was merely the court of judgment wherein society
defended its very existence against Bolshevism.
But repressive measures were ineffective. The Cathari
were determined even unto death. Persecution only gave
them a new title to build on false though it was the title of
martyrdom. For fanatics do die for false beliefs, and die
cheerfully, if, perforce, they must. Endurance of torture and
death is not the only criterion of true martyrdom. Nor was
preaching of any great avail. St. Bernard, with all the
prestige of his established reputation and eloquence, could
achieve only a nominal success, and that in virtue of a series
of miraculous cures. Conferences and debates were resorted
to, again with little of achievement. Finally came a crusade
of Catholic rulers "armed intervention" and this degener-
ated into an internecine warfare in which one party had no
higher claims in justice and truth than the other.
The true solution was a constructive and positive method
of social reform. It was a movement that cut the cancerous
abuses from the bosom of the Church. It was the foundation
of the Mendicant Orders. They revived apostolic poverty, but
united it to the best ideals of obedience and service. They op-
posed vice by Christian virtue. They met extortion and op-
pression with meekness and generosity. They assisted the
1920.] AFTER SEVEN CENTURIES
lowly and the needy. They made their houses not only centres
of religion and piety, but of active charity as well. They
preached against the excesses of the times, and by lives of
Christ-like self-renunciation renewed in the hearts of the peo-
ple confidence in their fellows and trust in God. Verba
movent, exempla trahunt.
In a word, they ultimately destroyed Catharism by prov-
ing that its claims as to the corruption of the Church and
society were false and unfounded. Their work was revolu-
tionary in a way in a positive way. They did not blindly
uproot the good with the bad. Like the man in the Gospel,
they were bent on destroying the cockle which an enemy had
oversown; but the good, golden wheat they tended carefully.
They separated the cockle of abuses from the wheat of good.
The point is that they did not destroy both. That would have
been prodigal waste. That is Bolshevism.
There is a vital, pragmatic lesson in the rise and fall of
the Cathari a modern and a timely lesson. With the prospect
of a Bolshevist alliance including Russia, Austria, and Ger-
many, with social unrest among the Allies and even among
ourselves, we must find and employ strong and ef-
ficient weapons. The Bolsheviki are modern Cathari, or the
Cathari were medieval Bolshevists, as you will. Both molded
social abuses and their resulting spirit of discontent into an
organization that would overthrow society, and destroy all law
and authority and order. The weapons that met the one
emergency will meet the other. It needs only that we modern-
ize them to fit the changed conditions.
Some of these weapons are already at work. There are
repressive measures at hand, at least where the Bolshevists
are not beyond control investigations and trials and punish-
ments. There is talk of a modern crusade of armed interven-
tion. These repressive measures are well and good. They
are necessary in view of the damage already done. But as a
fundamental and a final remedy, they were insufficient in the
past, nor can we be satisfied with them now. They only fan
the flame of opposition into a greater fire. The real solution
must be positive and constructive.
In our day it will not take the form of new religious so-
cieties. Religion is no longer the conscious basis of society,
the common denominator of social movements and public
VOL. CXI. 24
370 AFTER SEVEN CENTURIES [June,
thought. But it must be based on religion, consciously or un-
consciously. It may be a lay movement of social reform, but
it must build on the eternal truths of the divine dispensation.
As long as the problems of unfairly distributed profits, of
capitalism, of high prices, of wage standards and the rest re-
main to vex us, so long will discontent and Bolshevism be a
menace. And religious truths, consciously such or no, are the
only solution of these problems.
Shall Catholics, as Catholics, remain inactive because this
work is not directly and primarily religious? It would be
unfortunate and worse if we did not do our part. Bolshe-
vism is a rapid poison, and the need is pressing. Others must
go far afield in search of remedies we have the solution of
social ills in our very hands. We have the eternal principles
of justice and charity, true in the days of the Cathari, and as
true now. We need only to modernize their application.
Mere speculation and theory are not enough. It is only by
concrete realities that Bolshevism can be effectively answered.
Our clergy must translate the "approved authors" to meet the
terms and the needs of the day. Our laity must carry their
teaching into practice in the world of business and the marts
of trade. Some few are attempting the work, but the work
is too great for them to succeed unaided. There is need for
organization, for concerted effort. It is our duty, as citizens,
if we would save the State. It is, also, our duty as Catholics,
if we would serve the best interests of our Church.
Popes Leo XIII. and Pius X. consecrated the movement
of social reform by their leadership and approval. Benedict
now gloriously reigning has not left the problems of recon-
struction to the high and other signatories of Paris. Our
bishops are studying and evolving a concrete constructive
platform of reform. It needs only that Catholics all Catho-
lics in a nation-wide effort, unite to study with them and
work with them, and uphold their arms. A Catholic reforma-
tion of society will be a true reformation, and the deathblow
to Bolshevism. And perhaps in making this reformation, we
shall bring the Church again back into her own as the primary
conscious foundation of social life.
THE LOYALIST.
BY JAMES FRANCIS BARRETT.
CHAPTER III.
TEPHEN was sitting in his room, his feet crossed
on a foot-rest before him, his eyes gazing into the
side street that opened full before his window.
He had been reading a number of dispatches and
letters which lay piled in a small heap in his lap;
but little by little he had laid them down again to
let his mind run into reflection and study. And so he sat and
smoked.
It seemed incredible that events of prime importance were
transpiring in the city and that the crisis was so near at
hand. For nearly three months he had been accumulating, meth-
odically and deliberately, a chain of incriminating evidence
around the Military Governor and John Anderson, still he was
utterly unaware of its amazing scope and magnitude. Perfidy
was at work all about him and he was powerless to interfere;
for the intrigue had yet to reach a point where conviction was
certain. Nevertheless, he continued to advance, step by step,
with the events, sensing keenly the while, a tension, sensible,
although still intangible.
He had kept himself fully informed of the progress of affairs
in New York where the recruiting was being accomplished in
an ostensible manner. The real facts, however, were being
adroitly concealed from the bulk of the populace. Information
of a surprising nature had been forwarded to him from time to
time in the form of the dispatches and letters, which lay before
him. A certain Sergeant Griffin had been detailed by him to
carry out the more hazardous work of espionage in the city of
the enemy, and had now returned to Philadelphia to report on
the progress of the work.
Irish Catholics had been found in the British Army at New
York, but they had been impressed into the service. Sergeant
Griffin had spoken to many deserters who avowed that they had
been brought to the Colonies against their will, declaring that
they had been "compelled to go on board the transports where
they were chained down to the ring-bolts and fed with bread and
water; several of whom suffered this torture before they could
372 THE LOYALIST [June,
be made to yield and sign the papers of enlistment." In con-
firmation of this declaration, he had in his lap a letter written
to General Washington by Arthur Lee, June 15, 1777, which read:
"Every man of a regiment raised in Ireland last year had to be
shipped off tied and bound, and most certainly they will desert
more than any troops whatsoever." To corroborate this claim
he had obtained several clippings, advertisements that appeared
in the New York newspapers, offering rewards for the apprehen-
sion of Irish soldiers who had deserted to the rebels.
The same methods, he learned, were now being employed in
the recruiting of the Catholic regiment. Blackmail had been re-
sorted to with splendid results. In several instances enormous
debts had been liquidated in favor of the recruits. Commissions
in the army of His Majesty had been offered as a bounty. Suc-
cess there had been, if a few hundred faces in the ranks could
be reckoned a fair catch.
Just how this idea had taken root, he was at a loss to dis-
cover. Certainly not from disloyalty manifested by the Catholic
population during the war. The exploits of the famous "Con-
gress" Own" regiments might, he thought, have contributed much
to the enemy's scheme. It was commonly known that two regi-
ments of Catholics from Canada, raised there during the winter
of 1775-76, had performed valiant service against the British. A
great number of the Canadian population had welcomed the pa-
triots under Generals Schuyler, Montgomery, and Arnold upon
their attempted invasion of the country, and had yielded much
assistance towards the success of their operations. As many had
sought enlistment in the ranks as volunteers, an opportunity was
furnished them by an act of Congress on January 20, 1776, au-
thorizing the formation of two Canadian regiments to be knowia
as "Congress" Own." The first was organized by Colonel James
Livingston; the second, by Colonel Moses Hazen. Both of these
regiments continued in active service for the duration of the war,
and both obtained a vote of thanks from the American Congress
upon its termination.
Herein must lie the germ of the project of the British Regi-
ment of Roman Catholic Volunteers.
He sat and considered.
"You tell me, then," he said quietly, "that this is the state
of affairs in New York."
"Yes sir," replied the soldier.
There was a further silence.
The progress of the work in Philadelphia had been less
1920.] THE LOYALIST 373
evident. Certain it was that Anderson was directing his un-
divided attention to the furtherance of the plan, for which he
was admirably endowed. That Arnold, too, was greatly interested
in the success of the plot, he suspected, but he had failed to dis-
cover the least incriminating objective evidence against him.
There were several whose names had been associated with the
work; yet these, too, had revealed nothing, when confronted
with a direct question. Whatever inference he might have had,
whatever lurking suspicions he might have accumulated from
the contributory details, when simmered down amounted to little
or nothing. The plan had not progressed to the extent required.
There was nothing to do but to await further developments.
This man Anderson was baffling. The most striking char-
acteristic about him, that towards which and in support of which
every energy and every talent had been schooled and bent, was
an intrepid courage. Ambition possessed his soul, yet his dis-
position and address generally appeared soft and humane.
During the four or five months spent in the city, he had
made a host of friends among all classes of people. His agree-
able manner and fluency of speech at once gained for him the
confidence of the most phlegmatic. No man was endowed with
more engaging qualities for the work, if it may be assumed that
he was engaged solely in recruiting a Tory Regiment from among
the supporters of the Whigs.
The names of several who yielded allegiance to the opposite
side were in the hands of Stephen. The Major of the new regi-
ment was a Catholic, John Lynch. So were Lieutenant Eck,
Lieutenant Kane, and Quartermaster Nowland. These were at
present in New York, whither they had journeyed soon after the
British occupation of the city. Of the hundred odd volunteers,
who were supposed to constitute the company, little could be
learned, for a veil of secrecy enshrouded the whole movement.
Pressure had been brought to bear on several, it was dis-
covered, so that no alternative was left them but to sign the
papers of enlistment. In this Anderson had been materially
aided by the Military Governor's intimate knowledge of the for-
tunes and prospects of the citizens. To imply this, however, was
one thing; to prove it quite another. However strong the sus-
picion, it was still a suspicion, which must be endorsed by investi-
gation before the people could be convinced. Stephen was unpre-
pared to offer the results of his investigation to a people too
indolent and hasty to investigate them as facts and to discrim-
inate nicely between the shades of guilt. Anderson was loved and
admired by his countrymen and more especially by his country-
374 THE LOYALIST [June,
women. Everything would be forgiven his youth, rank and
genius.
Even Marjorie had been captivated by him, it seemed. The
relationship between them he disliked, and some day he would
tell her so. His attentions were evident, but to what degree she
reciprocated was another matter. What she thought of this
stranger and to what extent her heart strings had been fettered,
he longed to know, for it was weeks since he had laid eyes on her.
His last two attempts to see her had found her in the company
of Anderson, once at the Shippens', and again on a ride through
the country. True, he himself had been absent from town for a
brief spell, immediately after his court-martial, when he returned
to headquarters to file a report with his Commander-in-Chief.
The few moments spent with her upon his return was his last
visit. Undoubtedly, he was a stranger to her now; she was ab-
sorbed in the other man.
An insatiable longing to see her filled his soul. There
are certain situations when a man or woman must confide
in some person. No one more invited Stephen's confidence than
this girl. She understood him and could alleviate by her mere
presence: by a something that radiated from her alone, the great
burden which threatened to overwhelm him. Simply to converse
with her might constitute the prophecy of a godlier existence.
He determined to see her that very evening.
"Marjorie," said Stephen, "of course, you've a perfect right
to do exactly as you like. But, you know, you did ask my opinion ;
didn't you?"
"I did," said Marjorie, frowning, "but I disagree with you.
And I think you do him a grave injustice."
She was seated in a large comfortable chair in the middle
of the side yard when he entered. A ball of black yarn which,
with the aid of two great needles, she was industriously engaged
in converting into an article of wearing apparel, lay by her side.
Indeed, so engrossed was she, that he had opened and closed the
gate before her attention was aroused. She rose immediately,
laying her knitting upon the chair, and advanced to meet him.
"I haven't seen you in ages. Where have you been?"
He looked at her.
"Rather let me ask that question," was his query by way of
reply. "Already twice have I failed to find you."
They walked together to the chairs; she to her own, he to a
smaller one near by.
"That you called once, I know. Mother informed me."
1920.] THE LOYALIST 375
"You were similarly engaged on both occasions."
He brought his chair near to her.
"With Mr. Anderson?"
She smiled straight in his face.
"Of course."
He, too, smiled.
"Well!" Then after a pause, "Do you object?"
He did not answer. His fingers drummed nervously on the
arm of his chair and he looked far up the road.
"You do not like him?" she asked quickly.
"It would be impossible for me to tell you now. As a matter
of fact, I have been unable to form a definite opinion. I may
let you know later. Not now."
A deep sigh escaped her.
"I should imagine you could read a man at first sight," she
exclaimed.
"I never allowed myself that presumption. Men are best
discovered at intervals. They are most natural when off their
guard. Habit may restrain vice, and passion obscures virtue.
I prefer to let them alone."
She bit her lip, as her manner was, and continued to observe
him. How serious he was! The buoyant, tender, blithesome
disposition so characteristic of him, had yielded to a temper
of saturnine complexion, a mien of grave and thoughtful com-
posure. He was analytic, and she began to feel herself a simple
compound in the hands of an expert chemist.
"I am sorry to have caused you a disappointment."
"Please, let me assure you there is no need of an apology."
"And you were not disappointed?" A smile began to play
about the corners of her small mouth. She tried to be humorous.
"Perhaps. But not to the extent of requiring an apology."
"You might have joined us."
"You know better than that."
"I mean it. Peggy would have been pleased to have you."
"Did she say so?"
"No. But I know that she would."
"Alas!" He raised his arm in a slight gesture.
She was knitting now, talking as she did. She paused to
raise her eyes.
"I think you dislike Peggy," she said with evident emphasis.
"Why?"
"I scarce know. My instinct, I suppose."
"I distrust her, if that is what you mean?"
"Have you had reason?"
376 THE LOYALIST [June,
"I cannot answer you now, for which I am very sorry. You
will find my reasoning correct at some future time, I hope."
"Do you approve of my friendship with her?" She did not
raise her eyes this time, but allowed them to remain fixed upon
the needles.
"It is not mine to decide. You are mistress of your own
destinies."
Her face grew a shade paler, and the look in her eyes deep-
ened.
"I simply asked your advice, that was all."
The words hit so hard that he drew his breath. He realized
that he had been brusque and through his soul there poured a
kind of anger first, then wounded pride, then a sense of crushing
pain.
"I regret having said that," he tried to explain to her. "But
I cannot tell you what is in my mind. Since you do ask me, I
fear Peggy greatly, but I would not say that your friendship
with her should cease. Not at present, anyhow."
"Well, did you approve of my going there with Mr. Ander-
son?"
"With him? No."
"Can you tell me the reason?"
He then spoke briefly of his reasons for disliking this man
and of the veil of suspicion and of mystery with which he was
surrounded. He did not think him a suitable companion for
her, and wished for her own good that she would see no more
of him.
There was no reply to his observations. On the contrary,
Marjorie lapsed into a meditative silence which seemed to grow
deeper and deeper as the moments passed. Stephen watched her
until the suspense became almost beyond endurance, wondering
what thoughts were coursing through her mind.
At length he broke the silence with the words already re-
corded, and Marjorie answered him quietly, deliberately, and
continued her knitting.
A great melancholy fell upon him. He felt powerless to
contend against it. A seeming predilection on the part of Mar-
jorie for this man Anderson flashed upon him. The longer they
conversed, the deeper the conviction grew. This made him care-
less and petulant. Then he was consumed with regret because he
had been unsympathetic. Her grief and disappointment roused
his pity.
"I deeply regret the pain I have caused you," he said to her
quietly and kindly. "It was altogether rude of me."
1920.] THE LOYALIST 377
She bit her lip violently, tremulously, in an effort to restrain
a flood of emotion which threatened to overcome her if she
uttered the merest syllable.
She did not reply, but fumbled with the knitted portion of
her garment running its edges through her fingers.
"I had no intention of speaking of him as I did," he went on.
"I would not, had you not asked me."
"I am not offended."
"You have been hurt."
"I did not mean that you should know it."
"Very likely. But you could not disguise the fact. I shall
give you the assurance, however, that the subject shall not be
a topic for discussion by us again. He must not be men-
tioned."
"Please! I I"
"It was solely for yourself that I was concerned. Believe
me, when I say this. For my own part, I am wholly disinterested.
I thought you desired to know and I told you as much as it was
possible for me to tell. You must ask me no more."
"He has not revealed this side of his character to me and I
have been in his company on several occasions. Always has he
been kind, gentlemanly, sincere, upright."
Her eyes were centred full upon him; those large, brown
eyes that seemed to voice her whole being. Whether she was gay
or sad, jocose or sober, enthusiastic or despondent, the nature
of her feelings could be communicated by her eyes. She need
not speak: they spoke for her.
"You are right in believing every man virtuous until he has
proved himself otherwise," he replied. "There should be one
weight and one measure. But I regulate my intercourse with
men by the opposite standard. I distrust every man until he has
proved himself worthy, and it was that principle which guided
me, undoubtedly, in my judgment of him to you."
"Do you consider that upright?"
"Do not misunderstand me. I do not form a rash judgment
of every person I meet. As a matter of fact I arrive at no judg-
ment at all. I defer judgment until after the investigation, and
I beware of men until this investigation has been completed."
"You are then obliged to live in a world of suspicion."
"No. Rather in a world of security. How often has the
knave paraded under the banner of innocence! The greatest
thieves wear golden chains."
"I could not live so." She became impatient.
"Were you thrown into daily relation with the world, you
378 THE LOYALIST [June,
would soon learn the art of discrimination. The trusty sentinel
lives a life of suspicion."
At length a truce was silently proclaimed. Composure
reigned. The unpleasant episode had to all appearance been ob-
literated from their minds. There was even a touch of the old
humor dancing in her eyes.
"Some one has said," she observed, "that 'suspicion is the
poison of friendship.' >:
"And a Latin proverb runs: 'Be on such terms with your
friend as if you knew he may one day become your enemy."
Friendship, I realize, is precious and gained only after long days
of probation. The tough fibres of the heart constitute its es-
sence, not the soft texture of favors and dreams. We do not
possess the friends we imagine, for the world is self-centred."
"Have you no friends?" A humorous smile played about the
corners of her mouth.
"Only those before whom I may be sincere." He was serious,
inclined to analysis.
"Can you expect to find sincerity in others without yourself
being sincere?"
"No. But my friend possesses my other soul. I think aloud
before him. It does not matter. I reveal my heart to him, share
my joys, unburden my grief. There is a simplicity and a whole-
someness about it all. We are mutually sincere."
"Your test is severe."
"But its fruits imperishable."
"I cannot adopt your method," was the deliberate reply as
she began to gather together her ball and needles.
"Let's leave it at that."
And they left it.
Long after he had gone she sat there until it was well into
the evening, until the stars began to blink and nod and wrap
themselves in the great cloak of the night.
The longer she sat and considered, the more melancholy
did she become. Stephen was displeased with her conduct and
made no effort to conceal it, inflicting only a deeper wound by
his ambiguous and incisive remarks. His apparent unconcern
and indifference of manner frightened her, and she saw, or she
thought she saw, a sudden loss of that esteem he had seemed to
entertain for her. And yet he was mistaken, greatly mistaken.
Furthermore, he was unfair to himself and unjust to her in the
misinterpretation of her behavior. His displeasure pained her
beyond endurance.
1920.] THE LOYALIST 379
In her relation with John Anderson, she had been genuinely
sincere, both with herself and with Stephen. The latter had
asked her to help him; and this she was trying to do in her own
way. That there was something suspicious about Anderson, she
knew; but whether the cause lay in his manner of action or in
the possession of documentary evidence, she could not conjec-
ture. What more apt method could be employed than to asso-
ciate with him in the hope that, at some time or other, important
information might be imparted to her? She did not intend to
play the part of the spy; still if that was the role in which she
should find Anderson, she was ready to assume a similar one
to outwit him and defeat him on his own ground. If Stephen
would only trust her! Oh, dear! And she wrung her hands in
abject despair.
Little by little her experiences of the summer just past came
before her with a vividness which her experience with Stephen
served only to intensify. First, there was the night of the
Governor's Ball. He had come into her life there, filling a
vacancy not realized before. Hitherto, she had been quite content
in the company of almost anyone, and especially with those of
the sterner sex. But with the advent of this dashing young
officer she began to experience a set of new sensations. The in-
completeness of her life was brought before her.
He seemed to perfect her being, sharing her pleasures, les-
sening her woes, consoling her heart. Still, there was one office
he had failed to perform; he was not obsequious. Not that he
was wanting in attention and deferential courtesy, or that he
failed to betray a warmth of feeling or a generous devotion, but
his manner was prosaic, thoroughly practical both in action and
in expression. He spoke his thoughts directly and forcibly. He
was never enthusiastic, never demonstrative, never warm or im-
pulsive, but definite, well-ordered, positive. It was quite true that
he was capable of bestowing service to the point of heroism
when the occasion required, but this quality lacked spontaneity.
His heart, while intensely sympathetic, appeared cold and abso-
lutely opposed to any sort of outburst. He was too prudent, too
wise, too thoughtful, it seemed, acting only when secure of his
ground, turning aside from all obstacles liable to irritate or
confuse him.
Then John Anderson came and initiated her into a newer
world. He appeared to worship her, and tried to make her feel
his devotion in his every act. He was gallant, dignified, charm-
ing, lavishing attention upon her to the point of prodigality. He
said things which were pleasant to hear, and equally pleasant to
380 THE LOYALIST [June,
remember. What girl would not be attracted by such engaging
personal qualities; but Marjorie decided that he was too much of
the Prince Charming whose gentle arts were his sole weapons
for the major encounters of life.
Hence, she was not fascinated by his soft accomplishments.
He interested her, but she readily perceived that there was not
in him that real depth she had found in Stephen. True, he made
her feel more like a superior being than a mere equal; he
yielded ever to her slightest whim, and did not discomfort her
with weighty arguments. But her acumen was such that she was
able to penetrate the gloss and appraise the man at his true value.
The years spent at her mother's knee, the numberless hours in
her father's shop where she came in contact with many men,
her own temperament, prudent by nature, enabled her to per-
ceive at a glance the contrast between a man of great and noble
heart clothed in severe garments, and the charlatan garbed in the
bright finery of festal dress.
And now, the boomerang against which she was defending
herself, struck her from a most unexpected angle. That Stephen
should misunderstand her motives was preposterous; yet there
was no other inference to be drawn from the tone of his con-
versation during the few distressful minutes of his visit.
In all probability, he had gone away laboring under the hateful
impression that she was untrue, that she had permitted her heart
to be taken captive by the first knight errant who had entered
the lists. And what was more, the subject would never again be
alluded to. He had promised that; and she knew that he was
absolute in his determinations. His groundless displeasure dis-
concerted her greatly.
Whether it became her to take the initiative in the healing
of the breach which she felt between them, or simply to await
the development of the course of action she had chosen to pursue,
now became a problem to her perplexed mind. So much depended
upon the view he would take of the whole situation that it would
be necessary for him to understand it from the beginning. She
would write him. But, no! That might be premature. She
would wait and tell him, so great was her assurance that all
would be well. She would tell him of her great and passionate
desire to be of assistance to him; she would put into words her
analysis of this man's character, this man about whom he him-
self had first cast the veil of suspicion; she would relate her
experience with him. She smiled to herself as she contemplated
how pleased he would be, once the frown of bewilderment had
disappeared from his countenance.
1920.] THE LOYALIST 381
"Marjorie! Dost know the hour is late?"
"Yes, mother! I am coming directly."
It was late, though she scarce knew it. Gathering her things,
she brought the chairs into the house.
CHAPTER IV.
Week after week sped by, summer ripened into fall, and fall
faded into winter. Monotony reigned: the bleak winter season,
the shorter days, the longer evenings, the city settled down into
a period of seclusion and social inaction. There would be little
of gayety this year. No foreign visitors would be entertained
by the townsfolk. There would be no Mischienza to look forward
to. It would be a lonely winter for the fashionable element,
with no solemn functions, no weekly dancing assemblies, no
amateur theatricals. Indeed, were it not for the approaching
marriage of Peggy Shippen to the Military Governor, Philadelphia
would languish for want of zest and excitement.
The wedding took place at the home of the bride on Fourth
Street. The elite of the city, for the most part Tories, were in
attendance. Mrs. Anne Willing Morris, Mrs. Bingham all the
leaders were there. So were Marjorie, John Anderson, Stephen,
the Chews, and Miss Franks from New York. The reception was
brilliant, eclipsing anything of its kind in the history of the social
life of the city, for Mrs. Shippen had vowed that the affair would
establish her definitely, and for all time, as leader of the fashion-
able set of the town.
The centre of attraction was Peggy, of course. She carried
herself well, with grace and composure. And were one to judge
by the number and the quality of the gifts which loaded down
one whole room, or by the throng which filled the house to over-
flowing, or by the motley crowd which surged without, impatient
for one last look at the bride as she stepped into the splendid
coach, a more popular couple was never united in matrimony.
It was a great day for all concerned, and there was none more
happy or more radiant than Peggy as she sat back in the coach
and looked into the face of her husband, and sighed with that con-
tentment and complacency which one experiences in the posses-
sion of a priceless gem.
Their homecoming, after the brief honeymoon, was delight-
ful. No longer would they live in the great slate-roof house on
Second Street at the corner of Norris Alley, but in the more
elegant old country seat in Fairmount, on the Schuylkill Mount
382 THE LOYALIST [June,
Pleasant. Since Arnold had purchased this great estate and
settled it immediately upon his bride, subject, of course, to the
mortgage, its furnishings and its appointments were of her own
choice and taste.
It rose majestically on a bluff overlooking the river, a courtly
pile of colonial Georgian architecture whose balustrated and
hipped roof seemed to rear itself above the neighboring wood-
land, so as to command a magnificent broad view of the Schuyl-
kill River and valley for miles around.
"There! See, General. Isn't it heavenly?"
She could not conceal her joy. Arnold looked and smiled
graciously with evident satisfaction at the quiet, home-like aspect
of the place.
Peggy was on the stone landing almost as soon as she emerged
from the coach eager to peep inside, anxious to be at last in her
own home. Although she had already seen all that there was to
see, and had spent many days previous to the marriage in ar-
ranging and planning the interior, today she seemed to
manifest a newer, livelier joy, so pleasant and so perfect did all
appear.
"Oh! General. Isn't this just delicious?" And she threw
her arms around his neck.
"Are you happy now?" he questioned.
"Perfectly. Come let us sit and enjoy it."
She went to the big chair and began to rock energetically;
but only for a minute, for she spied in the corner of the room the
great sofa, and with a sudden movement threw herself on that.
She was like a small child with a host of toys about her, anxious
to play with all at the same time and trying to give to each the
same undivided attention. The massive candelabra on the table
attracted her, and she turned her attention to that, fixing one of
its candles as she neared it. Finally, a small water color of her
father, which hung on the wall a little to one side, appealed to
her as needing adjustment. She paused to regard the profile as
she straightened it.
The General observed her from the large chair into which
he had flung himself to rest after the journey, following her
with his eyes as she flitted about the great drawing-room. For the
moment there was no object in that space to determine the
angle of his vision, save Peggy, no other objective reality to
convey any trace of an image to his imagination but that of his
wife. She was the centre, the sum-total of all his thoughts, the
vivid and appreciable good that regulated his emotions, that con-
trolled his impulses. And the confident assurance that she was
1920.] THE LOYALIST 383
happy, reflected from her very countenance, emphasized by her
every gesture as she hurried here and there about the room in
joyous contemplation of the divers objects that delighted her
fancy, reanimated him with a rapture he had thought impossible
to corporeal beings. The mere pleasure of beholding her su-
premely happy was bliss.
"Would you care to dine now?" she asked of him as she ap-
proached his chair and leaned for support on its arms. "I'll
ask Cynthia to make ready."
"Yes, if you will. The last stage of the trip was exhausting."
And so these two with all the world in their possession, in
one another's company, partook of their first meal together in
their own dining-room, their own home.
" 'Thou hast it now king, Cawdor, Glamis, all ' " remarked
Arnold to his wife as they made their way from the dining-room
into the spacious hallway that ran through the house.
"Yet it was not foully played," replied Peggy. "The tourney
was fair."
"I had thought of losing you."
"Did you but read my heart aright at our first meeting, you
might have consoled yourself otherwise."
"It was the fear of my letter; the apprehension of its pro-
ducing a contrary effect that furnished my misgiving. I trembled
over the consent of your parents."
"Dost know, too, that my mother favored the match from the
start? In truth, she gave me every encouragement, perhaps,
awakened my soul to the flame."
"No matter. We are in the morning of our bliss; its sun is
about to remain fixed. Wish for a cloudless sky."
They were now in the great drawing-room, which ran the full
depth of the building, with windows looking both east and west.
In the middle of the great side wall lodged a full-throated fire-
place, above which rose imposingly an elaborately wrought over-
mantel, whose central panel was devoid of any ornamentation.
The door frames, with their heavily molded pediments, the
cornices, pilasters, door-trims and woodwork rich in elaboration
of detail were all distinctively Georgian, tempered with dignified
restraint and consummate good taste.
"We can thank the privateer for this. Still it was a fair
profit and wisely expended, wiser to my mind than the methods
of Robert Morris. At any rate, it is the more satisfactory."
"He has made excellent profits."
"Nevertheless, he has lost as many as an hundred and fifty
vessels. These have affected his earnings greatly. Were he not
384 THE LOYALIST [June,
so generous to an ungrateful people, a great part of his loss
might have been retrieved."
"I have heard it said, too, that he alone has provided the
sinews of the revolt," said Peggy.
"Unquestionably. On one occasion, at a time of great want,
I remember one of his vessels arrived with a cargo of stores and
clothing, whose whole contents were given to Washington with-
out any remuneration whatsoever. And you, yourself, remember
that during the winter at Valley Forge, just about the time Howe
was evacuating the city, when there were no cartridges in the
army but those in the men's boxes, it was he who rose to the
emergency by giving all the lead ballast of his favorite privateer.
He has made money, but he has lost a vast amount. I made
money, too, just before I bought this house. And I have lost
money."
"And have been cheated of more."
"Yes. Cheated. More generosity from my people! I paid
the sailors their share of the prize money of the British sloop
that they, as members of the crew, had captured, that is, with
the help of two other privateers which came to their assistance.
The court allowed the claims of the rival vessels, but denied mine.
I had counted upon that money, but found myself suddenly de-
prived of it. Now they are charging me with having illegally
bought up the lawsuit."
He was seated now and lay back in his chair with his dis-
abled limb propped upon a stool before him.
"They continue to say horrid things about you. I wish you
were done with them," Peggy remarked.
He removed his finely powdered periwig and ran his heavy
fingers through his dark hair.
"I treat such aspersions with the contempt their pettiness
deserves. I am still Military Governor of Philadelphia, and as
such am beholden to no one save Washington. The people have
given me nothing, and I have nothing to return save bitter
memories."
"I wish we were away from here!" she sighed.
"Margaret!" He never called her Peggy. He disliked it.
"Are you not happy in this home which I have provided for you?"
His eyes opened full.
"It isn't that. I am afraid of Reed."
"Reed? He is powerless. He is president of the City Coun-
cil which, under English law, is, in time of peace, the superior
governing body of the people. But this is war, and he must take
second place. I despise him."
1920.] THE LOYALIST 385
Peggy looked up inquiringly.
"Suppose that the worst should happen?" she said.
"But how what can happen?" he repeated.
"Some great calamity."
"How? What do you mean?" he asked.
"If you should be removed, say, or transferred to some less
important post?"
A thought flashed into his mind.
"Further humiliated?"
"Yes. What then?"
"Why I don't know. I had thought of no possible con-
tingency. I wished for a command in the Navy and wrote to
Washington to that effect; but nothing came of it. I suppose my
increasing interest in domestic affairs in the city, as well as my
attentions to you, caused me to discontinue the application.
Then again, I thought I was fitted for the kind of life led by
my friend, Schuyler, in New York, and had hoped to obtain a
grant of land in the West where I might lead a retired life as a
good citizen."
"I would die in such a place. The Indians would massacre
us. Imagine me hunting buffalo in Ohio!"
Her face wore a sardonic smile. It was plain to be seen
that she was in a flippant mood.
"Have you given the matter a thought? Tell me," he ques-
tioned.
"No! I could not begin to think."
"Are you not happy?"
"Happiness springs not from a large fortune, and is often
obtained when most unexpected. It is neither within us nor
without us, and only evident to us by the deliverance from evil."
He glanced sharply. There was fire in his eye.
"I know of what you are thinking. You are disturbed by
these persistent rumors about me."
She gave a little laugh, a chuckle, in a hopeless manner.
"Yes, I am. Go on." She answered mechanically, and fell
back in her chair.
"You need not be disturbed. They are groundless, I tell you.
Simply engendered by spite. And I blame partly the Papist
Whigs, d 'em."
"It isn't that alone."
"That is some of it. The origin of the hostility to me was
the closing of the shops for a week under an order direct from
Washington himself, and a resolution of the Congress. Yet, I
was blamed. The next incident pounced upon by them was my
VOL. CM. 25
386 THE LOYALIST [June,
use of the government wagons in moving stores. As you know
I had this done to revictual and supply the army. But I permitted
the empty wagons to bring back stores from the direction of
New York and was charged with being in communication with
the enemy."
"Which would be more praiseworthy?"
He paid no attention to her remark, but continued:
"I was honest in supposing the goods to be bona fide house-
hold goods belonging to non-combatants. As a matter of fact,
some of the decorations at our wedding were obtained in this
manner. What followed? A public complaint."
"I know."
"Then that scheming interloper, Matlack! You know of
him?"
"I think so."
"You've heard of his father, of course!"
"No."
"The Secretary to Reed, the President of the Council?
Timothy Matlack? His social aspirations were somewhat cur-
tailed by my interest in public affairs. He has borne me in mind
and evidently intends my ruin."
"In that he differs not from many other so-called friends."
"I did all in my power to soothe his ruffled feelings in a
long, considerate letter in answer to his note of grievance. Only
later I learned that it was his son whose haughty nature had
been offended."
"You were no party to the offence. In fact, you knew naught
of it until the episode had been concluded."
"True, but Franks had taken part in it, and Franks was my
head aid-de-camp. It was trivial. He wanted a barber and sent
young Matlack, who was doing sentry duty at the door, to fetch
one. Naturally, I defended his action in my letter of reply."
"I tell you, they do not want you here. Can't you sense that?
Else these charges would never have been uttered. They are
mere pretexts. They are weary of you and desire your resigna-
tion."
She talked rapidly, violently. Her face assumed a stern
expression.
He did not reply, but peered into the distance.
"The 'American Fabius," I suppose, is still watching General
Clinton," Peggy continued.
"He has thrown a cordon about him at New York. With a
sufficient force he might take him."
"Never! The Americans never were a match for His
1920.] THE LOYALIST 387
Majesty's well-trained troops. The longer the struggle endures,
the sooner this will be learned."
"Time is with us, dear. The mother country knows this."
She looked at him. It was astonishing to her that he could
be so transparent and so unaware of it. Really, he was not clever.
"Why do you say that?" she asked. "Every day our lot grows
worse. The troops perish from misery; they are badly armed;
scarcely clothed; they need bread and many of them are without
arms. Our lands lie fallow. The education of a generation has
been neglected, a loss that can never be repaired. Our youths
have been dragged by the thousands from their occupations and
harvested by the war; and those who return have lost their vigor
or have been mutilated for life."
"You are partly right," he mused. "America lost the oppor-
tunity for reconciliation immediately after my victory at Saratoga.
Since then, as you say, the land has become a waste of widows,
beggars and orphans. Then came the French Alliance, a sacrifice
of the great interests, as well as the religion of this country to the
biased views of a proud, ancient, crafty and priest-ridden nation.
I always thought this a defensive war until the French joined in
the combination. Now I look with disfavor upon this peril to
our dominion, this enemy of our faith."
Peggy became interested immediately. She sat straight up
in her chair.
"You never spoke these thoughts to me before!" she ex-
claimed.
"I feared it. You are a Tory, at least at heart. And I knew
that you would only encourage me in my manner of thought.
God knows, I am unable to decide between my perplexities."
"You know how General Monk decided?"
"My God! He was a traitor!"
"He restored Charles," insisted Peggy.
"And sold his soul."
"For the Duchy of Albemarle."
"Good God! girl, don't talk thoughts like that, I I. He
has endured universal execration. It was an act of perfidy." He
scowled fiercely. He was in a rage.
Peggy smiled. She did not press the subject, but allowed it
to drop.
"My! How dark it has become!" she exclaimed.
She struck a light and touched the wicks of the candles.
Dizzy was the eminence to which General Arnold and his
girl bride ascended! On a sudden they found themselves on the
highest pinnacle, the one of military fame with Gates, Lee, Wayne,
388 THE LOYALIST [June,
Greene, and many other distinguished generals at his feet; the
other, of social prestige, the observed of all observers! For a
time his caprices had been looked upon as only the flash and
outbreak of that fiery mind which had directed his military
genius. He attacked religion; yet in religious circles his name
was mentioned with fondness. He lampooned Congress; yet he
was condoned by the Whigs.
Then came the reaction. Society flew into a rage with its
idol. He had been worshipped with an irrational idolatry. He
was censured with an irrational fury. In the first place, his posi-
tion as Military Governor required the exercise of the utmost
patience and tact. Neither of these qualities did he possess. The
order to close the shops caused discontent. People became in-
censed at the sight of a dictator interfering with their private
life. In his person was thrust upon them the very type they were
striving to expel. His actions suddenly became obnoxious.
What was merely criticism in respect to his public life, be-
came a violent passion respecting his private life. There were
many rumors of his intercourse with the Tory element. Brilliant
functions were arranged, it was said, with the sole view of gain-
ing their friendship and good will. He spent the major portion
of his free time in their company, nay more, he had taken to wife
the most notorious of their number. Small wonder was it that
his sentiments on the question of the war were undergoing a
marked alteration. The thirst of the political Whigs for ven-
geance was insatiable.
Then he had repaired to a mansion, the most elegant seat
in Pennsylvania, where he entertained in a style and after a
manner far in excess of his means. He maintained a coach and
four with the greatest ostentation. His livery and appointments
were extravagant and wholly unbecoming an officer of a country
so poor and struggling. He drove to town in the company of his
wife and paid every attention to the aristocratic leaders of the
city. He disdained the lot of the common citizen. Even his head
aid-de-camp had submitted a free man to the indignity of fetch-
ing a barber to shave him, an act countenanced by the General
himself in a letter of reply to the boy's father.
His entertainments were frequent, altogether too frequent
for the conservative instincts of the community. Upon the ar-
rival of the French Ambassador, M. Gerard, a grand banquet was
tendered him, after which he was entertained with his entire
suite for several days at Mount Pleasant. Foreigners were seldom
absent from the mansion, and members of Congress, the relatives
of his wife, the titled gentry of Europe, were treated with marked
1920.] THE LOYALIST 389
and lavish attention. The visit of General Washington was an
event memorable for its display and magnificence, the ball alone
at the City Tavern entailing a vast expenditure. With Madeira
selling at eight hundred pounds a pipe and other things in pro-
portion to the depreciation of the paper currency, the wonder
was often expressed as to the source of so much munificence.
It was known that General Arnold was not a man of wealth.
Whatever fortune he had amassed had been obtained mainly
through the profits accrued from his privateering ventures. The
great estate which he now possessed, had been bought only a
few months previous to his marriage out of the profits of one of
his vessels, just then returning to port. He was continually in
debt, and ruin was imminent. Yet he was living at the rate of
five thousand pounds a year. Whence came the funds?
He had married a Tory wife, and presently it was discovered
that among his bosom friends, his table companions, were to be
found the enemies of America. Rumor began to whisper, with
nods and shrugs and shakings of the head, that his wife was
imparting profitable information to the enemy, and betimes the
question was raised as to who was profiting most. What was
more natural than that she, who had been the toast and lauded
favorite of the British Officers when they were in possession of
the city, should now be in communication with them in far-
away New York! The seeds of suspicion and ill-will were sedu-
lously sown and the yield was bound to be luxuriant.
So the days rolled into weeks, and the weeks clustered into
months, and the months fell into the procession of the seasons,
and in the meantime, Arnold and his wife passed their time in
conjugal felicity and regal splendor. Their affection was con-
stant, tender, and uninterrupted; and this alone afforded him
consolation and happiness; for his countrymen were in a bad
mood with him. His wife, his home, his estate now defined the
extent of his ambition. The world had turned against him.
[TO BE CONTINUED.]
IRew Books.
CARDINAL MERCIER'S OWN STORY. Introduction by Fernand
Mayence. Prefatory letter by His Eminence James Cardinal
Gibbons. New York: George H. Doran Co. $4.00.
History tells how in ancient times in the midst of inept
rulers and an effete civilization Christian pastors, who were great
saints as well as admirable organizers, proved themselves over
and over again defensores civitatis. Leo the Great saved Rome
from Attila; St. Ambrose confronted Theodosius, defied Justina,
and was the incarnation of moral force and rectitude; St. Basil
overcame Valens and was the providence of his people. But these
events occurred in such a distant past that they had lost the
sharpness of their outline, and assumed a more or less legendary
and hagiographic character. A few years ago no one dreamt of
these shining deeds being repeated in our days, or that the
Catholic Church of the twentieth century should beget sons as
heroic as those of the fourth and fifth.
Of such magnificent champions Cardinal Mercier is today
the leader and the chief, and the whole world, even those enemies
whose tyranny he exposed and whose machinations he foiled,
bow in admiration before his unquestioned moral supremacy.
The splendid qualities which heartened his people in the darkest
days of trial, and which since have electrified the world, were
buried for years in a quiet college, and practically unknown out-
side a small university town. But anyone privileged to live under
the same roof with Monsignor Mercier, as was the present re-
viewer, could not but feel that in him resided the latent power
and personal worth capable of the highest achievement. One
glance at his glorious inspiring eyes was sufficient to show he
was an extraordinary man; while the kindliness of his nature,
and the charm of his intercourse are best expressed by the famous
words of Lacordaire, fort comme le diamant, tendre comme une
mre. The personal testimony of such a witness must necessarily
possess the highest value and the deepest interest. Cardinal Mer-
cier's Own Story, therefore, will be eagerly read by thousands in
every part of the globe. The book is composed of the letters
the Cardinal wrote to the German authorities during the years
of occupation, and their replies to him. It betrays in every line
the zealous pastor ever watchful to safeguard and protect the
interests of the Church and of his flock. The first characteristic
1920.] NEW BOOKS 391
of these letters is their high and chivalrous courtesy. The Car-
dinal has his emotions so thoroughly under control, that he is
never carried away into any intemperance or even severity of
language. But at the same time he leaves no possible doubt on
the mind of his correspondant as to the attitude he intends to
maintain. Thus in his very first letter to Von Bissing, after ex-
pressing esteem for the Governor's person, he adds: "I regard it
as my strict duty in the interests of truth to add, that no matter
what the personal dispositions of Baron von Bissing may be, the
Governor-General represents among us here a usurping and hos-
tile nation, in whose presence we assert our right to independence
and respect for our neutrality."
Another precious quality of the writer, evidenced by these
letters, is his perfect fearlessness. He has weighed and measured
the consequences of his acts beforehand, and neither cajolery nor
force can persuade him to recoil an inch. To the demands that
he withdraw or tone down the ringing pastoral, "Patriotism and
Endurance," his reply is, "it is written, and it shall remain."
The publication of the Pastoral, "On My Return from Rome,"
caused the arrest of the Burgomaster of Malines and of four
printers. The Cardinal wrote immediately to Von Bissing claim-
ing that he alone was guilty, and on him alone as a citizen the
punishment should fall. Von Bissing's reply is extremely severe,
and he allows his ill-temper to be clearly seen. The prelate's
answer is serenely triumphant.
Those who have a taste for the things of the intellect will
find wherewith to whet their appetite in Chapter XXVII. It is
composed of the letters exchanged between the Cardinal and Von
Lancken, the chief of the German political department, and it
contains a veritable philosophical disquisition by His Eminence
on the rights of the Occupying Power. His principal letter runs
to eleven large pages of print. In it, with the serried logic of a
philosopher demonstrating a subtle thesis of metaphysics, he
maintains the right of the conquered to possess their consciences
intact, nor do they lose their claims to justice and fair treatment
from the brutal fact of occupation and conquest. What astound-
ing vitality and superb self-control that man must have, who,
confronted daily by a thousand cares and vexations and the shock-
ing sights and sounds of war, yet could argue with as much vim
and detachment as though he lived in an oasis of peace.
Admirable but terrible also in its simple directness is the
protest drawn up by the Cardinal in the name of the Belgian
Episcopate against the deportation of the unemployed. And a
fitting sequel to this document is the letter addressed by him to
392 NEW BOOKS [June,
the German bishops begging that at least Belgian priests be per-
mitted to accompany and remain with the unhappy exiles, so that
their morals might be protected and their precious faith pre-
served. These appeals remained without result. A subsequent
appeal (February 14, 1917) addressed personally to the Kaiser,
brought about a tardy reparation of such atrocious tyranny.
The German authorities feared the Cardinal's resounding let-
ters and towering personality. They did all they possibly could to
nullify his action, and fasten on him the stigma of a political
agitator untrue to the dignity and traditions of his high office.
But when the duel of four years was over, and peace with victory
dawned on Belgium and the world, they had the grace to acknowl-
edge the qualities of their antagonist and to pay homage to the
loftiness of his aims. On October 17, 1918, Von Lancken called
at the Cardinal's Residence and handed him a note couched in
these terms: "You are, in our estimation, the incarnation of oc-
cupied Belgium, of which you are the venerated and trusted
pastor. For this reason, it is to you that the Governor-General
and my Government also have commissioned me to come to an-
nounce that when we evacuate your soil we wish to hand over
to you unasked and of our own free will, the political prisoners
serving their time either in Belgium or in Germany."
The amende is full and comprehensive; a tribute of admira-
tion extorted from a determined and vigilant enemy, and for that
reason it must be taken at full face value. Patriots may look to
the Cardinal as an example, and pastors will find in him one, who
"was made a pattern of the flock from the heart."
The present anonymous English version is uniformly good.
Here and there, however, trivial expressions occur: e. 'g., "they
might have kicked against my orders;" "priests who are at
loggerheads with their bishops." We noticed also that "only,"
and "shall" and "will" are not invariably employed with metic-
ulous grammatical nicety.
THE CHURCH AND SOCIALISM. By John A. Ryan, D.D. Wash-
ington: The University Press. $2.00.
Dr. John A. Ryan has compressed a large amount of reading
and thought into these eleven essays. He is widely acquainted
with the literature of his subject, and quotes French and German
authorities, as well as English and American. In two papers,
"The Church and Socialism," and "The Church and the Working-
man," he puts in the clearest form Catholic ideal and Catholic
achievement, and he emphasizes the fact that the Guilds of the
Middle Ages did all and more than all that Labor Unions do today.
1920.] NEW BOOKS 393
Elsewhere he punctures many a deceitful tendencious theory
for instance, that economic factors determine all life and mor-
ality and many a hoary calumny, for example, that the Church
is responsible for the devouring capitalism and degraded pauper-
ism of modern times. But on the other hand, he urges Catholics
to take a more prominent part in social service, and to seek with
ever-increasing zeal solutions and remedies for the economic prob-
lems and abuses of our time.
The essay "False and True Conceptions of Welfare," is to
our mind the most practical of the entire series. The author
shows that extreme wealth is a very great misfortune. It opens
the floodgate of self-indulgence; it dries up the springs of gener-
osity; it nullifies all probability of worthy achievements; it spoils
health, and not unfrequently shortens life. This essay needs only
a change of key to furnish a series of very excellent sermons.
RELIGION AND CULTURE. By Frederick Schleiter, Ph.D. New
York : Columbia University Press. $2.00 net.
This book, written by a Professor of Columbia University, will
be welcomed by all who are interested in the Comparative History
of Religion. The author shows a splendid control of the vast
literature of his subject and the curious learning with which it is
freighted, and presents clearly and succinctly the theories that
have been winning general acceptance among students of Com-
parative Religion. This, however, is the least of fhe merits of his
book, the purpose of which is to appraise the methods in vogue
among the scholars who have been building up this newest of the
sciences. On page after page the false assumptions, the blunder-
ing reasoning, and the erroneous conclusions that have hitherto
characterized Comparative Religion are laid bare with a detach-
ment of judgment and a wealth of erudition that make the book
a model of criticism. The whole procedure of the scholars criti-
cized is seen to be infected with fallacy. A drastic critique of
the Comparative Method shows it to involve "loose implications
and presuppositions," while a dissecting of evolutionary theories
of religion proves them to be founded on "a hypothetical primor-
dium" that vitiates the whole train of reasoning based upon it.
The author does not mince his words. A typical writer of the
evolutionary school "fares best and swims most easily in a sea
of generalities, when, and in so far, as he can get rid of his
facts." The great reputation of men whose names have been
household words in the domain of the history of religions, does
not save their theories from a damaging indictment. Trenchant
and impartial criticism marks the chapters on ethnographical
394 NEW BOOKS [June,
analoga, magic and religion, spirit as the primordium, magical
power as the primordium, and on convergence in the interpreta-
tion of causality. The development of the concept of "converg-
ence" adds value to the book, especially in view of the scanty
literature on the subject.
Comparative Religion has justly been regarded as a menace
to Christianity. The threat of Sir J. G. Frazer shows the spirit
of the school: "Sooner or later it is inevitable that the battery
of the Comparative Method should breach those venerable walls
mantled over with the ivy and mosses and wild flowers of a
thousand tender and sacred associations. At present we are only
dragging the guns into position, they have hardly begun to
speak." Dr. Schleiter has put out of action a good many of the
heavy guns that were to batter the walls of the citadel of Religion.
GREAT FRENCH SERMONS. Second Series. Edited by Rev. D.
O'Mahony, B.D. St. Louis: B. Herder Book Co. $3.00.
The preface to this volume contains curious and interesting
gleanings from a secluded bypath of literary history; for it tells
of the English translations of Bossuet, Bourdaloue and Massillon.
Of the nine sermons of Bossuet here set forth, it seems no Eng-
lish translation has hitherto been attempted. We submit that
perhaps one reason for this may have been the unsatisfactory
state of the text of the sermons, of which a thoroughly critical
text has been published only within recent years. There can be no
question whatever as to the superiority of Bossuet; he is as far
above Massillon as Shakespeare is above Ben Jonson, and we may
remark, in passing, that Father Longhaye, in his able volume,
entitled La Predication, does not mention Massillon at all. The
latter employed the leisure of his episcopate in ceaselessly revis-
ing and polishing those discourses he had preached during his
missionary career. Various selections of Massillon have been put
into English by no less than six different translators, of whom
four were Protestants; while some three or four tried their hand
at Bourdaloue.
The present volume contains twenty-one sermons, nine from
Bossuet, six from Massillon, and five from Bourdaloue. The dis-
courses of the last two preachers, excessively long according to
our notions, have been considerably abridged. The translation is
excellent, and illustrative footnotes from a wide range of authors,
Protestant as well as Catholic, add to its usefulness and interest.
The book will be useful to awaken those ignorant of French to a
knowledge of a glorious religious literature. Faguet says in one
of his studies that the world has produced three supreme masters
1920.] NEW BOOKS 395
of prose Plato, Cicero and Bossuet. But to appreciate fully the
sublimity of the Eagle of Meaux, the zeal of Bourdaloue, the
tender charm of Massillon, one must be perfectly conversant with
the language in which they spoke and wrote.
TETE-D'OR. By Paul Claudel. Translated from the French by
John Strong Newberry. New Haven: Yale University Press.
$2.00.
THREE POEMS OF THE WAR. By Paul Claudel. Translated
into English Verse by Edward J. O'Brien. With the French
Text. Introduction by Pierre Chavannes. New Haven : Yale
University Press. $1.50.
If the Yale University Press had done nothing more than to
introduce the work of Paul Claudel to American readers, it would,
from the standpoint of pure literary values, have justified its
existence to a superlative degree. In fact, it would have taken the
English-speaking public and very particularly the Catholic read-
ing public conspiculously into its debt. For M. Claudel is one
of the outstanding figures in our contemporary literature, alike as
poet, dramatist, and mystic. He is more than outstanding
although far from popular even in his well-loved France: he is
gigantic. Perhaps, more truly than any other living writer, he
realizes Victor Hugo's definition of genius as "a promontory
jutting out into the infinite."
And although we understand still other translations of his
work are in immediate prospect, the English versions of Paul
Claudel have, up to the present, been available solely through the
various publications of the Yale Press. The two volumes at
present sent for review have little in common save their author-
ship. They represent the poet-dramatist in his earliest and his
latest periods: at his most remote in the sombre tragedy of
Tete-D'Or, at his most popular in the three thrilling poems in-
spired by the Great War.
Tete-D'Or, the first of Claudel's dramas, is an epic of the
golden-haired, self-sufficient superman the protagonist of
strength, who reaches the highest point of human power and
glory only to be smitten down by his master, the Death of the
Body . . . And it is only in the presence of Death that he learns,
as a revelation from the heroic princess, "the courage of the
wounded, the strength that sustains the weak." ... It is inter-
esting to note the tendency of various recent reviews to refer to
this play as a representative creation of a religious and Catholic
genius. For in point of fact it is, of course, one of the very few
works of Paul Claudel which are not overwhelmingly religious
396 NEW BOOKS [June,
in nature. Written before its author had entered upon his
mystical apostolate in modern France, it is manifestly a study of
the egoist. And the only note of faith in it is, naturally enough,
the note which rings by implication through the protests against
Tete-D'Or's philosophy of human pride. On the whole, it is a
young work magnificently young; a work of colossal sweep
and somewhat chaotic imagining. It is also a work offering un-
usual difficulties to the translator, since one may doubt whether
its audacious torrent of metaphor is at all times susceptible of
satisfactory Englishing. But Dr. Newberry's work is well and
skillfully done particularly in the less lyrical passages and it
was bravely worth the doing.
The three lyrics which make up the volume Trois Poemes de
Guerre, have been called the greatest yet produced by the recent
war. They are far simpler, far more direct and human than
Tete-D'Or a cry from the France of 1915, stricken but unvan-
quished, and "terrible as the Holy Ghost," in Claudel's tremendous
word. Here again the difficult work of translating the poet's im-
passioned and very "free" verse has been, on the whole, vividly
accomplished by Mr. Edmund J. O'Brien. Especially successful
is his rendering of the final poem, "To the Dead of the Armies of
the Republic." It was perhaps a daring thing to append the
French originals of these verses, but one for which the publishers
deserve unlimited thanks.
THE CHRONICLES OF AMERICA. Edited by Dr. Allen Johnson,
Professor of American History in Yale University. New
Haven: Yale University Press. Fifty volumes at $3.50 per
volume by the set.
The Cleveland Era, by Henry Jones Ford. Professor Ford of
Princeton University has done a splendid work in furthering the
recognition of Cleveland's rightful place in American history.
Students of government will be interested in the description of
Congress: "Somehow the American Congress fails to produce
capable statesmen. It attracts politicians who display affability,
shrewdness, dexterity, and eloquence, but who are lacking in dis-
cernment of public needs, and in ability to provide for them, so
that power and opportunity are often associated with political
incompetency." In connection with Grant's third term move-
ment, the writer questions if the opposition does not owe its
strength to politicians rather than to the conviction of the people.
After a period of political groping under Garfield and his
successor, Arthur, who proved himself a better executive than
men dared hope, Cleveland appeared. As yet popular dissatis-
1920.] NEW BOOKS 397
faction did not agitate for radical rearrangement of political in-
stitutions: practical defects were imputed to the governmental
system, not to the Constitution. One is challenged by the state-
ment that, "The rapid and fortuitous rise of Grover Cleveland to
political eminence is without a parallel in the records of American
statesmanship." But America was ready for a reform administra-
tion and the reform Mayor of Buffalo and the Governor of New
York who did not fear to accuse the State Senate of "barefaced
jobbery" was the man for the presidency. Elected over Elaine
by a turn of a few votes in New York, possibly caused by the Bur-
chard, "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion," indiscretion, Cleveland
met a Congress and especially a Senate which, if allowed to pro-
ceed, would have usurped all power, turning the executive into
a mere ceremonial office. However, we are warned: "But Cleve-
land was no genius; he was not even a man of marked talent.
He was stanch, plodding, laborious, and dutiful, but he was lack-
ing in ability to penetrate to the heart of obscure political problems
and to deal with primary causes rather than with effects." Yet he
fought the Senate's attempt to control patronage, modified the
anti-British interpretation of our fishery rights or privileges, won
the repeal of the Tenure of Office Act, freed the House of control
by a small coterie of Republican leaders, stanchly upheld the civil
service cause, made tariff revision Democratic doctrine and, by
extensive use of the veto, guarded the treasury from raiders.
Considerable space is given to the public discontent as illustrated
by the St. Louis and, later, Pullman strikes, the beginnings of the
American Federation of Labor, the radical programmes, Coxey's
army fiasco, and the stout upholding of law and order by the
President despite criticism.
A short account is given of the interim Harrison administra-
tion. Economic questions are not passed over the farmer's third
parties, the demand for cheap money in the way of greenbacks
and silver, the panic of 1893, and the whole silver issue. Cleve-
land's invincible courage in forcing his party to repeal the Sher-
man Silver Purchase Act and his determination to keep paper
money at par by buying gold through bond sales, regardless of the
charge of dealings with Wall Street, are estimated as his highest
achievements.
Professor Ford has written a thoroughgoing study of the
Cleveland period, so treated that the political, constitutional
and economic phases are equally well developed.
Hispanic Nations of the New World, by William R. Shepherd.
Professor Shepherd, like the textbook compilers, has filled a long-
398 NEW BOOKS [June,
felt need by giving in this slight volume an authoritative account
of the Hispanic Nations. Those who are acquainted with the
scholarly books and monographs on South American history and
culture by this Columbia University professor, will read him with
confidence, tried sorely as they so often are by books of propa-
ganda on this subject. It is a difficult task to sketch in brief the
troublous history of the nineteen neighboring republics, so dif-
ferent in development and present status, although linked by the
common heritage of the Catholic faith, Latin civilization, and a
doctrinaire belief in republican institutions. One is guided
through a maze of revolutions, counter-revolts, chaotic interims,
and foreign disturbances; one is puzzled by racial politics, anti-
clerical, and foreign programmes. Yet the reader will gain a
more intelligent appreciation of America's sister republics.
In connection with a description of the Latin domain and
social conditions, Dr. Shepherd has occasion to write of the
Church. This he does with commendable fairness. He says:
"Matters of the mind and of the soul were under the guardianship
of the Church. More than merely a spiritual mentor, it controlled
education and determined in a large measure the course of intel-
lectual life. Possessed of vast wealth in lands and revenue; its
monasteries and priories, its hospitals and asylums, its residences
of ecclesiastics, were the finest buildings in every community,
adorned with masterpieces of sculptors and painters . . . The
Church, in fact, was the greatest civilizing agency that Spain and
Portugal had at their disposal. It inculcated a reverence for the
monarch and his ministers and fostered a deep rooted sentiment
of conservatism which made disloyalty and innovation almost
sacrilegious. In the Spanish colonies in particular the Church not
only protected the natives against the rapacity of many a white
master, but taught them the rudiments of the Christian faith, as
well as useful arts and trades."
The liberating ideals of the American Revolution, of the
French Revolution, the success of L'Ouverture, and the cry of
"our old king or none," when Joseph Bonaparte was imposed
at the point of the bayonet upon the Spanish people, are cited
as the causes of the revolt of the Latin colonies. Then follow in
bewildering succession Miranda, Francia of Paraguay, Hidalgo
Iturbide and Morelos of Mexico, San Martin of the La Platte,
O'Higgins of Chile, Admiral Cochrane the doughty Scottish mar-
iner, Bolivar, Santa Ana, de Rosas of Argentina with many an-
other. Successful in revolt, the various states were too individ-
ualistic and sectional to accept the federalizing plans of Bolivar at
the Congress of Panama. Bolivar was disheartened and predicted
1920 -] NEW BOOKS 399
the future: "The majority are meztizos, mulattoes, Indians and
negroes. An ignorant people is a blunt instrument for its own
destruction. To it liberty means license, patriotism means dis-
loyalty, and justice means vengeance . . . Independence is the
only good we have achieved, at the cost of everything else "
Regarding the failure of union schemes, he complained- "Amer-
ica is ungovernable. Those who have served in the Revolution
have ploughed the sea." The age of dictators commenced, Lopez
of Paraguay, the stout Catholic, Dr. Garcia Moreno of Ecuador
the beneficent Pedro II. of Brazil, and Mexico's fifty fleeting
generals" in a period of thirty-two years, Santa Ana, Juarez, and
haz the outstanding "president." A chapter on foreign affairs
leals with the paternalistic Monroe Doctrine in its practical ap-
plication. Bright events are few, the early abolition of slavery
and the remarkable prosperity of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile
during the past three decades. Well might Argentina stand as a
eacon for warring Europe, with her reliance on arbitration in
boundary disputes with Brazil and Chile despite territorial losses
The monument of the Andes will testify to coming ages this faith
applied Christianity with its inscription: "Sooner shall these
mountains crumble to dust than the Argentines and Chileans
break the peace which, at the feet of Christ the Reedemer, they
have sworn to maintain."
Mexico, in revolution since the fall of Diaz, is a cautious
summary of the patent events, written in such a colorless way
that it will neither annoy the administration nor arouse the Car-
ranzists.
The Path of Empire, by Carl Russel Fish. Professor Fish of
Wisconsin, the author of a splendid text on American diplomacy
traces in this volume our foreign policy from the early period
olahon to the present, when the United States has assumed
true burdens and world responsibilities. While the facts are
not astoundingly new, the interpretation is illuminating, and the
story is written with a very winning charm of style and phrasing
f special appeal is the writer's genius for striking off, in a few
sentences, a living pen portrait of our chief diplomatists. Adams
Webster, Charles F. Adams, Seward, Elaine, and Hay stand out
in relief. A fearless sentence often challenges attention, so ac-
l have we become to conventional accounts of our states-
ien. Many a phrase clings to the memory and not a few sen-
5 are quotable, such as that likening Metternich to "the
spider who was for the next thirty years to spin the web of
European secret diplomacy."
400 NEW BOOKS [June,
In his account of the Monroe Doctrine, Professor Fish de-
clares that from John Winthrop to Woodrow Wilson "the Amer-
ican people have stood . . . for the right of the people of a ter-
ritory to determine their own development. First, they have in-
sisted that their right to work out their political destiny be
acknowledged and made safe. ... It has followed that they
have in foreign affairs tried to keep their hands free from en-
tanglements with other countries and have refrained from inter-
ference with foreign politics." Just as in Monroe's time the
struggle was one "of absolutism against democracy, of America
against Europe," so in the Great War our controlling principle
led to conflict with an autocracy which endangered liberty, the
world over. Controversies with Great Britain are considered with
a breadth of view which grants England's rights in boundary
difficulties, isthmian diplomacy, the Venezuela episode, or the
Behring Sea affair, yet, is not any the less soundly American.
Elaine's Pan-Americanism is frowned upon, although his "elderly-
sister" attitude toward the Latin American Republics is com-
mended. Prior to the Spanish-American War, the policy of iso-
lation is seen to be cast aside, with the procuring of coaling sta-
tions in the Pacific and the Americanization of the Hawaiian
Isles. Six chapters deal with the Spanish War, its origin, condi-
tions in Cuba, the war press, the Maine disaster, Dewey at
Manila Bay, the naval successes, wretched lack of preparation
in the War Department, frightful losses by disease, the feats of
Wood and Roosevelt, the controversies between General Miles
and Secretary Alger, the Schley-Sampson difficulties, and the
seizure of Porto Rico. The close of the war, the peace terms, the
acquisition of the Philippines, the guarantee of Cuban independ-
ence and the issue of imperialism, are outlined in some detail.
Other chapters follow our diplomacy in the Open Door in China
programme, the Portsmouth negotiations, in Panama, in the
Caribbean, and finally in our world relationship.
The Reign of Andrew Jackson, by Frederick Austin Ogg.
As this chronicle of the life and era of Andrew Jackson is Pro-
fessor Ogg's second contribution to the series, readers will antic-
ipate his pleasing, readable style, scholarly method, and breadth
of view. As an interpretation of Jackson and the democracy of
the western frontier this volume is secondary only to Professor
Turner's Rise of the New West. Jackson, Indian fighter, illiterate
lawyer, honest and courageous judge, duelling or fistic defender
of his own honor, incorruptible, extravagantly generous to friends,
relentless to foes, chivalrous to women, a good politician with
1920.] NEW BOOKS 401
some mark of the demagogue, arbitrary of will, and anti-English
in his red-blooded Americanism is the description of the man
who better than anyone epitomizes the turbulent, back-country
of the early national period. The Creek War and the Battle of
New Orleans, are considered in connection with the hero's early
career. The "Death of King Caucus" as a chapter heading affords
the opportunity to consider the broadened democracy, as illus-
trated by universal suffrage, convention nominations, and direct
presidential balloting. The triumph of democracy in the reign of
Andrew Jackson is virtually the thesis of two chapters, para-
doxical as the combination may appear. Then one is given an
outline, in no way strikingly original, of the Webster-war against
the Bank, and the removal of the Southern Indians. Dartmouth
men, who always quote Webster's small college eulogy, will resent
the suggestion that this portion of the famous speech is of
dubious origin, if not from a Yale professor's version of the trial.
Mr. Ogg's volume is no mere calendar of events. It is a study
of Jackson within his generation, written in a tone which makes
one a better democrat and less fearful of the people's will.
Pioneers of the Old Southwest, by Constance Lindsay Skin-
ner. Miss Skinner commences her volume on the Old Southwest
by describing the various pioneer elements, the Scotch-Irish, High-
landers, Pennsylvanische Deutsche, and Anglo-Saxons of the rov-
ing instinct. The account of the Scotch-Irish, their frontier ac-
tivities in Pennsylvania, in the Shenandoah Valley, and in the
Carolina back country is no newer than the valuable study of
this people by Professor Henry Jones Ford. The Ulsterman as
a pathfinder is well depicted: "Thanks to his persecutors, he
made religion of everything he undertook and regarded his civil
rights as divine rights. Thus . . . emerged a new type of man
who was high principled and narrow, strong, and violent, as
tenacious of his own rights as he was blind often to the rights of
others, acquisitive yet self-sacrificing but most of all fearless,
confident of his own power, determined to have and to hold."
A race of such morale was destined to make its mark in America
and leave its impress upon the national development.
The sketch of colonial folkways is a charming literary essay
but highly imaginative. Interesting are the doings of the Creek
and Chickasaw Indian traders, such as James Adair and Lachlan
McGillivray and the wanderings of Boone who, true to frontier
type, moved with the changing frontier from Virginia to Ken-
tucky and Tennessee, and thence to Missouri. In the struggle
with Indians and wilderness for Kentucky and Tennessee, a few
VOL. cxi. 26
402 NEW BOOKS [June,
Irishmen were found, the McAfee brothers, James Mooney, and
Dr. John Connolly, but the majority were Ulsterites, George
Rogers Clark, Richard Henderson, Benjamin Logan, Richard Cal-
loway with John Sevier, the Huguenot, and James Robertson, the
Scot history makers of the Southwest.
The volume is well written; at times its fascination draws
the student from the exercise of his critical office. Its chief value
would seem to be the appreciation of the labors of the various
racial elements in crowding the frontier line further back into
the hinterland.
The Day of the Confederacy, by Nathaniel W. Stephenson.
This is the second volume in the series from the pen of Professor
Stephenson of the University of Charleston. Moderate and im-
partial, save for a slight Southern bias, sympathetic in its treat-
ment of General Lee and President Davis, this chronicle affords
an excellent, if somewhat standard, resume of the history of the
Confederacy.
The introductory chapter describes affairs on the eve of se-
cession, the radical step of South Carolina, the ill-considered
manifesto of the Southern Congressmen, the bootless fight of the
moderates for delay, the sectional zeal of Toombs, Rhett, Cobb,
Davis, Breckenridge and Yancey, the revolt of the Lower South,
and the secession of Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, and
Tennessee. The government of the Confederacy is reviewed in
three especially instructive chapters. Jefferson Davis we are
to regard as a moderate, suffering radical attack, undermined by
his cabinet, and attacked by the press and certain war governors.
Like Lincoln, Davis perforce assumed a dictatorship, forcing
conscription, proclaiming martial law, averting clashes between
State and Confederate authorities, and setting aside constitutional
niceties. Like Lincoln, he found that military strategists were in
editorial chairs and that too few of the legal martinets were
conscripted. Unlike Lincoln, Davis could be easily attacked, for
with all his high qualities of integrity, courage, faithfulness, and
zeal, he lacked that insight into human life, which makes the
genius of the supreme executive. "He was not an artist in the
use of men. ... In fact, he had a dangerous bent toward
bureaucracy." While cordial with Lee, he failed to recognize him
"as one of the world's supreme characters." In his cabinet ap-
pointments, too, Davis was far from sagacious. Neither Toombs
nor Hunter being qualified to serve on the state department, and
Benjamin as secretary of war never gained popular confidence.
Under the title, the "Fall of King Cotton" financial problems
192( >.] NEW BOOKS 403
are discussed, munitions contracts, taxes, loans, depreciated
paper, the Slidel (?) transactions with Erlanger in cotton futures
bankruptcy of the South, and Egyptian cotton. Foreign rela-
tions are made to centre around the intrigues of Napoleon III
Life in the Confederacy as the blockade tightened, is a story of
hardship and privation, quite in contrast with the apparently
normal social conditions in the North with its inflated prosperity.
John Marshall and the Constitution, by Edward S. Corwin
This sketch of Chief Justice John Marshall, "the Hildebrand
of American constitutionalism," by that eminent scholar in con-
:itutional history, Professor Corwin of Princeton University,
mets the need of the lay reader as fully as ex-Senator Albert G
Jevendge's four volume work does the rigid requirements of the
historical and legal scholar. To summarize in a slight volume the
work of the great jurist demanded ability for condensation, the
art of describing momentous decisions in precise yet non-technical
terms, a deep realization of their constitutional importance, and
an intensive knowledge of the man and of his time. These qual-
ifications, combined with nicety of expression, Professor Corwin
possesses in the fullest sense.
The establishment of the judiciary, the origins of the judicial
view of legislative enactments, the judiciary acts of the char-
acter of the Supreme Bench prior to Marshall's appointment are
considered in an introductory chapter. The lack of leadership
the resignation of Chief Justice Jay to appear as gubernatorial
candidate in New York, the absence of Chief Justice Ellsworth on
a diplomatic mission, the offensive partisanship of the judges are
emphasized to make apparent the fearful decline of the court.
Then came the "mid-night" appointments of Adams, the most
important that of Secretary of State Marshall, without even pre-
vious consultation. Republicans raged in vain. John Randolph
decried and Dickinson wrote: "The Federalists have retired into
the judiciary as a stronghold. There, the remains of Federalism
are to be preserved and fed upon the Treasury and from that
battery all the works of Republicanism are to be beaten down
and destroyed." Marshall's career is recounted, his primitive
youth, his frontier-wrought audacity and initiative which breathes
in his great decisions, his lessons in nationalism rather than in
sectionalism learned at Brandywine, Germantown, and Valley
Forge, his scanty legal training, his stout Federalism, and his
hostility to Jefferson and close association with Adams.
Of especial value are the chapters dealing with Jefferson's
attack upon the judiciary, the impeachment of Chase and the
404 NEW BOOKS [June,
Burr trial. No sounder interpretation is available for the famous
decisions of Marbury versus Madison, M'CulIoch versus Maryland,
Gibbons versus Ogden, Brown versus Maryland, all pronouncing
nationalist doctrines, or for that series, such as the Dartmouth
College case and the Georgia Indian case, guaranteeing the sanc-
tity of contracts. Jefferson, as the spokesman of a party, de-
nounced the judiciary as "a subtle corps of sappers and miners
constantly working underground to undermine our confederated
fabric," declaring that, "An opinion is huddled up in conclave,
perhaps by a majority of one, delivered as if unanimous, and with
the silent acquiescence of lazy or timid associates, by a crafty
judge who sophisticates the low to his own mind by the turn of
his own reasoning." Indeed, at times, the author is a little of
a Federalist in his refusal to understand Jefferson's viewpoint.
These attacks affected Marshall the more, as they were but the
prelude to the deeper hostility displayed by Jackson with whose
nullification policy alone could he agree. Rather than resign in
favor of a Jacksonian appointee, Marshall, with martyr-like pa-
tience, clung to the bench until death. The labors of the great
jurist are summed up in a masterful fashion. He is the oracle of
the formative period, a nation-builder whose constitutional inter-
pretation has become a part of the vital, organic law, and one
whose success was due to his ingrained nationalism, integrity,
independence of view, courage of conviction, conservatism of
judgment, and personal ascendancy in his court.
THE SKILLED LABOURER (1760-1832). By J. L. Hammond and
Barbara Hammond. New York: Longmans, Green & Co.
$4.50 net.
The publication of this book marks the completion of a dis-
tinguished trilogy of sociological studies in the history of Eng-
land from 1760 to 1832. The previous volumes were The Town
Labourer and The Village Labourer. The whole work is a splen-
did example of enlightened industry and painstaking care, and
takes its place immediately among the great classics of English
sociological literature. The authors treat here of some of the
immediate economic and social results of the introduction of ma-
chinery, and the new mechanical inventions generally, at the
close of the eighteenth century. They review with a wealth of
detail the cases of the miners of Northumberland and Durham,
of the cotton workers, of the workers in woolen and worsted,
and of the weavers of Spitalfields.
Not the least interesting portion of this fine and exhaustive
study concerns itself with the Luddite uprisings in the northern
1920.] NEW BOOKS 405
shires. Those were stormy times. A great war was raging
throughout Europe, and England was in the midst of a period of
"labor troubles" even more acute and more dangerous than those
of the present hour. Having won the war abroad, Castlereagh
was engaged in stifling liberty at home; an example which has
not been without its recent imitators. He crushed English work-
ingmen almost as cruelly as he had persecuted Irish nationalists.
Those workingmen in smashing the machines knew what they
were about; they saw that the use of machinery would, before
long, impoverish them and darken the lives of their children.
"Machinery," write the authors, "was introduced under a system
that placed the workers at the disposal of owners of capital, who
valued machinery as a means, not to a larger and richer life for
the workers, but to greater and quicker profits from their enter-
prise." A knowledge of the contents of this book is essential to
any thorough study of English industrial history.
i
THE VIRTUES OF A RELIGIOUS SUPERIOR. By St. Bonaven-
ture. Translated by Fr. Sabinus Mollitor, O.F. St. Louis:
B. Herder Co. 60 cents.
A sub-title, De Sex Alls Seraphim, explains the idea of the
Saint. It is noteworthy that he compares a good Superior to the
Seraphim, symbolizing love, rather than to the Cherubim, typi-
fying knowledge of Divine things. After a chapter concerning the
general qualities required for such a responsibility, the six wings
are defined to be: Zeal for Justice, Pity or Compassion, Patience,
Edification, Prudent Discretion, Devotion to Prayer. These are
enlarged upon by the Saint with that mysticism directed by the
sane common sense so characteristic of the Catholic mystic. On
page fourteen, "sensual" is used unfortunately for "sensitive;"
the first term has a disagreeable connotation, and the grammatical
construction is, at times, confusing.
EXPOSITION OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE. Part II. Moral.
By a Seminary Professor. Philadelphia: John J. McVey.
$2.75.
This is an authorized English translation from the French, of
a book that well deserves the favor with which its previous edi-
tions have been received. In this sixth edition, it has been re-
vised according to the New Code of Canon Law, the arrange-
ment and order, however, remaining the same. It is a com-
pendious course of Moral Theology, outlining in a clear and prac-
tical way all that it is necessary for the average person to know
about the general principles of Morality and Human Acts, the
406 NEW BOOKS [June,
Commandments of God and the Church, and the Evangelical
Counsels and Beatitudes. It is written in catechetical form of
question and answer, but at the end of each chapter is a splendid
summary and tabular analysis of the matter explained. The book
was prepared for the Brothers of the Christian Schools, but mem-
bers of all teaching congregations and the intelligent laity will
derive great profit from a close study of it.
CREDO, A SHORT EXPOSITION OF CATHOLIC BELIEF. From
the French of Rt. Rev. A. LeRoy. Translated by E. Leahy.
New York: Frederick Pustet Co. $1.50.
This volume, Credo, as its sub-title indicates, is an explana-
tion in brief form of the whole subject matter of Catholic Faith and
Practice. The first chapters deal with the articles of the Apostles'
Creed. These are followed by chapters on Catholic morals, the
natural law, the Decalogue, and the commands of the Church.
The rest of the book is devoted to Catholic worship, the seven
sacraments, prayer, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the liturgical
year, and the practical organization of the Christian life. The
treatment, being brief and pointed, is well adapted to the needs
of the busy man and woman of today. It ought to prove a useful
book both for those busy Catholics who feel the need of refresh-
ing their memories on the teachings of the Church and for non-
Catholics seeking knowledge of those teachings.
CELEBRATED SPIES AND FAMOUS MYSTERIES OF THE
GREAT WAR. By George Barton. Boston: The Page Co.
$2.00 net.
This book contains more promise than performance. Not
that the subject matter is uninteresting or unworthy of a per-
manent record. It treats of many of the great tragedies of the
War events that marked important phases of a struggle replete
with dramatic incidents. The death of Edith Cavell, the murder
of Captain Fryatt, the adventure of Roger Casement, the murder
of the Archduke Ferdinand no one can deny these happenings
their rightful place in the War's history. But to catalogue them
as "famous mysteries" is to cheapen them and bring them down
to the level of the melodramatic, an element altogether absent
from the actual occurrences. Not merely does the author per-
sist in thus misguiding his reader by making promises he cannot
possibly fulfill, he attempts to "write up" his version of the
events, to throw a green calcium upon actors and to enshroud
them in mystery. The result is that whatever interest the stories
themselves might hold is entirely spoiled by this stagey dressing.
1920 -] NEW BOOKS 407
GOTLAND. By Mary Austin. New York: Boni & Liveright.
-, I /)
Herman, a professor of sociology, proposes a matter-of-fact
marriage with Mona, a retired school teacher, who rejects him
with scorn, because he failed to recognize within her "a vast un-
discovered country, full of wandering lights and crying voices "
In other words, she is looking for a lover, who will not talk of
similarity of tastes and ample money to provide a home for his
future wife, but will really love "with passion." Our University
professor certainly needed some training to meet Mona's require-
ments. In despair Mona runs away to the woods California
woods beyond question in the vicinity of Montereyand naturally
enough our prosaic German hero, Herman, runs after her by the
trail of the Broken Tree. Together they come across a strange
and wonderful people, the Wood Folk, who initiate them into all
the mysteries of nature, and furnish enough adventures to con-
vert the most matter-of-fact soul into a poet of the finest type
When they return to civilization or the House Folk Herman is
completely changed, and is ready to love in proper, orthodox
fashion.
Outland is a most fantastic tale of hidden treasures with
Vestal maids to guard them, combats to the death between Wood
Folk and Far Folk, and incidents of treachery, jealousy and mur-
der, much ado about nothing the judicious reader would say,
after he had read about one-quarter of the volume.
HAPPY HOUSE. By Baroness von Hutten. New York: George
H. Doran Co. $1.75 net.
This, her latest novel, is of a more acceptable sort than the
Baroness von Hutten is wont to contribute. Its central figure is
an elderly woman, Violet Walbridge, whose naive romances have
for many years been household favorites, bringing her a substan-
tial income. They reflect her personality, the self-respecting, self-
forgetting type, described in the parlance of our enlightened gen-
eration as mid-Victorian. She receives scant affection and total
lack of appreciation from her sophisticated children, who scarcely
veil their contempt for her writings to which, however, they, as
well as their father, owe most of their worldly comforts. The
quiet story is full of interest and pathos. The author employs the
ever-effective method of conveying her intentions by means of
their effect upon a sympathetic observer, a young man, in this
case, whose sense of comedy lightens the atmosphere.
To one point alone must the Catholic reader take exception
and that is where the tired, patient woman yields to her worthless
408 NEW BOOKS [June,
husband's importunate demands for a divorce, and begins to
indulge vague dreams of happiness for herself, a lover of her
youth having reappeared. The divorce is not consummated,
though; and at no time is the general tone lowered. As a whole,
the book is decidedly pleasing and out of the ordinary.
..* ,j ( j
RONALD O' THE MOORS. By Gladys Edson Locke. Boston:
The Four Seas Co. $1.75 net.
Dartmoor, in the time of George II., is the scene of
this novel; its story, the adventures of Sir Roger Hetherington,
who is sent from court to capture Wild Ronald, a Cornish high-
wayman, and to track down the outlawed Earl of Penraven, an
adherent of the Stuart cause. He encounters a formidable oppo-
nent in the person of the earl's young and beautiful sister, who is
passionately loyal to her brother. Needless to say, the customary
love affair follows. There is plenty of action, along the well-worn
grooves. The book is about on a par with the average of its
class, fiction of which the authors seem to be under the impres-
sion that vital interest is imparted by a liberal supply of oaths
and expletives, and the use of archaic language whether appro-
priate to the period or otherwise.
BACK TO THE REPUBLIC. By Harry F. Atwood. Chicago: Laird
& Lee, Inc.
There is much wisdom in this little book and its words should
be heeded. Its purpose is to make clear the meaning of the
words, "autocracy," "democracy," and " republic." In present-
ing a clear conception of these terms, the writer brings out the
attributes of the republic and proves it the "golden mean," the
standard form of government.
This standard, he declares, was given to us in the Constitu-
tion. As long as we adhered to it, we made progress. Digression
from it has brought about confusion, inefficiency and expensive
waste. He pleads for a return to the golden mean by the aboli-
tion of all our commissions, the simplification of a Federal and
State government, and a check upon all socialistic tendencies.
THE MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY. By Arthur Twining
Hadley, Ph.D., LL.D., President of Yale University. New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. $1.75.
The eighteen short essays sermonettes if you will gath-
ered under the foregoing title, were delivered before students and
graduates of the Connecticut University at various times during
a period of eleven years, 1908-1919, as Sunday morning talks.
1920.] NEW BOOKS 409
Dealing in trenchant, but dignified style, with such vital themes
as "The Honor of the Service," "Fitness for Command," "Self-
Consecration," "The Compelling Power of Ideals," etc., these short
papers form a valuable addition to what may be called our liter-
ature of public service. The form of expression is sufficiently
dynamic to place them among the inspirational, in the best sense
of that much mouthed word.
From a Christian standpoint the essays fall short, as one
might expect, in the matter of positiveness, a defect, however,
which it is possible their author might extol as virtue. Dr.
Hadley, for example, appears to harbor certain crass and popular
misconceptions concerning asceticism. He fails to distinguish
properly between Christian and pagan concepts. Like so many
others, he sees in asceticism nothing more than a mere rejection
of human joys, from motives that are, to say the least, unworthy.
His vision stops short of a transformation of lawful desire into
something infinitely higher through the action of grace. "The
Christian philosophy is the Stoic philosophy with the human
element added," sets forth a definition that those who believe in
the truths of revelation will scarcely accept.
The division of the volume into two sections, one dealing with
"Ethics of Citizenship," the other with "Ethics of Leadership,"
impresses us as arbitrary. A better method, it seems, would have
been to range the sermons in the order of their delivery.
HIGHBENTON. By William Heyliger. New York: D. Appleton
& Co. $1.50 net.
Mr. Heyliger has done himself much credit in this story
for boys, a work of more substance and depth than his usual
productions.
Stephen Benton is a fundamentally honorable, well-inten-
tioned lad, but too much inclined to carelessness and shirking,
content merely to scrape through, rather than exert himself to do
his best. He sees no necessity for finishing his course at the High
School, feeling himself sufficiently educated to go to work,
whether in his home town or elsewhere. Advice and remon-
strance have no effect. Experience comes to his aid. By a per-
fectly natural course of circumstances, there is forced upon his
observation the contrast between two men, brothers, of whom
one has made a success of his life, while the other has been
ruined by consistent following of the easy-going policy which
Steve pursues. Being an intelligent boy, he takes the lesson to
heart, turns over a new leaf, and becomes "High" Benton.
The tale is told in Mr. Heyliger's own agreeable manner,
410 NEW BOOKS [June,
which is all the more effective because it excludes formal moral-
izings. He has been most generous with his material, lavishing
incident and action, as well as an unwonted number of clear-cut
characterizations. The book is juvenile fiction of the best type.
Accustomed as we are to the author's attitude, healthful and
ethically correct, but totally religionless, it is with a little shock
of pleasant surprise that we read Steve's account of how, during
a thunderstorm, he took refuge in a Catholic church, and, seeing
the red light at the altar, felt as if God were there; eliciting from
his hearer the comment: "Perhaps He was."
MOUNT MUSIC. By E. O. Somerville and Martin Ross. New
York: Longmans, Green & Co. $2.00.
For many years Miss Edith Somerville and Miss Viola Martin
have been writing stories and sketches of Irish life. Most or
all of the present volume has been written by Miss Somerville,
for her friend and collaborator died two or three years ago.
It is hard nay, it is impossible for an alien to write
sympathetically or truthfully of things Catholic, especially if there
be question of Catholic Ireland. Our Protestant friends may
write with zest of an Irish fox hunt, or describe with humor the
arts of the social climber, but they cannot portray the soul of
Ireland. Why are all their priests stupid, gluttonous, intolerant,
domineering men "of bovine countenances," and their Catholic
laymen dishonest tricksters like the Doctor Mangan who domin-
ates this story, or weak-kneed, namby pamby heroes like Larry,
"who debated the question as to whether a common atheism were
not the only panacea for the hatreds that ruled the Isle of Saints?"
THE BOOK OF THE DAMNED. By Charles Fort. New York:
Boni & Liveright. $1.90 net.
"By the damned, I mean the excluded," explains the author;
and by the excluded he means certain phenomena which Science
has not applied itself to account for. These are such as black
rains, red rains, strange substances, animal, vegetable and min-
eral, falling upon the earth, bodies of planetary size "floating
or navigating through inter-planetary space," and so on. These
data are surprisingly numerous, and their compilation repre-
sents research of a particularly difficult kind, as the records of
these singular occurrences are principally to be found in news-
papers and magazines, covering a period of many years. To read
of them is to be inspired with an interest which has no need of
the book's sensational title; nor is it increased by the author's
quasi-scientific speculations which he presents in a staccato style
that soon produces the wearying effect of a series of explosions.
!920.] NEW BOOKS
411
THE HOMESTEAD. By Zephine Humphrey. New York- E P
Dulton & Co. $1.90 net.
Memories of Miss Humphrey's earlier novel, Grail Fire, will
predispose the reader in favor of the present work. It would be
pleasant to assure him that his anticipations will be realized-
but the unfortunate truth is that the author has not quite suc-
ceeded on this occasion. In the former book she dealt with that
surpassingly important theme, the search for religious truth Its
vitality imparted life to her characters, who were very real human
beings. Of course, it is not to be expected that she should confine
herself to kindred subjects; but in The Homestead all such inter-
its are abandoned without supplying an effective substitute
With all the good will possible, we cannot find the main theme
other than labored and artificial. Naturally, this is reflected in
the characters who, for the most part, are mere automatons, con-
veying the impression that they are neither clear to the author's
vision nor close to her heart. The most genuine note is sounded
by the woman, Martha Sloan, whose jealousy of her son's love
develops into criminal insanity. This is well handled in itself
but its disproportionate weight destroys the artistic balance.
We look forward to what we may receive from Miss Hum-
phrey at some future time, when she has been again impelled by
earnestness of conviction to write upon a theme of general appeal.
THE BEST GHOST STORIES. New York: Boni & Liverright
REDEMPTION AND OTHER PLAYS. By Leo Tolstoy. New
York : Boni & Liveright. 85 cents each.
Fashions change in ghost stories, and, besides, every coun-
try boasts its own special brand of spirits. With this considera-
tion in view the compiler, Mr. J. L. French, has selected stories
that will satisfy every taste and fancy. The best known of
those included are Defoe's "Apparition of Mrs. Veal," Bulwer
Lytton's "The Haunted and the Haunters,' and Kipling's "Phan-
tom Rickshaw." The Irish banshee, and French, Jewish, Negro
and American spooks are all represented in the other selections
3 round out the volume, or perhaps to convince the skeptical,
the editor has included several newspaper accounts of "real
American ghosts." There is a brief, but interesting introduction
by Arthur B. Reeves on "The Fascination of the Ghost Story."
In Redemption and Other Plays three plays of Tolstoy are
reproduced. Of these two are tragedies "Redemption" and
lie Power of Darkness" gripping realistic pieces of crime and
expiation with Tolstoy's grim ethical purpose showing through
412 NEW BOOKS [June,
them. The third, "Fruits of Culture," is a comedy which satir-
izes the grossness and the credulity of some Russian gentlefolk
whose cult is Spiritualism.
SIMONETTA. By Edwin Lefevre. New York: George H. Doran
Co. $1.50 net.
Here we have a little of Marion Crawford and a little more
of Anthony Hope molded and finished with the art and dexterity
of Mr. Lefevre himself. It is a delightful bit of unsubstantiality
concerning an American lover and an Italian inamorata whose
beauty exactly reproduces that of La Bella Simonetta, most
famous of Botticelli's subjects. The usual role is played by the
bottomless American purse, but we have to thank Mr. Lefevre
for the light grace of his touch, and for his mastery of delicate
phrases.
THE COCKPIT OF SANTIAGO KEY, by David S. Greenberg
(New York: Boni & Liveright. $1.50), is the first of a
series of juvenile books that Mr. Greenberg is writing to illustrate
the manners and customs of foreign peoples. The story is laid
in Porto Rico and centres around the popular sport of cock-
fighting, condemned by the United States Government. There is
adventure and tragedy and romance told in a simple unaffected
way. The enlightening work of American educators is well
emphasized, but one would imagine that this Catholic people
were atheists, for the mention of God and Catholicism is skill-
fully omitted.
PAMPHLET PUBLICATIONS.
The America Press issues two pamphlets of practical instruction
and genuine moral value; one, The Church and the Sex Problem (10
cents), the other, Courtship and Marriage (25 cents). The Church and
the Sex Problem is a lecture delivered by Richard H. Tierney, S.J., at
a meeting of the American Federation for Sex Hygiene, held in
Buffalo, August 27, 1913. It shows that the teaching of sex hygiene not
only fails in its purpose to inculcate purity, but even frustrates that
purpose. Courtship and Marriage contains practical instructions for
those who contemplate matrimony, and safeguards the sanctity of the
sacrament.
Fordham University prints a pamphlet, entitled Puritanism in
History and Literature (15 cents), by Terence L. Connolly, S.J. It
corrects a false impression of the Church contained in Long's History
of English Literature.
The Martyrs of Uganda, issued by the Catholic Truth Society of
London, is of particular interest now, on account of the approaching
ceremony of Beatification of the Uganda Martyrs. It contains a record
1920.] NEW BOOKS 413
of the heroic sufferings of the first converts of Uganda, whose blood
has been the source of many blessings to the Church in that far-off land.
Two pamphlets of real apologetic value are entitled What the
World Owes to the Papacy, by Rt. Rev. Monsignor Grosch, and The
Failure of Anglicanism, by Frederick Joseph Kinsman, late Protestant-
Episcopal Bishop of Delaware (London: Catholic Truth Society).
Among recent contributions on economic subjects we note Cooper-
ation Among Farmers and Consumers, issued by the National Catho-
lic War Council, and Two Years of Faulty Taxation and the Results,
by Otto H. Kahn. Both these publications try to point out a more
satisfactory economic arrangement for the public advantage.
The Hon. Daniel F. Cohalan in The Freedom of the Seas, published
by the Friends of Irish Freedom, calls attention to British control
of the seas, and affirms that the possession of such points by one
nation is not only without precedent, "but is a menace to the liberty
of all the other peoples of the earth."
American Masonry and Catholic Education, by Rev. Michael
Kenny, S.J., is an exposition of Masonic activities in education. (In-
ternational Catholic Truth Society of Brooklyn. 5 cents.)
In these days of political upheaval and unrest, when nations are
contending for their separate freedom, we must not forget that the
Papacy has a right to its freedom, too. Hence, the Roman question.
The freedom of the Papacy is presented to us again in The Pope
and Italy, by the Very Rev. Nazareno Casacca, O.S.A., D.D., translated
from the original Italian by Rev. J. A. Hickey, O.S.A., D.D., and con-
taining a preface by the Most Rev. D. J. Dougherty, D.D., Archbishop
of Philadelphia. (Philadelphia: John Joseph McVey. 50 cents.)
The Catholic Educational Association Quarterly Bulletin, under
date of February, 1920, announces the Seventeenth Annual Meeting of
the Catholic Educational Association in New York City, Monday, Tues-
day, Wednesday, and Thursday, June 28, 29, 30, and July 1, 1920,
under the auspices of His Grace, Most Rev. Patrick J. Hayes, D.D.,
Archbishop of New York.
Two interesting pamphlets, published by the Central Bureau of
the Central Society, St. Louis, Mo., are The Non-Partisan League of
North Dakota, by Frank O'Hara, Ph.D., and The Facts and Fallacies
of Modern Spiritism, by J. Godfrey Raupert, K.S.G.
The Congregation de Notre Dame of Montreal have issued in small
pamphlet form a Tercentenary Sketch of the Venerable Marguerite
Bourgeoys, their Foundress. This favored servant of God was born
two hundred years ago, at Troyes, France. Her work in the cause of
education earned for her the title of Apostle in that field, and her
virtues have been declared heroic by the Holy See.
The Catholic Truth Society of Ireland makes an interesting con-
tribution to historical studies in a magazine, entitled From Peter to
Constantine, Studies in Early Church History.
IRecent Events.
The Polish advance against the Bolshevik
Russia. armies continued throughout the month,
and early in May a joint Polish and Uk-
rainian army under General Pilsudski swept into Ukrainia and
captured Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, which has been in the hands
of the Bolsheviki since the Denikin collapse. At the same time,
Ukrainian troops under General Petlura occupied Odessa, Russia's
most important outlet on the Black Sea. These victories are the
culmination of a month's severe fighting in which the Bolsheviki
have uniformly been forced to give ground, and military observers
are of opinion that they mark the beginning of the end of the
Bolshevik menace in the west.
One of the most important features in the latest Russian de-
velopment is the military, economic, and political convention
signed by Poland and Ukrainia just before the drive toward Kiev.
By this compact Poland agrees to free Ukrainia of the Bolshevik
troops, and to recognize Ukrainia as an independent State. In re-
turn, she will be granted certain advantages. Full details of the
agreement are not yet published, but it is understood the pro-
visions will grant Poland an outlet to the Black Sea; a Vice-Min-
ister in the Ukrainian Cabinet, which will be composed principally
of experts, in order to help the new State obtain a footing in its
fight for existence; and virtual control of the railroads through
the vast stretches of wheat country from which the Bolsheviki
have hitherto been deriving benefit. Poland agrees to give Uk-
rainia military support for a ten-year period; she further agrees
to withdraw her troops as soon as the Ukrainian state is safely
established, and an invasion from the east provided against. Uk-
rainia definitely renounces in favor of Poland any claim to eastern
Galicia, and marks out Ukrainian territory as lying between the
Dneiper and the Dneister Rivers, and extending to the Black Sea,
with Odessa as its seaport.
The Polish-Ukrainian arrangement is looked on with mixed
feelings by the Allies favorably by the French, who are actively
aiding the Poles, and have much to gain by the constitution of a
strong Poland, dubiously by England and America. The latter
consider that if the territorial arrangement of the compact were
carried out, it would mean the severance from Russia of a vast
territory, beginning at Odessa on the Black Sea, and with the
1920.] RECENT EVENTS 415
combinations previously arranged by Poland, covering Latvia,
Lithuania, and White Russia, extending all the way to the Baltic.
All of this territory, with a population of something like 40,000,000
inhabitants, would be permanently lost to Russia, and would form
a belt of semi-autonomous or autonomous states, under the more
or less extended protectorate of Poland, and bound to the latter by
political, military, and economic agreements. This creation of a
"Greater Poland" would deprive Russia of economic resources
which for more than a century have been necessary to her eco-
nomic life. Moreover, there is a bitter hostility against the Poles,
both in Lithuania and also in Ukrainia, where already the Polish
policy is being carried forward in the face of a strong anti-Polish
feeling, centuries old, entertained by the Russian Orthodox pop-
ulation of the Ukraine and Galicia, both forming branches of the
Russian ethnological family, and differing less in language than
the North and South of France. England and, less outspokenly,
America are opposed to anything like imperialistic aims on the
part of Poland as constituting a new European storm centre.
Meanwhile the Polish offensive still continues, and the Bol-
sheviki are falling back along the whole front. According to lat-
est dispatches, Polish and Ukrainian forces have struck a power-
ful blow at the Russian Bolshevik front far north of Kiev, and
have driven the enemy back along the Beresina River. Betchitsa,
an important Dneiper River crossing, has been captured, and seri-
ous losses have been inflicted on the Soviet army. Fighting is
now going on over a front of approximately four hundred and
twenty miles. An interesting feature of the Polish situation is
the fact that less than two years ago, at the time the armistice was
signed, Poland from a military point of view was non-existent,
whereas today it is estimated she has a fighting force of more than
700,000 men, and is maintaining a front greater than the Franco-
German front during the War.
Of course, the Polish offensive has put an end to all peace
negotiations between Poland and the Soviet Government. Late
in April and early in May negotiations for the resumption of trade
between Russia on the one hand and various outside countries,
such as England, Italy, Finland, Sweden, and Latvia, on the
other, were in progress, but the Polish successes have had the ef-
fect of slowing these up.
The belief is expressed in British official circles that a well-
defined plan is afoot to renew an encircling military offensive
against the Bolsheviki. Coincident with the Polish Ukrainian
victories over the Soviet armies in southwestern Russia, three
additional divisions of Japanese troops have been thrown into
416 RECENT EVENTS [June,
Siberia, official advices say. The British Foreign Office also has
been advised that Finland is purchasing large quantities of mili-
tary supplies, and apparently is planning a new attack toward
Petrograd.
In view of these facts, and the announced decision of the
Moscow Government to exclude from Russia any member of a
League of Nations Investigating Committee, who represents a na-
tion supporting the Poles and Ukrainians, any action on Lloyd
George's plan for the resumption of trade with Russia will be
postponed, it is thought, until the situation clears. Meanwhile,
Russia's trade delegation at Copenhagen, which has been settling
the main lines of the programme for trade resumption between
Russia and the outside world, has decided to return to Russia.
This is due to the reported refusal of Great Britain to admit Maxim
Litvinoff to England, and because no answer was received to its
appeal to the San Remo Conference that the trade negotiations
be transferred to some other country.
Though the month's record for the Bolsheviki on the western
and southwestern fronts has been disastrous, they have been more
successful in the east. On April 28th, the Bolshevik forces occu-
pied Baku, an important port on the western coast of the Caspian
Sea, and the outlet of the largest petroleum fields in the east.
The republics of Georgia and Azerbaijan have submitted to the
Soviet armies, and Bolshevism is reported to be spreading rapidly
throughout Transcaucasia and into Armenia. The fall of Tiflis is
momentarily expected, and, according to latest dispatches, the
Bolsheviki are marching from Baku on Batum, which stands at
the extremity of the railroad and pipe line which distributes oil
from the Caucausus fields. If the Bolsheviki take Batum, it
would mean the loss to Great Britain of the indispensable key to
her exploitation of the Caucausus.
Severe fighting occurred late in April at Chita, Transbaikalia,
between the forces of General Voitzekoffsky, the sole remnant of
Admiral Kolchak's army in Transbaikalia, and the opposing Bol-
shevik faction. The Japanese are said to be supporting General
Voitzekoffsky. The Japanese representative at Vladivostok de-
clares that the action of the Japanese troops has been sanctioned
by the Allies. Japanese reinforcements are constantly arriving
at Vladivostok.
The remnants of the Russian volunteer army in the Stochy
region of the Black Sea coast to the number of 60,000 men are re-
cently reported to have surrendered to the Bolsheviki. All, with
the exception of the leaders of the rising, were granted life and
liberty.
1920.] RECENT EVENTS 417
General Wrangel, who is attempting to hold together the
shattered forces of General Denikin in the Crimea until they are
assured of protection, recently reported to British official quarters
that he had been able to reorganize the men sufficiently to with-
stand the isolated Bolshevik attacks. Other reports indicate that
the Bolsheviki are preparing for a general attack, hoping further
to crush Denikin's followers before Great Britain's demand for
their protection is recognized by the Russian Soviet Government.
Notwithstanding reports from Moscow that the Bolsheviki will
accede to Great Britain's demand, the British Government is still
unsatisfied with the replies received from the Soviet Government,
and is awaiting an answer to its last note.
An aftermath of the sessions of the Russian-Japanese Com-
mission for the liquidation of the events of April 4th and 5th,
when the Japanese took possession of Vladivostok, has been the
announcement by the Provisional Government that elections will
shortly be held for a Far Eastern Provincial Parliament. The
Government is organizing an international Board of Trade, con-
sisting of Russian, Chinese, American, and Japanese business men.
The Japanese have installed a complete telephone system, both
military and industrial.
The results of the ten-day conference of the
Italy. Supreme Council of Allied Premiers at San
Remo, beginning on April 16th, were such
that each Government participating in them considered its aspira-
tions to be measurably satisfied. The Premiers and Foreign Min-
isters met in mutual distrust, but they parted with great personal
cordiality, and with much more confidence in the future. The
decisions arrived at involved mutual concessions, and may be
summarized under three main heads: Germany, Turkey, and
Russia.
The German decision made clear that the Allies were in com-
plete harmony on the fulfillment of the Versailles Treaty, and that
they would require its fulfillment, by joint military action, if nec-
essary. The first evidence of German good faith required by the
Allies is disarmament. The indemnity to be paid by Germany will
be fixed as soon as possible at a lump sum to be paid in annual in-
stallments extending over thirty years, or in such other manner
as may later be decided on. An annual payment of three billion
marks pre-war exchange, for thirty years, it is understood, has
been tentatively suggested, but no definite sum will be named till
the Allies hold their meeting with the German representatives.
This meeting between the Allied and German representatives is
VOL. cxi. 27
418 RECENT EVENTS [June,
scheduled to take place at Spa, Belgium, on May 25th. The Ger-
man request to be allowed an army of 200,000 is refused, in view
of the German failure to observe certain terms of the Peace Treaty.
France on her part makes an emphatic disavowal of imperialistic
or militaristic aims, and declares she has no intention of annexing
the left bank of the Rhine.
In dealing with the dismembered portions of the old Turkish
Empire, the Council decided to make Great Britain the mandatory
for Mesopotamia and Palestine, and France the mandatory for
Syria. A formal offer has been made to the United States to ac-
cept the mandate for Armenia, and, in the event of refusal, Presi-
dent Wilson is asked to act as arbitrator in the question of the
boundaries of Armenia. Armenian independence is recognized
by the constitution of a free Republic. The Turkish Treaty was
completed and was later handed to the Turkish plenipotentiaries
in Paris on May 10th. By its terms the Turkish army is to be re-
duced to 25,000 men. The Turks will not be permitted to main-
tain troops on the European side except one company in Con-
stantinople for a guard of honor to the Sultan, who is allowed to
retain his seat of government there. The city will be in the hands
of police with an Allied Commission supervising. Italy, France,
and Great Britain in turn will nominate the Chairman of the inter-
allied forces in Constantinople.
At the urgent request of the Italian Premier, it was decided to
open up trade relations with Russia, and to give every facility for
sending peaceable material to Russia, and for obtaining the sur-
plus of Russian foodstuffs and raw materials for the rest of the
world. It was made clear, however, that the Allies as a whole
refused to accept on the Bolshevik trade delegation the presence
of M. Litvinoff, because of the abuse of his privileges while in Eng-
land by engaging in active political propaganda. The apparent
refusal of the Soviet Government to remove M. Litvinoff from the
Commission, and especially the new hopes engendered by the
Polish victories since the San Remo Conference, have served to
render this decision of the Allies largely inoperative.
The Adriatic question was brought before the Supreme Coun-
cil, but it was decided on the request both of the Italian Premier
and of M. Trumbitch, the Jugo-Slav Foreign Minister, to leave the
settlement of the dispute to negotiation between the two interested
countries. Conversations between Premier Nitti and M. Trum-
bitch have been going on at intervals throughout the month, and
on several occasions a full agreement, involving plans for a buffer
state about Fiume, were reported to have been arrived at. All re-
ports of agreement, however, have been subsequently denied, and
1920.] RECENT EVENTS 419
the whole matter at present is apparently as far from settlement
as ever. Meanwhile d'Annunzio continues at Fiume, which is
under strict blockade by the Italian authorities to prevent supplies
from reaching the insurgents. The communications of the town
have been completely cut off, regular Italian troops tearing up
sections of the railway and bringing up numbers of machine guns
to guard the frontiers. Passage in and out of the city is abso-
lutely forbidden, not even milk going in, and connection with the
outside world by the sea route has been completely severed.
The fifth meeting of the Executive Council of the League of
Nations opened in Rome towards the middle of May. Profound
political changes have taken place since the first session of the
Council, which opened in an atmosphere of extreme optimism,
but now even its warmest advocates admit that the League is in a
bad way. This is due to two principal causes: the failure of
America to join the League, and the indefinite continuance of the
Supreme Council of Allied Premiers and Foreign Ministers which
threatens to become a permanent body, and to absorb many duties
assigned to the League. At present the League has neither moral
nor material strength. At the Rome conference several questions
of importance are to be considered, among them being the date of
the first meeting of the Assembly, which, under Article III. of the
Covenant, consists of representatives of all the members of the
League. It is planned to call the first gathering late this year,
probably at Geneva. The Labor Department of the League has
begun to move to Geneva, and by the end of the month it is ex-
pected it will be permanently installed there. Another assembly,
under the auspices of the League, is the economic conference at
Brussels, which is scheduled to meet towards the end of May. In
June the Committee to draft a constitution for the permanent
court of arbitration will meet at The Hague, with Elihu Root as
the American representative.
With regard to purely Italian affairs, towards the middle of
May the Ministry, of which Premier Nitti was the head, was forced
to resign in consequence of an adverse note in the Chamber of
Deputies. The Popular, or Catholic, Party, numbering one hun-
dred votes, which had hitherto supported the Ministry, joined the
opposition. Premier Nitti has been the object of innumerable
bitter attacks in the past year, and on the eve of the reopening
of the Chamber of Deputies early in May, there were animated
discussions among all groups as to the attitude to be taken toward
the Ministry. The Catholics resented the policy of the Govern-
ment towards the radicals during recent disturbances in Northern
Italy as being excessively mild. The Cabinet crisis is considered
420 RECENT EVENTS [June,
one most difficult to solve, because the Chamber is divided chiefly
into two groups, the Socialists and Catholics, neither of which is
strong enough to constitute a majority, while an agreement be-
tween them is impossible on a common programme. General
elections are prophesied for the near future, as no Cabinet can
remain long in power with the Chamber constituted as at present.
The internal condition of Italy has grown steadily worse dur-
ing the month because of the great number of strikes, of which
the most serious in its effects has been the so-called peasants'
strike. This strike, which was called over a month ago among
the agricultural workers in the Province of Novara in sympathy
with the industrial strike, has been accompanied by bloodshed,
and also by destruction of crops on a considerable scale.
The industrial strike is reported to include all Piedmont,
where it is estimated that the number of persons in voluntary idle-
ness exceeds 500,000, and to be spreading to Lombardy and
Liguria. The Turin conflict, which is being waged over the ques-
tion of workmen's Soviets, shows no signs of settlement. A grave
feature of the troubles is that State servants, the post and tele-
graph workers, are really idle almost all over the country despite
the fact that at Turin, for instance, they are supposed to have
agreed to return to work. In fact, this form of semi-strike
what the French call greve pertte in which the workers do not
actually quit work, but simply do not do any, has grown terribly
prevalent in Italy, especially in cases of Government employees,
or elsewhere, when military force is likely to be exercised suc-
cessfully. Its deliberate passive inertia is harder to beat than ten
ordinary straightforward strikes.
Since the first of May France has been dis-
France. turbed by a series of strikes, whose object
was the furtherance of the radical purpose
to dictate to the Government the nationalization of the railroads,
mines and other industries. The Government has responded by
announcing its determination to dissolve the General Federation
of Labor, and many of the strike leaders have been arrested.
This drastic step is in accordance with French law, which strictly
defines the power of syndicalists on striking, providing only for
strikes on professional or economic grounds. The present strike
has been called on political grounds in the endeavor to exert
pressure on the Government to acknowledge labor's power on the
nationalization issue. The Labor Federation has been trying to
intimidate the Government by successive waves of strikes since
the railway men walked out the first of the month. The Labor
RECENT EVENTS 421
Federation has successively called out ten other unions to support
the railway men. The first wave of the workers' attack was that
of the miners, dockers and seamen. Then followed the metal-
lurgists, general transport workers, subway employees, and elec-
tricians. Finally the strike was extended to the electric-light,
gas and furniture-trade workers, thus producing on paper every-
thing short of a general strike, which is the Federation's last card.
Public opinion and the great majority of the workers are un-
doubtedly against a strike. There is, nevertheless, some trepida-
tion concerning the result of the Government's drastic action.
During the month much space has been given in the French
press to discussions of the San Remo Conference. The general
results of the Conference are hailed as a French victory, both with
regard to the fulfillment of the Treaty, in the matter of definite
procedure as to German disarmament and demobilization, and
also as providing a joint indivisable programme for the Allies in
future. To obtain these advantages, the French were obliged to
make certain concessions, chiefly in the matter of consenting to a
direct conference with the Germans at Spa, the fixing of a lump
sum as the German indemnity, and waiving their objections to cer-
tain portions of the Turkish Treaty. The outstanding feature of
the San Remo meeting in French eyes is the definite decision by
the three Allies against any revision of the Treaty of Versailles.
The Peace Treaty for Turkey was presented to the Turkish
delegation at the French Foreign Office on May llth. The Turks
have thirty days in which to reply. The Treaty is rather remark-
able for the great attention paid to the League of Nations, many
duties being assigned to that organization in enforcing the terms.
It is provided that England, France and Italy shall assume perma-
nent and complete control of Turkish finances. A strong faction
French opinion favors rewriting portions of the Treaty, which
it claims sacrifice French interests for the benefit of England.
The French ban upon the importation of all articles of luxury
became effective April 28th, and just before it adjourned, the
Chamber of Deputies passed a law forbidding all exportations of
works of art of a date prior to 1830, and all paintings and sculp-
tures of artists dead for more than twenty years. Both laws have
been the subject of much criticism in the French press, particu-
larly the first. It is thought that it will scarcely serve to restore
the unfavorable trade balance and may suggest reprisal measures
on the part of other countries.
The sixth meeting of the International Parliamentary Confer-
ence on Commerce opened in Paris on May 4th, and continued for
three days. The delegates, who are members of the parliaments
422 RECENT EVENTS [June,
of the various countries, represented Belgium, Brazil, China, Fin-
land, Great Britain, Greece, Italy, Japan, Poland, Portugal, Ru-
mania, Czecho-Slovakia, and Jugo-Slavia. The findings of the
Conference, -which has only recommendatory powers, will be sent
to the Brussels international financial meeting.
The Conference adopted a series of resolutions, the first of
which requested that international legislation be enacted to control
responsibility in sea transportation. The second asked the for-
mation of an international commission charged with studying the
question of exchange, and arriving at an agreement concerning the
debts of the Allies and former enemy countries.
The third requested the various nations immediately take
steps to curtail expenses, improve their financial position, and re-
duce the circulation of paper currency for the purpose of stabil-
izing exchange. The fourth declared the reparations clauses of
the Versailles Treaty should not be changed, and asked that the
Reparations Commission of the Peace Conference proceed to allo-
cate gold bonds to the countries which suffered through the War,
and that the nations signatory to the Treaty facilitate advance on
the bonds.
Apart from payment of the German indemnity the only inter-
national anxiety seriously troubling France at present is the ques-
tion of German disarmament. From a report recently made by
American observers to the United States Government, this anxiety
is well grounded. The most noteworthy instance of non-compli-
ance with the disarmament clauses of the Treaty, according to this
report, is the failure of Germany to reduce her military effectives.
Although pledged to reduce her regular army to 200,000 by April
10, 1920, and to 100,000 by July 10th, the regular army remains
approximately 250,000.
The state constabulary of 75,000 to 150,000, and approxi-
mately 600,000 home guards, are regarded as a violation of the
Treaty provision forbidding any reserve or secret armed forces.
Although in compliance with the Treaty the German General Staff
ostensibly has been abolished, the report says that the nucleus of
a general staff continues to be maintained. Of the guns and
ammunition Germany agreed to destroy by March 10, 1920 it is
estimated that up to January 5, 1920, about one-quarter of the
amount had been disposed of. Prohibition of the exportation of
munitions into other countries is also said to have been violated.
Secrets in the manufacture of gas and other munitions, which the
Germans agreed to disclose to the Allies before April 10th, have
not yet been divulged. Military clauses reported as completely
complied with, include adoption of new tables of organization,
1920.] RECENT EVENTS 423
non-manufacture of munitions, non-importation of munitions,
abolition of universal military service, and the destruction of
Rhine fortifications.
Allied military authorities were notified on
Germany. May 10th by the German Government that
the number of troops in the Ruhr region
had been cut down to the number of units authorized under the
agreement reached in Paris last August. The Germans intimated
that they expected, in consequence, the withdrawal of French
troops from Frankfort. An Allied Commission has been ap-
pointed to visit the Ruhr Valley and investigate conditions. It is
expected that the German decision not to intervene in the terri-
tory south of the Ruhr will have to be revoked, because of urgent
appeals from this section, where apprehension is felt over the
possibility of another radical outbreak. The understanding is
that some Reichwehr troops combined with a force of security
police will enter the zone. The French have announced the with-
drawal of the 67th Division to Weisbaden. This division included
the Moroccan and Algerian troops, whose presence in Frankfort
was greatly resented by the people.
German economic experts, financiers, merchants, and cap-
tains of industry are exceedingly pessimistic regarding the results
of the Spa Conference, May 25th, mainly because of what they
consider the extreme severity of the French attitude. It is an-
nounced that the German Government will request a postpone-
ment of the conference to June 10th because of the difficulty in
getting together data for the conference and also because of the
approaching German elections. It is understood that the Ger-
mans will make a concrete proposal for annual payments, and the
sum frequently mentioned as an average of the first ten years is
one billion marks, to be paid in gold. Meanwhile a meeting of
French and German experts will take place in Paris on May 17th
to discuss Franco-German commercial relations, and to make ar-
rangements for the restoration of northern France.
The preliminary proceedings for the trial by the Supreme
Court at Leipsic of German criminals have begun, though the date
of the main trial has not yet been fixed. Forty-six Germans, rang-
ing from an army corps commander to a simple private, figure on
the Allies' first specified list of war culprits to be arraigned. The
preliminaries also have been begun in the case against Wolfgang
Kapp and Major General Baron von Luettwitz and their associates
in the recent uprising who are charged with high treason. The
mass of evidence in the case is still increasing. Kapp has fled to
424 RECENT EVENTS [June,
Stockholm, and has placed himself under the protection of the
Swedish Government, which refuses to allow his extradition.
Germany at present is in the midst of the campaign for the
election of the new Reichstag, which is set for June 6th. The
danger of new revolts and of the subversion of the Republic either
by the reactionaries or the Bolsheviki, is dominating the campaign
and overshadowing all other questions. Returns from the elec-
tions to the local assemblies in the Bavarian Palatinate, at the end
of April, show a remarkable drift from the Coalition Parties to the
opposition. Compared with the National Assembly election in
1919, the Catholics showed a loss in votes of twenty-five per cent,
the Democrats of forty-three per cent, and the Majority (or mod-
erate) Socialists nearly forty-four per cent, while the Independent
Socialists gained three hundred and ninety-four per cent, and the
Agrarian League and People's Party eleven per cent.
Forty billion marks is involved in the Government's purchase
of the Federated States Railways, which has been approved by the
National Assembly. The annual interest is estimated at four-
teen million marks. The Government is not over sanguine with
respect to early returns from the investment, in view of the
dilapidated condition of the railways, the delayed output from
repair shops, and continued demands by the men for wage in-
creases. More than a million employees of the railways will be
on the Government payroll, and the whole transaction is described
as one of the most gigantic ever effected by any parliament.
A Swiss Commission of experts, just returned from an in-
vestigation of conditions in Germany, declares that Germany is
on the eve of the collapse of both the food supply and industry.
At most they reckon that she has cereals enough to suppy bread
only until the end of May, after which she must depend on foreign
supplies. The scarcity extends to all articles of food, and the
country is confronted with famine. To obviate this danger the
German Government recently contracted for a large importation
of food from Holland, Scandinavia and England. The contract is
part of a huge re-victualling scheme which embraces cereals,
cheese, rice, potatoes, condensed milk, live cattle and pigs, total-
ing 6,500,000,000 marks. Moreover, the shipment of 10,000 tons
of frozen meat from the United States has been contracted for at
2,750,000,000 marks. The products imported will not be per-
mitted to enter the free markets, but will be distributed by the
public authorities on the basis of the present rationing system,
preference being given the urban localities.
May 17, 1920.
With Our Readers.
THE Gregorian Congress, which meets in New York on the
first, second and third of June, under the auspices of His
Grace, Archbishop Hayes, will, no doubt, prove a significant
event, because it will afford a striking illustration of what can be
accomplished towards the realization of at least one type what
may be called the fundamental type of sacred music.
In 1903 Pope Pius X. gave to the world in his letter on this
subject, the instructions which were meant for the general better-
ment of the singing in our places of worship and for the elimina-
tion of abuses that had been allowed to intrude. Since that day
various efforts have been made, with more or less success, to meet
the requirements of the "Motu Proprio;" and these efforts have
been no less prominent and effective in our own country than
in others. Much, however, still remains to be done.
During the Congress, the Masses and the offices of Vespers
and Compline to be sung in St. Patrick's Cathedral by immense
congregations of the laity, adults and children, and by trained
choirs for the more difficult parts, notably the Proper of the
Mass, there will be given important illustrations not only of Gre-
gorian Chant, but also of the practicability of congregational sing-
ing. A great service will be rendered to all interested in Church
Music by such exemplification of one of the kinds of music
classified by His Holiness Pope Pius X. as appropriate to the
liturgical services of the Church.
* * * *
NOT the least good result that may be expected from the as-
sembly and work of such a Congress is that it will arouse
a new interest in the general subject of music proper to religious
worship, and stimulate clergy and laity towards greater efforts
in seeking to reach the aims set and the ideals advanced by the
Holy Father. May we not hope, likewise, that it will result in a
closer and deeper study of the "Motu Proprio" itself in every
detail, so that all who are zealous for the House of God will be
led to exclude whatever is unbecoming in the music of Divine
service, and adhere, as the document requires, to the use of either
Gregorian Chant, which the Church "prescribes exclusively for
some parts of the Liturgy," or to the classic polyphony, which
"has been found worthy of a place side by side with the Gregorian
Chant in the more solemn functions of the Church . . . ," or to
426 WITH OUR READERS [June,
that modern music of the proper kind, which "is also admitted in
the Church, since it, too, furnishes compositions of such excel-
lence, sobriety, and gravity, that they are in no way unworthy of
the liturgical functions."
THE question of public health, and the efforts centred upon it as
a field of social action demand both the attention and the
activity of the Catholic body. The importance of the subject was
impressing itself more and more upon the mind of every com-
munity before we entered the World War. Our entry therein
brought every one of us quickly and violently face to face with
the far-reaching vital importance of the problem. Upon it de-
pended our ability to raise an army that could fight and conquer.
Upon it depended also our power to have an army at home that
would serve not only to support the men overseas, but that would
sustain the very life of the nation itself.
Public health has become a national question of primary im-
portance. It has brought home to thinking men and women, as
perhaps nothing else would, the necessity of what may be called
the community spirit. This is but a rehearsal of the Christian
truth that we do not live alone : that we are our brother's keeper :
that every one is our neighbor: that we are all children of one
human father: that we are saved by the second Head of the
human race, Jesus Christ our Lord, and that our life here should
be that of members of the Kingdom of Christ and members one
of another. Therefore, do we daily pray to God our Father:
"Thy kingdom come: Thy will be done on earth as it is in
heaven."
* * * *
THE painful experience of sacrifice and of sorrow which our
country was forced to endure because of the War has re-
enlightened many with an old and a very Christian truth : namely,
that the best must die that the less fit and weaker may live. The
army examination rejected the physically deficient: these latter
remained at home: their stronger brothers went to the front.
And of those who went into army service, such as violated the
moral law and sought their own pleasure and indulgence had to
icmain in hospital for treatment. Their brothers who denied
themselves sinful pleasure were fit and worthy to go to the fight-
ing line. The best gave themselves that the less worthy might
live.
This also is but a reflection of the great central and central-
1920.] WITH OUR READERS 427
izing truth of Catholic Faith, that Christ, the Worthiest and the
Highest, gave Himself that we sinful and unworthy might have
life in Him.
* * * *
IT is wonderful how all life and all of what we are pleased to call
social action, is in its goodness but a reflex of the wisdom and
love of God. We are His instruments even in the slightest good
that we think or do, though very dim, at times, the higher vision
may be. A deeper study of these things would show us how true
it is that both the well-being and the progress of humankind are
built upon the truths of Christ: how every true onward step or
movement is but the unfolding in some measure of His revelation
and His teaching. Moreover, the realization of this truth is our
hope and our sole hope. "Vain," says St. Paul, "is our hope if
Christ be not risen from the dead." And if the transcendant truth
of Christ is not also imminent, we have no hope.
THESE very things that are of God are often used by human
hands as the means and messengers of evil and of immoral-
ity. "They changed the glory of the incorruptible God into the
likeness of the image of a corruptible man: they changed the
truth of God into a lie: and worshipped and served the creature
rather than the Creator."
The truth of God is that marriage is a sacrament: the very
instinct of humanity is to reverence it as a permanent union of
husband and wife and children. Yet even so-called ministers of
the Christian gospel are perverting the truth of God into a lie, and
declaring that divorce makes for decency and morality.
The movement in England to secure easier divorce laws is
championed by leading secular journals in this country. The
marriage law in Denmark prohibits the mentally defective and
those afflicted with syphilis from marrying: it demands a health
certificate of the contracting parties. It abolishes the publication
of banns in the churches. But beyond these, it provides for
legal separation on the mere request of both husband and wife or
on the request of either "whenever the mutual good relations of
the two may be said to have been destroyed." And after one
year of separation a divorce may be granted if both parties request
it; after two years the request of only one party is required.
Divorce is also granted by the law to persons who have lived
apart because of mutual disagreement for three years. If one
party is sentenced to two years in jail, the other party shall
ipso facto have a right to a divorce.
428 WITH OUR READERS [June,
On reading this one wonders why marriage is observed at
all : and whether or not marriage is in the minds of the supporters
of such a bill an "institution" in any sense of that word. In fact,
such legislation brings us face to face with the question whether
or not those who enter into such temporary relationship, know-
ing its provisions, are married at all : in other words whether it is
not merely a legalized promiscuity.
OF course, this more than pagan laxity presages, in so far as it
is effective, the degeneration of the human race. It is a de-
cisive indictment against both the religious and moral, the entire
spiritual well-being of generations to come. Its protagonists will
assert that it protects the public health: it is in fact the worst
enemy of public health. It will sow broadcast the seeds of
physical as well as moral degeneration. It breathes the con-
demnation of the apostle "without thought of God in the world."
The holiest sentiments and the highest aspirations of humankind
are to become the toy of irresponsible and irreligious legislators.
They may give one definition to marriage and divorce one year,
and another the following year. They may reduce, as they have
reduced, the sacred relation of husband and wife to a mere
temporary living together. They have no thought that God owns
us; that He is our Creator and that we must order our lives
under His Law. Of course, their attitude is a reflex of the attitude
of many of the people for legislators are ever subservient: and
an index further of how modern legislation, guided by no prin-
ciple save expediency, is in many cases suicidal in its operation.
Legislators fail when their laws disrupt, rather than cement,
human society.
THE laws of our United States concerning marriage and divorce
are surely lax enough. And yet we will soon witness at-
tempts to increase their laxity. The public of the United States is
not yet ready for such a direct move. It will, therefore, be made
to assume the guise of public health.
And here discrimination, careful examination are necessary.
Slate and Federal measures for the protection and safeguarding
of public health are absolutely necessary. Every one of us should
support most earnestly such legislative measures and protect the
community from the danger of contagious diseases of any and
every kind; such measures as provide for proper instruction on
matters of personal health; on the obligation of caring for our
1920.] WITH OUR READERS 429
health and, in that measure, of caring for the community's health;
on the care of infants and nursing mothers, particularly among
the poor and in congested districts; on the training of young
women in the elements at least of nursing, so if an epidemic come,
we would be somewhat prepared to meet it.
* * * *
A LL such measures as speak not only of relief, but also of pre-
rV vention should, and will, we believe, receive the full support
of Catholics and of the Catholic body. Because of the injurious,
immoral legislation that will be introduced under the cloak of
public health, they will not be deceived into grouping all public
health measures under the one infamous category. And as they
will be vigilant and intelligent in discriminating, so will they be
vigilant, intelligent and emphatic in condemning those proposed
measures which, under the pretence of safeguarding the public
health, are really effective measures to sow broadcast the seeds
of immorality and undermine the character of marriage as a
sacred and holy institution.
* * * *
IVTOTICE has been given in the public press of the country to a
movement that would change the present Federal Code and
permit the transmission through the mails of what, up to the
present time, has been termed "indecent" reading matter. The
supporters of this movement are the defenders of birth control-
they wish to spread broadcast all information concerning contra-
ceptive methods and compounds. They have many respectable
imes on their letterheads; their apologetic language braces itself
with a strained ethical enthusiasm; but their real purpose is to lift
from marriage its responsibility and therefore its dignity, and its
very reason for being, and to make "safe" for married and un-
married the ways of sexual indulgence.
Up to the present time, fear has prevented the actual intro-
duction of this bill into the halls of Congress. In spite of the fear,
someone will probably be found to father it. What will be the
action of the American public, particularly of the American Cath-
olic public?
This and similar attempts will all be carried on in the name
of the public health. It will be noticed that they betray them-
selves by lack of principle; they lift law and welcome lawlessness.
Our country is beginning to realize that if it is to continue it
must have something of a soul to keep. The more it forsakes, or
allows its legislators to forsake, principle, the less life will it pos-
430 WITH OUR READERS [June,
sess; the more will its soul shrink to littleness. The evil of the
"red" poison is that it has no principle; and every movement that
imitates it adds to its strength.
The Public Ledger of Philadelphia said some time ago:
"We have discredited 'principle.' We have marked down as a
'failure' the various agencies by which 'principle' was instilled
into the minds of the Americans who really made America. The
schoolhouse has become of very much less importance than the
garage. The Church is no longer the centre of the life of the
community. A man stands far better who belongs to a fashion-
able club. The purely intellectual and spiritual activities have be-
come the eccentric peculiarities of the few. The mass are 'mak-
ing money.'
"Yet there never was an age when America so greatly needed
the old teaching, the old inspired preaching, the universal incul-
cation of the old 'principles.' We are a ship finding itself sud-
denly launched upon seas so stormy that our 'log' hardly carries
a parallel, and yet we have flung overboard the old charts, the old
compass and have driven the old pilots away from the wheel."
It will be well to remember these things in a day when every
man is called upon to interest himself in public legislation, and to
play his part as a defender or an enemy of Christian civilization.
THE report that England is sending more soldiers into Ireland
is but a further argument in favor of Ireland's fight for
freedom. Such a step will be as ineffective and almost as ridic-
ulous as some of the English propaganda which is being published
in this country. We will take as the latest example a four-page
folder, published by The British-American Association. It is
entitled The Cause of Irish Enmity, and is written by Saxby
Vouler Penfold. The pamphlet is worth noticing, not in itself,
but as an evidence of the dire needs to which English propagand-
ists are driven and how they are willing to pervert history.
Our American Revolutionary War was a war for our inde-
pendence against England. England sent her armies and her
fleets here, burnt our cities and killed our men. But this pamph-
leteer tells us that the American Revolution was "simply part of
a struggle which the English had for centuries carried on."
History tells us that the French came to our aid in our fight
for independence: but this writer tells us that the French were
the enemies of America.
And, according to him, it was through the influence of Car-
dinal Richelieu that George III. was led to tax the American
1920.] BOOKS RECEIVED 431
colonists. In fact, he assures his readers that the "unrighteous
taxation, unnatural war, and subsequent bitterness between Great
Britain and the United States were the result of a subtle Franco-
Spanish-Roman Catholic intrigue . . . and this has continued to
the present day."
In line with this "the Roman Catholic population of Ireland
secretly conspired with the Germans to bring about the defeat of
the United States and the Allies." And "Ireland in its relations
with England is politically as independent as Minnesota in its
relations to the United States."
The "few fine Irish Roman Catholics, who volunteered for
service in the British Army, did so in defiance of their Roman
Catholic priests."
Ulster, according to this authority, owns Ireland and Ulster
will be victorious and Ulster will be supported by "an enormous
section of our British community."
After all this vicious mendacity he asks that "Britannia and
Columbia join hands across the Atlantic, and their outstretched
arms will form a sacred arch of peace!"
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GEORGE H. DOBAN Co., New York:
A History of the Great War. By A. C. Doyle. Vol. II. The Loom of youth.
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Voyage Out. By V. Woolf. Whitewash. By H. A. Vachell.
BONI & LIVEBIGHT, New York:
Beyond the Horizon. By E. O'Neill. $1.50 net. Primitive Society. By H. R.
Lowie. $3.00 net. The Release of the Soul. By G. Cannan. $1.75. The
Modern Book of French Verse. Edited by A. Bonl. $2.50 net. The Modern
Library: The Best American Humorous Short Stories, edited by A. Jessup;
A Modern Book of Criticism, edited by L. Lewisohn< Litt.D. ; Salome, the
Importance of Being Earnest, by O. Wilde. 85 cents each.
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS, New York:
The Rose of Jericho. By Ruth H. Bouclcault. $1.90.
HARPHH & BROTHERS, New York:
What Social Classes Owe to Each Other. By W. G. Sumner. Up the Seine to
the Battlefields. By A. B. Dodd. Pierre and Joseph. By H. Bazln. $1.75
net. Alsace in Rust and Gold. By E. O'Shaughnessy. $2.00 net.
P. J. KENEDY & SONS, New York:
Abbotscourt. By J. Ayscough. Summurium Theologies Moralts. By A. M.
Arregul, S.J. $1.80.
BENZIGER BROTHERS, New York:
Penal Legislation in the New Code of Canon Law. By Very Rev. H. A. Ayrlnhac,
D.D. $3.00 net. Your Own Heart. By Rev. E. F. Garesche', S.J. $1.25 net.
Worth. Lectures by Rev. E. Kane, S.J. $2.25 net.
J. FISCHER & BROTHER, New York:
O Sacrum Convivium. (Music.) 12 cents. Twenty-Five Offertories for the
Principal Feasts of the Year. (Music.) Score, 80 cents; vocal part, 40 cents.
432 BOOKS RECEIVED [June, 1920.]
ALLYN & BACON, New York:
The Story of Modern Progress. By M. M. West. $2.00. Jose. For A. P. Vald^s.
80 cents. Applied Mathematics. By E. H. Backer. $1.25.
BRENTANO'S, New York:
Pax. By L. Marroquin. The Five Books of Youth. By R. Hillyer. With Other
Eyes. By N. Lorimer. $1.90 net.
ROBF.BT M. McBniDK & Co., New York:
Maureen. By Patrick MacGill. $2.00 net.
LONGMANS, GREEN & Co., New York:
A History of the Venerable English College, Rome. By Cardinal Gasquet. $5.00.
Father Maturin. By M. Ward. $2.50 net. Pages of Peace from Dartmoor.
By B. Chase. $2.00.
FREDERICK STOKES Co., New York:
The Menace of Spiritualism. By E. O'Donnell. $1.50 net.
JOHN LANE & Co., New York:
The Superstition of Divorce. By G. K. Chesterton. $1.50 net.
THE FOUR SEAS Co., Boston:
The Bride in Black. By Lillie S. Husted. $1.60 net.
THE CORNHILL Co., Boston:
The Love Scout. By E. C. Carter. $1.50. Body and Soul. By E. H. Marsh.
$1.25. The Settling Price. By W. E. Hingston. ?1.75.
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, New Haven:
The Chronicles of America. Edited by Allen Johnson. 50 vols. 40 vols. received.
$3.50 per volume by the set.
MAGNIFICAT PUBLISHING Co., Manchester, N. H. :
Father Ladden, Curate. By L. M. Whalen. $1.00. A Girl's Ideals. By Mrs.
A. O'Connor. $1.00.
J. B. LIPPINCOTT Co., Philadelphia:
The Truth of Spiritualism. By "Rita" (Mrs. D. Humphreys). $1.50 net. The
Report of the Seybert Commission on Spiritualism. $1.50 net. The Children's
Story Garden. Collected by a Committee of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting
of Friends. $1.50 net. Happy House. By J. D. Abbot. $1.60 net.
THE ANDREW B. GRAHAM Co., Washington:
Creation versus Evolution. By P. L. Mills, D.D. 50 cents.
B. HERDER BOOK Co., St. Louis:
A Commentary on the New Code of Canon Law. By Rev. P. C. Augustine, O.S.B.,
D.D. $2.50.
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The Modern Commonwealth. By E. L. Bogart and J. M. Mathews.
SCHOOL PLAY PUBLISHING Co., South Bend, Ind. :
Memory Sketches. By P. J. Carroll, C.S.C. $1.35.
MCCLELLAND & STEWART, Toronto, Can.:
Leaves on the Wind. By Rev. D. A. Casey. $1.25.
CATHOLIC TRUTH SOCIETY OF IRELAND, Dublin:
Saint and Diplomatist St. Lawrence of Brindisi, O.S.F.C. By Father A. Bren-
nan, O.S.F.C. Nora Gillespie. By A. Furlong. Christmas and the Home. By
Father Laurence, O.S.F.C. A Plea for Catholic Education. By Rev T. N.
Burke, O.P. Pamphlets.
LIHRAIRIE VICTOR LECOFFHE, Paris:
Le Livre de Jeremie. Par P. A. Condamin. 24 fr.
PIERRE TEQUI, Paris:
Dominicales. Par E. Duplessy. Tome II. $2.00. Vade-Mecum des Prfdicateurs.
Instructions d'un Quart d'Heure. Par Abb J. Pailler. $2.00. La Parousie.
Par Cardinal L. Billot, S.J. 9 fr.
INDIA CATHOLIC TRUTH SOCIETY, Trichinopoly, India:
Prayer Book. The Pope and the War. By Rev. J. Carroll, O.S.F.C.
THE
Catholic ^G(orld
VOL. CXI.
JULY, 1920
No. 664
FEDERATION OF CATHOLIC SOCIETIES.
BY FREDERIC SIEDENBURG, S.J.
HE federation of Catholic societies began on the
first Pentecost, for on that occasion, as we read
in the Acts of the Apostles, "The Parthians, the
Medes and Elamites, the inhabitants of Judea and
Egypt, Crete and Arabia, and even strangers
from Rome," were brought together in the name of religion.
From that day to this, this same high purpose has federated
men and women at all times and in all lands, and this federa-
tion is today, as in the past, seen in its highest degree in the
Catholic Church. Nearly three hundred million souls from
the four corners of the earth are united in one Faith, in one
Sacrifice, and under one authority. This world-wide federa-
tion has persevered unbroken from that first Pentecost to the
present day, unique in the world. Catholics attribute this to
divine guidance; others to wonderful organization.
This article shall confine itself to Catholic federation as
regards social work, and hence will not directly consider the
social value of religion, without which, however, all social
work is fragmentary and even illusive, for without religion's
foundations a permanent social order of any value is impos-
sible. The Decalogue is still the groundwork of social pro-
gress. Why talk of the fullness of life, when life itself is in
danger? Why heed the testimony of men, when the truth is
Copyright. 1920. THE MISSIONARY SOCIETY OF ST. PAUL THE APOSTLE.
IN THE STATE OP NEW YOBK.
VOL. cxi. 28
434 FEDERATION OF CATHOLIC SOCIETIES [July,
not sacred? Why strive for wealth when its possession is in-
secure? Be that as it may, it is natural that religious federa-
tion should in the same society produce social federation, and
hence in the history of the Church we find the idea of federa-
tion, with its consequent power and efficiency, almost uni-
versal in its social as well as its religious activities.
Beginning with the deacons and deaconesses of apostolic
times, who were, by the way, the first social workers of the
Christian era, we find them gradually merging into the re-
ligious orders of men and women who successively and suc-
cessfully met the social problems of every age.
Teaching a new spirit of brotherhood and equality before
God, and of humanity to the suffering and the lowly, the early
Church, through its sodalities, with which, Mr. C. Osborne
Rowe says, the empire was honeycombed, immediately exerted
a wide social influence on every grade of society. Slavery was
probably never worse than just before the advent of Chris-
tianity, which taught the slave the lesson of Christian humility
and at the same time bade the master recognize the rights of
the slave. The institution of the family also felt the effects
of this new spirit in the world, since the rights of women and
children were recognized by the Church, and the absolute
power of the father over them was taken away by legislation
enacted during those times. The Church raised marriage to
a sacrament and forbade any absolute divorce, thus giving the
family a permanence hitherto unknown.
Preaching everywhere the "Sermon on the Mount," the
Church rapidly spread through its vast organization a new
doctrine of human brotherhood which is, perhaps, its greatest
contribution to social reform. Gladiatorial contests which the
Stoics had fruitlessly opposed, were soon abolished. Con-
stantine, the year before he became a Christian, exposed in the
amphitheatre many prisoners to wild beasts, but the following
year found him promoting laws forbidding such spectacles.
The exposure and mutilation of children, so frequent while the
Church was buried in the catacombs, ceased when the Church
came into freedom. Even Lecky says that "Christianity, for
the first time made charity a rudimentary virtue. It effected
a complete revolution by regarding the poor as the special
representatives of the Christian Founder, thus making the
love of Christ rather than the love of man the principle of
1920.] FEDERATION OF CATHOLIC SOCIETIES 435
charity. ... A vast organization of charity, presided over by
bishops, and actively directed by the deacons, soon ramified
over Christendom, till the bond of charity became the bond of
unity, and the most distant sections of the Christian Church
corresponded by the interchange of mercy." 1 Lowell caught
this spirit when he put into the mouth of Christ,
Who gives himself with his alms, feeds three,
Himself, his needy neighbor, and ME.
'" !
Beginning with the fourth century the Church sent forth
her apostles to all northern Europe, and while teaching the
gospel of salvation they did not forget to teach the gospel of
work. The monks by their labors gave the example and thus
became the real founders of European civilization. Each
monastery became a centre of population and community ac-
tion. Agriculture, commerce and schools followed. Later,
to perpetuate this work, the Church fostered guilds of every
kind to promote piety, learning and civic pride, and to prevent
the profiteering of usury and the exploitation of labor. She
taught both the rich and the poor that justice was always para-
mount and charity often essential; she impregnated the pol-
itics and industry of that day with the principles and practices
of the democracy of religion, and thus the monasteries became
not only the centres of religion, but of social progress.
Equally effective was the Church on behalf of human
liberty and world peace. War and feuds were lessened
through the efforts of the clergy preaching "the Truce of God,"
which gradually limited actual fighting to one fourth of the
year. Mediaeval serfdom sprang from the chaos of the times,
and the freed slaves finding they could not protect themselves,
preferred to join some master as land slaves or serfs. Here
the Church ameliorated their condition by social and eco-
nomic emancipations, and thereby prepared the way for their
ultimate freedom. With truth can we say that democracy took
its rise under the a?gis of the Church, or as Janet affirms in
his History of Political Philosophy, "it was in the cloister that
the doctrines of the sovereignty of the people were born." 2
Opposing riches as hindering salvation, bishops and
priests, by the example of their lives and by selling even the
1 History of European Morals, vol. H., 3d ed., p. 79. Page 279.
436 FEDERATION OF CATHOLIC SOCIETIES [July,
Church ornaments to succor the plague stricken or to ransom
captives, forcibly taught the supreme lesson of charity on
which social service must always ultimately rest. Some even
went farther than sacrificing riches; they sacrificed them-
selves. In fact, in the thirteenth century (1235) the Order of
Mercedarians was established by Peter Nolasco for the purpose
of ransoming captives, and often his followers redeemed the
captives by serving in their stead.
Throughout the centuries the Church's work for the sick
and especially for the lepers and the poor, is evidenced by the
number of hospitals and hospices established wherever she
flourished. Alms were regularly collected in the churches and
often distributed there, and all was done in a mediaeval fra-
ternal spirit which we moderns might well imitate. Dr.
Edward T. Devine some years ago in the Survey 3 wrote : "The
best exponent of this mediaeval conception of human relations
is Francis Assisi, that joyous friend of man, who mingled with
the throngs of men to bring them peace; to teach them once
more not to be needlessly worried about many things, but to
give themselves wholly in simple, effective service of their
fellowmen, to help, console, and strengthen them, and to make
sure of faithfulness in this mission by becoming wholly de-
pendent on those who need such service. . . . Tempting as the
mendicant friar's philosophy is, however, a more authoritative
source, Thomas Aquinas, says the genuine test of true charity
is, if it will inspire in the beneficiary, a desire to pray for the
giver." This Mr. Devine seriously offers in a modern journal
of constructive philanthropy as "a thoroughly scientific ef-
ficiency test" the best on the whole that has yet been dis-
covered.
The point to be remembered in all this social activity is
that it was federated work, generally under episcopal direc-
tion and sometimes of national and even of international char-
acter. Organizations like the fratres misericordix (the
brothers of mercy), the monies pietatis (funds of pity), arrd
the fratres pontifices (bridge builders) were lay associations,
but stimulated by the Church. The first of these assisted the
sick and buried the dead; the second was a system of loan
banks to counteract the usury of that day, and the last, the
"bridge builders," during four centuries built bridges and
February, 1914.
1920.] FEDERATION OF CATHOLIC SOCIETIES 437
roads and erected inns for travelers to protect them against
highwaymen. The / retires pontifices were a religious body, and
obviously indicate that in the Ages of Faith no social need was
foreign to the Church. An interesting development is that of
the Alexian Brothers, who were founded in the eleventh cen-
tury as a lay society to bury the dead, and who became, in
1458, a religious congregation, still existing in many parts of
the world, in charge of asylums and hospitals. In the Middle
Ages the institutions, schools, hospitals, and asylums for defec-
tives and delinquents were generally conducted by religious
bodies, and they were thus the forerunners of nearly all of our
state institutions. It was federation of resources and expe-
rience that made their work effective, and the religious unity
of the times created a community spirit which made this
federation not only feasible but even simple.
This brief survey of the historic past of Catholic federa-
tion is a necessary background for an understanding of Catho-
lic federation today. It reveals its soul or shall I say the
blood royal that courses in its veins. On account of the re-
ligious motive of Catholic social work, it is not hard to under-
stand that in stressing the spiritual, at times the material and
scientific aspects of the work were neglected and hence, in
spite of good intentions, the remedies were sometimes worse
than the diseases they intended to cure. However, this was the
exception not the rule. F. A. Walker, the American econo-
mist, who reported for our Government on the Poor Laws
which succeeded the monastic system in England, pronounced
the poor law in "all its details as unnecessarily bad" because it
favored the beggar at the expense of the laborer who struggled
on in self-support. 4 Then, as now, the religious Orders in the
field of charity profited by their years of experience as their
rules testify, and the monasteries soon systematized their so-
cial, as well as their religious, work. Many of the canons of
the early Church councils and, later on, the rules of the
mediaeval guilds are almost technical in their treatment of
social disorders. Thus one of the early Fathers tells us "let
thy obolus sweat in thy hand, lest thou givest it to the un-
worthy," and Juan Vives, a Spanish humanist, in the six-
teenth century wrote a scientific treatise on poor relief. 5 He
Warner, American Charities, revised edition, p. 13.
*De Subventlone Pauperum, 1526.
438 FEDERATION OF CATHOLIC SOCIETIES [July,
proscribed mendicancy; he would expel vagrants from the
cities; he made employment the basis of rehabilitation and
provided vocational guidance; he urged asylums for the in-
sane as well as for foundlings quite a modern programme
this, in 1526!
Frederic Ozanam, a lawyer of Paris and professor of the
Sorbonne, is the modern apostle of federated Catholic social
work. In 1833, he founded the first Conference of the Society
of St. Vincent de Paul, which applied the practical as well as
the spiritual motive of that Saint to the poverty problems of
the day. Its members visited the poor without distinction of
creed, and their prime principle, as is evident from their rule,
was not to dole out alms, but to rehabilitate socially and
morally. Soon the Conferences of St. Vincent de Paul were
spread all over the world. In this country, the first Conference
was established in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1845, and the second
in New York City the following year. The 1918 report shows
17,000 members; over 30,000 families visited; nearly 5,000 posi-
tions secured; and $612,000 given out in relief.
The example of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul has, no
doubt, suggested the federation under the bishops of the
Catholic charitable agencies in nearly all of our larger cities.
It may be interesting to study the extent of one such federation
from a few details of the survey of the Catholic Charities of
the Archdiocese of New York, which has just been completed.
This survey revealed twenty-six general and special hospitals;
twenty-four institutions for the welfare of 22,164 children;
six homes for the aged; three institutions for delinquents, and
twenty-two day nurseries. The survey, we are told, was under-
taken "to determine the question of specialization and co-
ordination in institutions and agencies, to prevent overlapping
and duplication, and in the interest of economy and efficiency."
Another idea of Catholic federation may be gleaned by
a study of a few typical dioceses. Here you have the com-
bined resources of all the churches as parish units, federated
and assisted by the power and prestige of a single authority,
thus making the religious and material resources of the
whole diocese mutual aids to social work. Let us first take the
Archdiocese of Chicago. According to the Catholic Directory
of 1920 there are 1,150,000 members distributed in three hun-
dred and fifty-two churches. In the city of Chicago alone
1920.] FEDERATION OF CATHOLIC SOCIETIES 439
there are 107,062 pupils in two hundred and two parochial
grade schools, and in the country sections there are seventy-
nine schools with 17,225 pupils. In this Archdiocese there are
nine orphanages with 2,825 boys and girls; three asylums with
two hundred and sixty-seven infants; three working girls'
homes with three hundred and sixty-five boarders. Then there
are five homes for the aged; eighteen hospitals; two maternity
homes; three Houses of the Good Shepherd; a school for the
deaf and dumb and an insane asylum, not to mention settle-
ment centres, day nurseries, employment bureaus, Braille and
Ephpheta societies, etc. Although many of these organizations
are independently managed and self-supporting, they are, all,
for the sake of efficiency, affiliated with the Associated Catho-
lic Charities, which is directly concerned with outdoor relief,
court activities, and institutional follow-up work. In 1919 the
Associated Catholic Charities spent nearly half a million
dollars.
To take an example from the South and of a smaller
federation, the following statistics of the Archdiocese of New
Orleans may be studied. The Catholic population is 426,338.
There are two hundred and fifty-three priests, two hundred and
fourteen churches, and over 20,000 children attending ninety-
nine parochial schools, twenty-seven of which are for colored
children. There are ten asylums for 1,169 children, three hos-
pitals, three homes for the aged, a House of the Good Shep-
herd, a deaf mute asylum, and a hotel for workingmen. Be-
sides these, there are parish day nurseries, aid societies, etc.
As a last example let us take an industrial diocese in the
northeastern part of the country, Hartford, Connecticut. The
1919 census gave a population of 519,886. There are two hun-
dred and forty-seven churches administered by four hundred
and twenty-five priests; there are eighty-six parochial schools
of 41,615 pupils, taught by 1,642 religious women; there are
four asylums with eight hundred and forty-one orphans, four
day nurseries with a daily attendance of two hundred and
thirty-four; a home for one hundred and seventy-five delin-
quent girls; five hospitals caring for 18,422 patients, two homes
for the aged with three hundred and two inmates.
These general statistics of only three dioceses give us at
least some measure for visualizing the federation of all the
Catholic forces in the United States which, at the end of 1919,
440 FEDERATION OF CATHOLIC SOCIETIES [July,
were as follows : one hundred and two dioceses, 21,019 priests,
16,181 churches, nine hundred and eleven colleges and high
schools, 5,852 parish schools with 1,702,213 children, two hun-
dred and ninety-six orphanages with 45,687 children, and a
total Catholic population of 17,735,553. The great asset of
Catholic federation in social work is its personnel, which for
the most part is made up of women and men who have con-
secrated their lives to the work, asking nothing but an exist-
ence so as to serve. Occasionally this great asset is discounted
by an indifference to newer and better methods of work. In
general, however, the efficiency of Catholic charity is acknowl-
edged even by those of other creeds. No less a person than
Mr. John D. Rockefeller has said that in his opinion Catholic
Charity Organizations make a dollar go farther than any
others. The degree and value of federation in the various
dioceses naturally vary according to the conservative or pro-
gressive policies of those in authority. In Cincinnati the fed-
eration of Catholic Charities and Corrections is very compre-
hensive, and in St. Louis they hold their own diocesan charity
conferences. In Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Bridgeport, and
other places, the coordination of all social agencies and insti-
tutions is practically complete, and they are all under the con-
trol of a Director of Diocesan Charities and his Council.
Federation in itself is not necessarily a synonym for ef-
ficiency, for it may err on the side of system and technique
as well as through the want of them. System and technique
are necessary but, like pure sentiment, which they aim to
avoid, they defeat their own purpose if they become hide-
bound. A happy medium between head and heart, between
science and sentiment would seem to be the highest efficiency
as well as the sanest humanity. Virtus stat in media. Today
we are in danger that our federations, in their zeal for scien-
tific coordination and methods, may lose the "milk of human
kindness" which, after all, is vital to their work.
Catholic social work, to be worthy of the name must, of
course, be religious, but none the less, it must be scientific for
the Church must give the world not only ideals, but must
apply them to problems vast and complex, which demand
scientific treatment. It was this thought, no doubt, which in
1910 inspired the founders of the National Conference of Cath-
olic Charities. While preserving the character of Catholic
1920.] FEDERATION OF CATHOLIC SOCIETIES 441
charity, it aims "to take advantage of the ripest wisdom in re-
lief and preventive work and to serve as a bond of union for
the innumerable charity organizations. It further aims to be
the attorney for the poor in modern society, to present their
point of view and to direct them unto the days when social
justice may secure to them their rights." Next September, the
sixth biennial conference will be held in Washington. The
mustard seed of 1910 has grown into an ample tree in 1920, in
whose shade many earnest social workers find inspiration and
direction for their noble calling.
Independent of Church control, there are innumerable
Catholic societies doing social work of diverse kinds. Fore-
most among these are the Knights of Columbus, who have for
their purpose citizenship and religion and their personal ad-
vancement through sociability and insurance. In recent years
they have engaged largely in social work, having spent during
the War thirty million dollars, and their "Everybody Wel-
come" slogan and its realization at home and abroad, have
attracted the attention of the world. They are now conduct-
ing vocational night schools, employment bureaus, and Amer-
icanization centres as their contribution to our reconstruction.
Established in 1882, on January 1, 1920, they had 1,937 Coun-
cils with 581,983 members, of whom 165,189 were in the in-
sured class. In the year 1919 the Knights of Columbus car-
ried an insurance of one hundred and forty million dollars,
and paid out a million and a half dollars in death benefits.
Another large fraternal organization is the Catholic
Order of Foresters, with assets of nine million dollars, and
carrying an insurance of one hundred and fifty million dollars
among a membership of 160,000. Their Courts use the parish
as a unit and, although the Foresters are specifically a mutual
insurance society, they have other features, promoting social
education and religion. The feminine counterpart of this or-
ganization is the Women's Catholic Order of Foresters, with
assets of four million dollars, and an insurance of seventy-five
millions and a membership of 75,000.
In 1836 the Ancient Order of Hibernians was established
in this country for the purpose of promoting Irish ideals of
citizenship and religion, and in 1894 a Woman's Auxiliary
was added to it. Both of these organizations have in many
places taken up fraternal insurance, with sick and death
442 FEDERATION OF CATHOLIC SOCIETIES [July,
benefits. According to the last annual report, the Hibernians
have a membership of over 100,000, with assets of nearly five
million dollars, and a record of having paid over twenty mil-
lions of dollars in sick and death benefits. The Woman's
Auxiliary has 75,000 members, nearly three million dollars in
assets, and in its short career has paid out over a million
dollars.
Another large woman's organization is the Ladies' Catho-
lic Benevolent Association, with a membership of 150,000 dis-
tributed in 1,300 Lodges, and carrying an insurance of one
hundred and seventeen million dollars during the year 1919.
Then there are the Daughters, the Ladies, the Circle of Isa-
bella, and kindred societies which, though primarily social,
nevertheless engage locally in welfare work suited to their
organization.
Another organization, quite apart from the rest and which
gives promise of valuable social work, is The International
Federation of Catholic Alumnae, founded in 1914 for the pur-
pose of upholding ideals of Catholic womanhood in education,
literature and social work. At the present time they hold
annual meetings, to which representatives of nearly every
Catholic academy and college for women sends delegates.
It is not generally known that in the parishes of the for-
eign born, and especially among the Slavs, there are many
benevolent associations of great value: death and sick benefit
societies; loan and building associations promoting thrift and
housing; dramatic and musical societies furnishing recreation
and entertainment. Some of these organizations are national
in scope, such as the Polish Roman Catholic Union which, in
1919, counted 105,000 members, carrying an insurance of sixty-
five millions and having three million dollars in assets. Nearly
every nationality has similar organizations, thus among the
Germans, it is the Knights of St. George and the Catholic
Knights of America, the latter organization having, in forty-
three years of its existence, paid out twenty-two million dol-
lars in insurance in forty-two States. Among the Italians there
is no nation-wide society, but locally they have many large
groups, such as the L'Unione Siciliana, while the Catholic Slo-
vak Union and the Bohemian Slavonian Benevolent Society,
with assets of a million and a half dollars, have branches in
many parishes.
1920.] FEDERATION OF CATHOLIC SOCIETIES 443
A strictly social reform organization is the German Catho-
lic Central Verein, established in 1855, and whose primary pur-
pose is preventive social work through education and legisla-
tion. This organization was a pioneer "crying in the wilder-
ness" for the consideration of social problems based on sound
ethics and economics. They pleaded and worked for the im-
migrant, for labor legislation and, in general, for community
cooperation. Their work, though silent, has been most effec-
tive. They publish a journal, conduct a central bureau of
information and supply the Church newspapers with weekly
news items of social welfare. At the present time the member-
ship counts 147,000 in twenty State organizations.
Directly connected with the Church are many smaller
parish organizations, but these are sometimes units of larger
diocesan organizations. The most popular of these is the
Holy Name Society. In the Boston archdiocese there are
56,000 members in two hundred parishes, while in the Chicago
archdiocese there are 70,000 members in one hundred and
seventy-one branches. Primarily organized for the spiritual
welfare of its members and to promote respect for the Holy
Name, this Society also engages in social activities adapted
to the needs of the community or parish. Members are "Big
Brothers" to wayward boys, or they visit the jails and hospitals
or supply community recreation; in fact, in His Holy Name
they are ready to help any brother in any way.
Another important parish organization is The Sodality
for both sexes and for all ages, and often there are as many as
ten in a large parish. Intended for the spiritual profit of its
members, its rules also prescribe works of neighborly charity.
In olden times this work expressed itself in alms and in visits
to the poor and sick, but today social service is introduced in
many of its larger groups. This service is shown in homes for
business and working girls, recreational centres, day nurseries,
vacation and Sunday Schools, and "Big Sister" Work. Today
there are nine thousand sodalities in the United States with an
approximate membership of nearly 360,000.
The idea of Catholic federation was carried to a high de-
velopment when twenty years ago the American Federation of
Catholic Societies was organized to affiliate all existing so-
cieties on the principle that, though marching apart, they
could strike together. Leaving each party its autonomy, the
444 FEDERATION OF CATHOLIC SOCIETIES [July,
Federation wished to coordinate their efforts in the interest
of nation-wide movements and often in cooperation with
secular societies and those of other creeds. Thus they pro-
moted woman and child labor legislation, workingmen's com-
pensation laws and moving picture censorship; they opposed
the white slave traffic, the divorce evil, lewd literature, and
the vicious theatre. At the last general meeting, just before
the War, the delegates represented nearly three million mem-
bers in all parts of the Union. The War, however, demanded
a more highly centralized federation, and hence at its outbreak
the Bishops of the Church met in Washington and created the
National Catholic War Council. This Council, while leaving
the welfare work of the soldiers within the camps to the
Knights of Columbus who were already in the field, concen-
trated its efforts in supplying chaplains for the army and
navy, and in conducting hostess and community houses and
service clubs, and in establishing employment bureaus and
hospital social service.
The War Council has recently been succeeded by a
permanent organization called the National Catholic Wel-
fare Council, which was formed in September, 1919, and
which is administered by seven bishops in the name of the
entire hierarchy. The National Catholic Welfare Coun-
cil will operate through several departments: Social Action;
Legislation; Press and Publicity; Education, and Lay Organ-
izations, including a National Council of Women, and a Na-
tional Laymen's Council, all of which are already organized
for work and give rich promises for the weal of Church and
State. Here we hope to have a federation of many millions
dedicated to God and country, a federation that will speak
with one tongue though its members are of many languages;
that will think with one mind though reflecting the ideals of
many lands; that will act with one heart though they are
priest and lay, rich and poor, learned and ignorant truly a
universal, that is a Catholic Federated Society.
THE PASSING OF W. D. HOWELLS.
BY HENRY A. LAPPIN.
|N a day when death has been busy among so
many who had hardly begun to live, men are less
inclined to notice the passage of one whose labors
are complete. But to those for whom his delicate
and delightful art had long been a consolation
and an encouragement, the news that William Dean Howells
was no more, must have been a blow mitigated only by the
characteristic serenity with which he met the end. He had
carried the torch a long way and it burnt brightly to the last.
Born more than eighty-three years ago, he had been con-
tinuously contributing to American letters for over sixty years.
The lengthy procession of his books began with a volume of
verse, Poems of Two Friends, written in collaboration with
John J. Piatt, and a presidential campaign "Life" of Lincoln.
Twelve industrious years of miscellaneous literary work
passed before he published his first novel, Their Wedding
Journey, in 1871. There followed many novels, tales, and
studies and sketches literary, autobiographical, and topo-
graphical of which the best are probably The Rise of Silas
Lapham (1885), A Hazard of New Fortunes (1889), A Boy's
Town (1890), Literary Friends and Acquaintances (1900), and
Certain Delightful English Towns (1908).
Twenty years ago Howells was universally regarded as
the most distinguished living American man of letters. Today
it seems as if his popularity had, in large measure, waned.
The younger reviewers and most of the older no longer
quote him, or write of him deferentially the parole among
them being, apparently, that he was all very well for his time
and taste, but that, in these spacious days of Frank Norris,
Upton Sinclair, and Theodore Dreiser (especially Theodore),
and their austere followers, he is of little account as an artist
and of less as an interpreter of the tumultuous American real-
ity. With a mournful knowingness they allude to him these
alert and profound young men as one who, in sinking (so
they depict him) into the almost academic leisureliness of a
446 THE PASSING OF W. D. HOWELLS [July,
New England editorial chair, had somehow made a great re-
fusal and sunk to the rear and the slaves.
We are still too close to his achievement to appraise ade-
quately either it or the influence which it is likely to exert as
time goes on; but now that William Dean Howells is dead and
his work is ended, it is only a just and natural piety to attempt
a brief notation of his quality, and to suggest a reason for the
neglect into which he has so strangely fallen.
Of mixed Welsh, German and Irish strains, Howells was
born in the small southern Ohio town of Martin's Ferry, and
lived there until his twelfth year when his family moved to
Columbus, the capital of the State. His childhood was happy,
and the faithful loving record of it which he has given the
world in A Boy's Town is not only one of the rare treasures
of American literature, but also a classic in the literature of
boyhood a department of letters where the authentic classics
are few and far between. One reader can never forget the
thrill that came to him years ago when he read of the drown-
ing of the one-legged man who came off in a yawl to board
the steamboat going down the Ohio River to Cincinnati : "The
passenger is a one-legged man, and he is standing in the yawl,
with his crutch under his arm, and his cane in his other hand
. . . when the yawl comes alongside he tries to step aboard the
steamboat, but he misses his footing and slips into the yellow
river and vanishes softly. It is all so smooth and easy and it
is as curious as the little men jumping up from the rain-
drops." The book is full of unforgettable little touches like
that, and of pictures exquisitely colored in the soft and mellow
tints of affectionate reminiscence. "It seems to me," the
glorious second paragraph of A Boy's Town begins, "that my
Boy's Town was a town peculiarly adapted for a boy to be a
boy in. It had a river, the great Miami River which was as
blue as the sky when it was not as yellow as gold; and it had
another river, called the Old River, which was the Miami's
former channel, and which held an island in its sluggish loop ;
the boys called it The Island; and it must have been about the
size of Australia; perhaps it was not so large. Then this town
had a Canal and a Canal-Basin, and a First Lock and a Second
Lock; you could walk out to the First Lock, but the Second
Lock was at the edge of the known world, and when my boy
was very little, the biggest boy had never been beyond it.
1920.] THE PASSING OF W. D. HOWELLS 447
Then it had a Hydraulic, which brought the waters of the Old
River for mill power through the heart of the town, from a
Big Reservoir and a Little Reservoir; the Big Reservoir was
as far off as the Second Lock, and the Hydraulic ran under
mysterious culverts at every street crossing. All these streams
and courses had fish in them at all seasons, and all summer
long they had boys in them and now and then a boy in winter,
when the thin ice of the mild Southern Ohio winter let him
through with his skates. Then there were the Commons; a
wide expanse of open fields where the cows were pastured,
and the boys flew their kites, and ran races, and practised for
their circuses in the tan-bark rings of the real circuses." So
the delectable chronicle begins.
Had Howells never published another line, A Boy's Town
would have immortalized his name. For there is in it both
the wild freshness of childhood and the wistful wisdom of
maturity; it has the charm of sunshine on a June morning
and the pensive beauty of a golden afternoon in the autumn.
The style is simplicity and lucidity itself, and gives one the
sense of absolute reality. It is a pity that readers of today
are so little acquainted with this masterpiece for masterpiece
it is, no lesser word will describe it. A copy from the public
library of one of the largest of our Eastern cities has been
taken out, one notices with regret, only once in the last ten
years. Yet there is surely no one, old or young, whom a read-
ing of A Boy's Town would not gladden and inspire, so full it
is of the gifts of humor, poetry, observation; so clear, and
sweet, and fine. "He had often been foolish" thus "the boy"
meditates as his record draws to its end "and sometimes he
had been wicked; but he had never been such a little fool or
such a little sinner but he had wished for more sense and more
grace. There are some great fools and great sinners who try
to believe in after-life that they are the manlier men because
they have been silly or mischievous boys, but he never believed
that. He is glad to have had a boyhood fully rounded out with
all a boy's interests and pleasures, and he is glad that his lines
were cast in the Boy's Town; but he knows, or believes he
knows, that whatever is good in him now came from what
was good in him then; and he is sure that the town was de-
lightful chiefly because his home in it was happy. The town
was small and the boys there were hemmed in by their inex-
448 THE PASSING OF W. D. HOWELLS [July,
perience and ignorance; but the simple home was large with
vistas that stretched to the ends of the earth and it was serenely
bright with a father's reason and warm with a mother's love."
For a passage more musical and moving we must go to Gold-
smith and Thackeray at their best.
In his characteristically cavalier way Arnold Bennett has
declared that Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi is worth
the collected works of George Eliot. With equal emphasis
and much greater certainty one may affirm that for its pro-
found insight into the heart of a boy, this one book of Howells
is worth more than a carload of Stanley Hall treatises on
adolescence. It is, in fine, a breviary of "the Golden Age."
At Columbus, Howells' father reported the proceedings of
the Ohio legislature for the Ohio State Journal, and the twelve-
year-old boy earned four dollars a week as a compositor on
the same newspaper. During his leisure from the printing
office the youngster, as many years later he recorded, "was
cultivating a sufficiently thankless muse in the imitation of
Pope and Goldsmith, for in me more than in his other children,
my father had divined and encouraged a love of poetry."
After his day's work at the case young Howells read assidu-
ously: Pope, Goldsmith, Washington Irving, Scott, Shake-
speare; the classics, in short, of the English tongue. And he
was imitating them constantly and trying his boyish best to
reproduce their harmonies in prose and verse. He was indeed
giving himself a priceless training for his life-work: such a
training as the masters of all ages have gladly undergone.
Of these literary influences, judging by the fruits of his pen in
after years, that of Goldsmith was easily the most potent and
permanent; Goldsmith, whom Frederic Harrison has finely
called "the Mozart of English prose." More than forty years
later Howells wrote: "[The Vicar of Wakefield] is still for
me one of the most modern novels: that is to say, one of the
best. It is unmistakably good up to a certain point, and then
unmistakably bad, but with always good enough in it to be
forever imperishable. Kindness and gentleness are never out
of fashion; it is these in Goldsmith which make him our con-
temporary, and it is worth the while of any young person
presently intending deathless renown to take a little thought
of them. They are the source of all refinement and I do not
beb'eve the best art in any kind exists without them. The
1920.] THE PASSING OF W. D. HOWELLS 449
style is the man, and he cannot hide himself in any garb of
words so that we shall not know somehow what manner of
man he is within it; his speech betrayeth him, not only as to
his country and his race, but more subtly yet as to his heart,
and the loves and hates of his heart. As to Goldsmith I do not
think that a man of harsh and arrogant nature, of worldly and
selfish soul, could ever have written his style, and I do think
that, in far greater measure than criticism has recognized,
his spiritual quality, his essential friendliness, expressed itself
in the literary beauty that wins the heart as well as takes the
fancy in his work." A wise and beautiful criticism which
could with perfect propriety and truthfulness be applied to
the writings of Howells himself.
John J. Piatt "the truest poet of our Middle West," as
he has been called was in those days also working as a
printer in the composing-room of the Ohio State Journal. It
was in a volume of verse written in collaboration with him
that Howells first, in book form, made his bow to the public.
The opportunity of his life came when, through the friendly
offices of Lincoln's young secretaries, Nicolay and Hay, Howells
was offered the American consulship at Venice. Nicolay and
his colleague were, as young Westerners, much interested in a
young Westerner of distinct literary promise, and they were
generous enough to see to it that the salary of Venetian Consul
was doubled for Howells. Perhaps the campaign biography of
Lincoln, which Howells had written not so long before this,
had helped him to this pleasant piece of preferment. Howells'
devotion to Lincoln was life-long and ardent. There is a
wonderful passage in his Literary Friends and Acquaintances
enshrining a memorable vignette of the great President as the
future novelist saw him for the second time just after the
Venetian appointment had been made: ". . . as I left my
friends I met him in the corridor without, and he looked at
the space I was part of with his ineffably melancholy eyes,
without knowing that I was the indistinguishable person in
whose 'integrity and abilities he had reposed such special con-
fidence' as to have appointed him Consul for Venice and the
ports of the Lombardo, Venetian Kingdom, though he might
have recognized the terms of my Commission if I had reminded
him of them. I faltered a moment in my longing to address
him, and then I decided that everyone who forebore to speak
VOL. cx:. 29
450 THE PASSING OF W. D. HOWELLS [July,
needlessly to him, or to shake his hand, did him a kindness;
and I wish I could be as sure of the wisdom of all my past
behavior as I am of that piece of it. He walked up to the
water-cooler that stood in the corner, and drew himself a full
goblet from it, which he poured down his throat with a back-
ward tilt of his head, and then went wearily within doors.
The whole affair, so simple, has always remained one of a
certain pathos in my memory, and I would rather have seen
Lincoln in that unconscious moment than on some statelier
occasion."
His four years of consular life Howells turned to exquisite
use in a book of Venetian studies, first issued to the public
in the form of letters to The Boston Advertiser; and while in
Venice he had helpful and friendly relations with the great
American historian, John Lothrop Motley, the United States
Minister at Vienna and his immediate superior in the diplo-
matic service. Upon his return from Italy, Howells became an
editorial writer on the New York Nation (1865-6). Going
thence to The Atlantic Monthly, he was appointed assistant
editor of the latter periodical and, after six years of distin-
guished service, editor-in-chief, a post he retained until 1881.
From The Atlantic Monthly he went, as editorial contributor,
to Harper's Magazine, and subsequently, for a short time,
edited The Cosmopolitan Magazine, before finally associating
himself again with Harper's this time as regular contributor
of the "Editor's Easy Chair" section.
In all this long period of editorial labors scarcely a year
passed without the publication of a book from Howells' pen.
Several times during his journalistic career he was offered and
refused the opportunity of becoming a professor of English
literature at Yale, Harvard, and John Hopkins successively.
He was given the honorary master's degree by Yale and Har-
vard, and, in later years, the honorary doctorate by Yale, Ox-
ford, and Columbia. In 1909 he was elected President of
the American Academy of Arts and Letters. And five years
ago the National Institute of Arts and Letters conferred its
Gold Medal upon him for distinguished work in fiction.
The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) is surely Howells' finest
novel. There are not ten finer novels in the whole range of
English literature, and there is certainly no greater American
novel. Its construction is superb and its style is of an incom-
1920.] THE PASSING OF W. D. HOWELLS 451
parable felicity. The nineteenth century Samuel Butler re-
marks in one of his Notebooks that "a man's style should be
like his clothes, neat, well-cut, and such as not to call any
attention to him at all." Howells' style is of the best because
so naturally does he write that no effort is apparent. He says
everything he has to say in the most succinct and perspicuous
way; and the result is that for the purest and simplest speech
of modern fiction one must read what he has written. Light,
color, and music are here joined with a crystalline clearness.
In this his master, as we have seen, is Goldsmith, a master to
whom he never tires of rendering his gratitude.
In The Rise of Silas Lapham, as in practically all his
novels, Howells has endeavored to present a transcript of the
ordinary realities of ordinary life. His books, it is true, abound
in a diversity of incident, interest, and character, but in all of
them life is seen steadily and whole and clear, and not in its
tragic interludes only, nor only in its episodic passions. There
are scenes in Howells as, for example, the great moment in
The Rise of Silas Lapham when Irene, who has just learned
that Corey's love was all for her sister, Penelope, and that for
herself he had never cared at all, gives to Penelope her little
trinkets and the newspaper clipping about the Texas ranch
where Corey had been, and the pine-shaving tied with ribbon
which are as tense and as tremendous as any in modern
fiction. In a different way, but not less perfect, is the epochal
dinner in the fourteenth chapter of Silas Lapham at which
Silas takes too much liquor and afterward reveals himself to
the pained and astounded Brahmins. The opening, too, of
this novel could not well be more dexterous. It is such
moments as these that definitely and incontestably assign the
author his place among the great story-tellers of the world.
If, again, a test of a novelists' greatness be his power
to interpret women, Howells has hardly an equal in fiction
written in English. The analysis of Irene Lapham is a locus
classicus to the student of the art of the novel. Not a whit less
thoroughly revealing is his incisive, if much slighter, portrait
of Mrs. Corey. But it is in his revelation of American family
life that Howells' genius is most palpably of the highest. He
conveys perfectly the group-emotions, so to speak, of the Lap-
hams and convinces us fully of their reality and representa-
tiveness. Here also it is extremely difficult to find a piece of
452 THE PASSING OF W. D. HOW ELLS [July,
work by another novelist which will bear comparison. The
best I can think of at the moment is the Orgreave family in
Arnold Bennett's Clayhanger trilogy, but that picture has
neither the rich simplicity nor the unity of the other.
There is no novelist more truly American in his blood
and bones. It may be that there are some aspects of Amer-
ican life even vital aspects upon which Howells never bent
his gaze. Life in the United States has undoubtedly become a
more passionate and a more complex affair since the later
eighties, when Howells was writing his best novels. But within
his clearly marked limits, and in the special fields in which his
finest work was done, he had neither superior nor equal.
Henry James' range is wider, but he goes no deeper, and we
may be sure that, ultimately, Howells' fame will abide no whit
less securely.
An English critic has recently remarked that, at the pres-
ent moment, "in the world of letters everything is a little up
in the air, volatile and uncrystallized. It is a world of rejec-
tions and velleities. . ." So, perhaps, after all it is not greatly
to be wondered at that an artist like Howells should suffer a
considerable measure of neglect in such a time. One has long
learned to distrust the finality of contemporary judgments in
letters. Like the individuals who exist in it, an age varies in
its moods, and the variations affect its literary tastes. A tem-
porary unpopularity or neglect of an author is far from being
a convincing proof of his demerit. Professor T. G. Tucker has
observed, with his accustomed felicity, that "an author may
be right for his own age, but for that alone; he may be wrong
for his own age, but right for all time." The trail of the time-
spirit is over most of the work done in letters today; it is over
our Tendenz-Novellen, our fictional studies in the psycholog-
ical picaresque, our sociological narrative poems, our Freud-
ian "lyrics of passion," our ineffably silly "modern drama."
There is just about as much likelihood of a reader of, say, the
year 2020, attempting the perusal of Joan and Peter or Saints'
Progress as there is of a reader of today essaying Beckford's
Vathek or Mark Lewis' Tales of Wonders.
If, as Bacon believed and declared, it be the province of
literature to impart "morality, magnanimity, and delectation"
there can be little doubt that the writings of William Dean
Howells will return to popularity again. Ruskin once said
1920.] THE PASSING OF W. D. HOWELLS 453
that all good works of art aimed either at stating a true thing
or adorning a serviceable thing. In the light of this canon
most of the fiction of the hour is neither true nor serviceable,
whatever may have been the author's intent. One day Bos-
well and Johnson were discussing Rousseau's La Nouvelle
Heloise, and Boswell broke in: "I don't deny, sir, that his
novel may, perhaps, do harm, but I cannot think his intention
was bad." "Sir," thundered the Doctor, "that will not do.
We cannot prove any man's intention to be bad. You may
shoot a man through the head and say you intended to miss
him, but the judge will order you to be hanged."
Lastly, Howells is in the great tradition of English writing,
and, for the most part, those who decry him are followers of
"misbegotten, strange, new gods." That tradition has no valid-
ity for most of the younger generation of writers and critics.
There was a time in our literary history when a large public
outside the United States looked eagerly for the successive
products of American pens. The age of the giants is gone,
and Lowell, Holmes, Emerson, Hawthorne, and the great
"Harvard Intellectuals," as Leon Kellner has called them,
gather dust upon the shelves of our public libraries. Since
they died the prestige of American letters has suffered a sad
decline. It was one of William Dean Howells' special distinc-
tions that he was an exponent and representative, and, in some
sort, a continuator of that noble tradition, taking the torch
from those august hands. The note of those great writers was
primarily a classic simplicity and strength. Of this note
Howells was not without his share, and though the present
outlook be dark enough, it is difficult not to believe that one
day time will pay all his arrears in full.
As for the man himself, he was, as Mackail once said of
Verrall, "a living example of how greatly the art of letters may
sustain and reenforce the art of living, and how literature is
not a region abstract and apart, but a real thing, the image
and interpretation of human life."
CATHOLIC LITERATURE AS A WORLD-FORCE.
BY GEORGE N. SHUSTER.
HEN Christopher Columbus planted the banner of
Castile upon the island of San Salvador, Europe
entered America. In view of what various ad-
venturers picturesquely removed from the Con-
tinent, and of what millions of settlers have since
taken up permanently, the greatest thing which Europe
brought has generally been forgotten the Christian tradition.
Columbus symbolized centuries of unified faith and action,
Saints and Kings, Christian art and architecture, the popular
idealism of the Crusades and the no less popular realism of
education. On the epoch-making day when Isabella's ships
were moored in that unknown offing, Rabelais was a child,
Michelangelo a young man, and Sir Thomas More a promis-
ing lawyer. Within the next century Spain rang with the
laughter of Cervantes and shone with the majestic fantasies
of Calderon and La Vega, while her great rival, Britain,
mingled the uproar of religious upheaval with the Elizabethan
drama. Columbus was born amid the fruits of the Christian
victory over paganism, and the extension of that victory was
at least as much his purpose as finding the court and wealth
of Tartary. Yet, despite these facts and despite the con-
tinuous influx of Catholics into America, we have almost for-
gotten the very existence of the great tradition. Today, when
the heirs of Columbus seem almost as near paganism as he
was from it, when the forces of propagandizing art ride over
us almost as did the Moslem armies in Granada, we are be-
ginning to recall, vaguely, that we are at the same time more
ancient and more modern than the pagans.
This memory will, in time, become a transcendent thing.
It has hitherto been impossible that American Catholics should
figure largely in the writing and speech-making public; most
of us even now have not been in America long enough to feel
at home. Nor is it strange that our best art should be the
legacy of converts Brownson, Joyce Kilmer, Father Tabb and
Marion Crawford. But lately we have done a startlingly mag-
1920.] CATHOLIC LITERATURE A WORLD-FORCE 455
nificent thing: we grew collectively angry and collectively in-
spired. We proclaimed the Reconstruction Programme and
proved to the world that we had not forgotten our free descent
from Christian men. I think that the future historian of
American Catholicism, looking back over decades of splendid
effort, will mark this as a critical place in our story; for here
we broke the fast of silence.
From Columbus to post-bellum obligations is a long way,
but in both of these instances there is shown clearly the im-
portance of considering the Church as a world-force. If there
is any difference of motive, it is simply that the discoverer was
more insistent upon faith, while the bishops have emphasized
especially justice and charity. Now an outstanding charac-
teristic of missionary Catholicism is its use of art. Building
spread from Byzantium to Italy and thence to France and
Britain; and northward of the farthest Roman outpost in Ger-
many there arose one of the most majestic cathedrals in the
world. The literary handicraft of Christendom became the
common property of all, was changed to meet the requirements
of successive owners. The mediaeval schools seem almost to
have been portable schools, and the Doctors appeared, as if
by magic, in places extraordinarily remote. Indeed, the
Church had come into the world with no place to lay its head,
and at the time of the American discovery men felt a real urge
to seek a new place. All of this belongs to the far past, but
it is invaluable. With so little national tradition to look back
upon, American Catholicism can gather stanch support from
the idea of the continuity of the Christian tradition. Cardinal
Newman said that whatever the future might bring, the liter-
ature of the English would have been Protestant. Neverthe-
less, it may justly be added that whatever the present is doing,
the literature of the world has been Catholic. And literature
in this sense is what we wish to consider.
It is scarcely necessary to say anything about the impor-
tance of creating a body of Christian writing in America: the
subject has been often and ably discussed. The old connection
between philosophy and art has, however, become so much
more intimate during the past fifty years that a Catholic re-
vival is not only desirable but almost indispensable. Hand-
books on the English literature of the period present the
thought of Hardy, Butler, Galsworthy, and George Moore, with
456 CATHOLIC LITERATURE A WORLD-FORCE [July,
more than relative partisanship. So far as contemporary
American writing is a matter of intellectual concern, we must
deal, leaving faddists out of consideration, with powerful
names like Dreiser and Masters. The ancient national malady
of sentimentalism, rampant even where it over-stressed indi-
viduality and demolished "shams," has turned into a worse
disease. This weird time of spent nerves, hectic intolerance,
with its comic mixture of Spiritism with no spirits, vitiates all
art with its unraveled thinking. Indeed, the torment of the
day, the myriad shifting opinions, the downfall of the national
moral creed, have left upon literature the mark of a queer
attempt at perpetual motion.
More than ever before, America needs communal effort,
and in the face of this relentless demand, nothing could be
more appalling than the present disintegration of intelligence.
Conservatives, liberals and radicals, even those among them
who are actuated by the best motives, succeed only in stirring
up the dust of conflicting theories. These range from Pascal's
mandate to remain tranquilly seated within a room, to a proc-
lamation of camping on the market square; and none are
really trusted. What a contrast to the unity of the Christian
ideal! If one were a rationalist one could say, at least, that
the era of faith wrought miracles because it believed in mir-
acles, while the moderns accomplish nothing because they be-
lieve in nothing.
The singleness and beauty of Christian art are so much
the spontaneous developments of traditional philosophy that
their absence would be inexplicable. Centuries of penetrating
study of dogmatic truth, the endless battles involved in de-
fending successfully the diverse tenets of the Faith, resulted in
the erection of a monumental house of reason. The popular
way of putting its relation to art has been to say that Dante
was the disciple of St. Thomas. Knowing life steadily and
wholly the great artists were not deluded into painting it like
something else. But, though they could grow dark with the
darkness of hell, they were saved from pessimism by remem-
bering the connection between laughter and love. Because the
latter had an eternal foundation, it could be danced upon, like
a floor; and that dance was laughter. The high merriment of
the Catholic time ran through a literature of folk-lore that is
now practically lost: enough remains of it, however, to show
15)20.] CATHOLIC LITERATURE A WORLD-FORCE 457
that this laughter was rational in the sense of being shrewdly
critical. No saner, gentler satire has ever been leveled at the
foibles of life than that of the popular story of Italy and
France. In their gracious time the fairies taught sociology
and politics, and of them Pascal was doubtless thinking when
he wrote that all the good rules had been laid down. This
reasonable laughter was crystallized in Reynard the Fox, the
songs of the troubadours, and Chaucer; it was scintillant still
in Rabelais and Shakespeare.
The house of reason, however, was also the home of faith.
The same skill which touched everyday utensils and vast
cathedrals alike with the wand of imperishable beauty, set
the common adventures and the highest hopes of life to color-
ful rhythms. That the ideal can be realized in the material,
that the soul can walk with the flesh to the throne of God, was
a truth so vividly felt that it necessitated the surprising debate
on whether angels have bodies. The success of this idealism
in art is attested to primarily by the Latin hymns and their
setting in irresistible music. It is evident also from the great
battle songs, like the Chanson de Roland, with their rhythms
of naked swords a-clash; from the stories of love and honor,
so splendidly typified in the tale of Arthur and his knights;
and finally, from the fervid, unfettered symbolism of Dante.
It was a literature, an art, which belonged unequivocally to
everybody and to which all, apparently, were able to contrib-
ute; there was consequently very little egoism and less philis-
tinism, shortcomings to thank Heaven for. It may be that the
Greeks had developed a more perfect art than that of the
mediaeval time, but the Christian masters achieved something
more wonderful even than art, something which no previous
or subsequent age has even rivaled. They succeeded in the
spiritualization of Democracy.
Inheriting as they did such wealth, it would have been
strange indeed if post-Reformation Catholics had failed ut-
terly at the work of creation. However, though the rise of the
nation was crowned by the miracle of St. Jeanne d'Arc, racial
differences widened, and religious chaos resulted ultimately
in the suppression of the people, so that the fortunes of litera-
ture came to depend on wealthy circles or individual courts.
There was, it is true, an age of gold in Spain; the magnificent
oratory of the French bishops roused the kings and nobles of
458 CATHOLIC LITERATURE A WORLD-FORCE [July,
the Court, and there was in the same country a great attempt
to Christianize the pagan drama. In England, after the final
sublime jest of Sir Thomas More, there appeared for a long
while nothing distinctly Catholic except the poetry of Cra-
shaw, though the Shakespearean drama is packed with
memories of the olden time.
When, however, the battles for the salvation of the bour-
geoisie had all been fought, when the first age of reason died
out into the nineteenth century, there opened simultaneously
with the giant battle for materialism a struggle for Christian
art. It is vital, I think, for us who of necessity have been able
to share but little in that conflict, to follow closely what was
done. True, literature everywhere in the world, though least
noticeably in America, became provincial in the sense that it
became somewhat rigidly national. Commerce, political am-
bition, a dozen other things, had definitely turned the natural
barriers between peoples into fortresses, which were armed.
Nevertheless, in each case Catholicism preserved some of the
marks of the ancient unifying tradition, and the result, how-
ever much neglected now, may sometime come to be consid-
ered the only world-literature of the century. There is room
here only for a summary of a small part of the work that was
done; nevertheless, it will serve to show that modern Chris-
tian art has not forgotten the earnest symbolism of the ball
and the cross.
In France, the course of the nineteenth century was
marked by a surprising number of literary conversions. With
the exception of a few powerful individuals like Ozanam and
Barbey d'Aurevilly, the men who most emphatically re-stated
the Christian tradition had at some time in their lives been
agnostics. Now this situation was of obvious value: for while
no fully developed Catholic artist went over definitely to na-
turalism, many famous naturalists dedicated their powers to
the ideals of the Church. Over the whole country, however,
there hung a cloak of sadness; it was a time of aesthetic dark-
ness. This is manifest from Chateaubriand's Genie du Chris-
tianisme as well as from La Cathedrale, the book in which
Huysmans later continued the rediscovery of mediaeval beauty.
The Catholic poetry of the time, Lamartine, Hugo (Christian
always in his verse) and Mistral, has somehow an elegiac char-
acter. Criticism was mordant and rather pessimistic as writ-
1920.] CATHOLIC LITERATURE A WORLD-FORCE 459
ten by the belligerent Veuillot and de Maistre, but lofty and
mystic in the hands of Ernest Hello and Teodor de Wyzewa.
The greatest pulpit orator of the period, Lacordaire, was both
brilliantly enthusiastic and beautifully sad. Nevertheless,
when the French novel had finally left the schools of natural-
ism and skeptic realism, it came to live joyously sub specie
leternitatis. Vivified once more with popular dreams, the
peasant appeared in Bazin, the Parisian in Bourget, and the
provincial in Bordeaux, while a host of other writers did as
much for other types. Poetry in France has taken on a color
both mystic and wonderful, and the art of Francis Jammes
and Paul Claudel is worthy of its high ancestry. Still, in the
face of this miracle of transfiguration, we generally associate
French literature with Zola and de Maupassant!
Modern Catholic expression in England really began with
the Oxford Movement, and the great stream of healing and
clarifying prose which originated with Newman and Ward
has been added to magnificently even to our day. Neverthe-
less, the two great figures who have most genuinely modern-
ized the mediaeval tradition were quite independent of Ox-
ford. The poetry of Francis Thompson and Coventry Pat-
more is the nineteenth century's most intimate song of life.
Essentially they stood very close together, and one may connect
them, perhaps, by saying that whereas Thompson read him-
self by the light of God, Patmore read God by the light of him-
self. That there were many others must never be forgotten.
Around the central idea of medievalism there has formed
today a glorious crusade, whose goal may truly be called a
Grail. Emphasizing the freedom and dignity of man and
trusting steadfastly in the interest of heaven, the Meynells,
the Chestertons, and Hilaire Belloc have fought breathlessly
and exultantly a whole civilization. In addition, the priestly
ofiices of Monsignor Benson, Canon Sheehan, and John Ays-
cough have not forbidden the creation of the first strongly
Catholic fiction in English.
Had Germany accomplished nothing more than the pres-
ervation of the great Passion Play at Oberammergau, its
service to the Catholic tradition would, indeed, have been
large. But in addition to a very diligent religious scholarship
and an energetic political policy, German Catholics have given
the world a poetry as priceless as old wine. The most cursory
460 CATHOLIC LITERATURE A WORLD-FORCE [July,
glance will take in two names of power Father William
Weber and Droeste-Hulsdorff. The epic poems of the former
and the sensitive lyrics of the latter, deeply religious and
virile, are the literary descendants of the art of Diirer and
Holbein. There have also been story-tellers, essayists and
dramatists, but without doubt the greatest Catholic novelist to
write in German is the Austrian noblewoman, Enrica von
Handel-Mazzetti. Her books deal with the stern religious con-
flicts of yore, with the spiritual quests of today, and above all
with the universal human heart. They glow with the strong
loves of the ordinary soul : the hopes and struggles of the poor
throughout the Christian ages. Jesse and Maria, her most
powerful novel, is a masterpiece which the American public
will sincerely welcome when once the agony of the recent
War has been soothed.
Nowhere in the world has the intellectual conflict been
fiercer than in Italy, and only of late has anything like con-
certed Catholic action been developed. There exists now an
idealistic, energetic leadership conscious of its supremely
beautiful tradition and firm in its attitude toward the present.
Antonio Fogazzaro (despite his momentary aberration) is a
novelist for whom the world is alive, and his greatest story,
the political novel, Daniel Cortis, is a masterly study of Chris-
tian life. Nor has there come out of the War a book of deeper
spiritual insight than the Diary of Giosue Borsi. From Spain,
too, from Belgium, from Poland, and in spite of all her suffer-
ing, from Ireland, the voice of the Christian tradition speaks
clearly and firmly. Though almost no government is Catho-
lic, though education has long been used against the Church
and the magic word of "progress" invoked to make her vanish,
the ancient creed and its ideals march like jovial veterans to
the battle for the world. Though the future be hard and un-
certain, the virtues which have made of the past a legend
of glorious struggle will stand undaunted.
In comparison with Europe, from which after all we take
descent, American Catholicism has only a meagre literary
store to offer. The reasons are obvious and have already been
stated. This is, however, no warrant for being blind to the
real things accomplished. Our poetry is the expression of
magnificent vision: Joyce Kilmer died, as he had lived, for
the free civilization which is almost inseparable from Chris-
1920.] CAT1&LIC LITERATURE A WORLD-FORCE 461
tianity; the little verse-gifts of Father Tabb have been pre-
sented to the whole world; in songs of surprising universality
Madison Cawein interpreted the nature-life of his country.
There are other poets, and there are story-tellers, journalists
and students: if these have not developed a high and varied
art, they have at least cleared the way for a free future. We
have discovered our existence and the times in which we
exist. It is to be hoped that we shall produce less doggerel,
less namby-pamby fiction, and above all, less second-rate in-
formation. For American Catholicism today is charged with
enthusiasm for its high mission, with a fervent readiness to co-
operate, and with a consciousness of the sublime conflict
which, though interminable, is always to be won.
Catholic literature, then, is a world force, not to be laid
aside like a trophy, but to be wielded like a sword. Author-
ship is nothing but the transmissal of the craft from master
to apprentice, and just now we are learning. The great spirits
of the past, whose swords still gleam undimmed, whose armor
has lost none of its brightness, and whose deeds are intimately
woven with the story of the Christian tradition, can teach us
the art that we must learn. Nor have they lost any of their
effectiveness in dealing with popular needs and aspirations.
The most definite and relentless propaganda afoot today is
materialistic literature. American life for the past fifty years
has been stirred by a subtle shifting of standards, and the
present general pallor of our national will is due to the hag-
gard vision of nowhere. The tables of the Puritan law have
been turned to the wall; it is on the other side that we must
rewrite the ancient hopes.
For all of these reasons it is most apparent that Catholic
education and enterprise should combine in the effective dis-
tribution of that literature which is our very own, though it
may come from the ends of the earth. Whatever the univer-
sities may or may not be doing, whatever isolated lecturers
are achieving, a widespread enthusiasm and a well-grounded
popular appreciation are the only things which can make of
literature the tremendous power for good that it once was.
Not only should the ancient masterpieces be attractively re-
dressed as Mr. Scott-Montcrieff has lately done in the case
of the Song of Roland but they should be made appealing by
the best and most illuminative scholarship at our disposal.
462 CATHOLIC LITERATURE A WORLD-FORCE [July,
The most interesting venture, however, would be a uniform
edition of what is best in the modern Catholic literature of all
lands. These books must be carefully translated when neces-
sary, and prefaced, perhaps, with able comment. Similar en-
terprise in literature that is frankly pagan has met with start-
ling success, and there is no plausible ground for belief that
we should fail.
The present life of American Catholicism is an awakening
of intense significance. That sense of remoteness from the
centres of religious activity which once hampered us is pass-
ing away. In a sincere, almost mystical, manner the War
aroused us to an understanding of the continuity of the Chris-
tian tradition. We are concerned intimately with the life of
the Faith throughout the world, just as we realize the awful
meaning of civilization. Whether we like it or not, the war
for Christendom is now a world-war, and though literature
and art seem to many of us only trifles, we know at last that
they are mighty trifles, like grenades. The attempt to gather
together and spread the master works of Christian literature
will bring us together with our brethren, shoulder against
shoulder, in the light and glory of the cause of God and man.
We shall find what Columbus sought and failed to find the
cross of Christ on the shores of unknown lands.
SIR THOMAS MORE, SAINT AND HUMORIST.
BY JAMES J. DALY, S.J.
\
HE great," says Emerson in his pontifical way,
"will not condescend to take anything seriously:
all must be as gay as the song of a canary though
it were the building of cities or the eradication
of old and foolish churches and nations which
have cumbered the earth long thousands of years." Still,
when he wishes to illustrate this doctrine by example, the
only one in all Christendom to occur to him is Thomas More,
who literally laid down his life to prevent an old Church from
being eradicated and supplanted by a new one. Which of
those two Churches is foolish, the old one or the new, is a
question which may be confidently left for sure solution to
the processes of time. The entire paragraph, the brightest in
the essay on "Heroism," leaves a strong impression of having
been written with Sir Thomas More in mind. "That which
takes my fancy most in the heroic class is the good-humor and
hilarity they exhibit. It is a height to which common duty can
very well attain, to suffer and to dare with solemnity. But
these rare souls set opinion, success, and life at so cheap a
rate that they will not soothe their enemies by petitions, or
the show of sorrow, but wear their habitual greatness." His
intuition, so often more reliable than his staccato play of
intellect, brings the "sage of Concord" very close to a great
spiritual truth when he goes on to say that, if we could see the
whole race assembled together, the true heroes of the race
would appear "like little children frolicking together, though
to the eyes of mankind at large they wear a stately and solemn
garb of works and influence."
The only portion of mankind which, as a class, answers to
this description are the saints. It was from the saints accord-
ingly that Emerson, with some reluctance we may suppose,
selected his type of debonair and smiling hero. Blessed Tho-
mas More was a leading statesman and politician; the first
great writer of English prose; a classicist of European reputa-
tion; a philosopher, a theologian, an original thinker, a man
464 SIR THOMAS MORE, SAINT AND HUMORIST [July,
of affairs, an eloquent pleader, a skillful parliamentarian, an
honest and learned judge, a smooth and astute ambassador,
and the principal adviser of a powerful monarch. It sounds
preposterously fortunate. But there it stands in history with
more than the usual explicitness and corroboration.
Indeed, on the evidence this is, if anything, an incomplete
catalogue of the greatness of the immediate successor to that
Wolsey, "who once trod the ways of glory." Nevertheless, we
should look for Sir Thomas More in the "nurseries of heaven."
His judicial ermine and gold chains and seals of office, the
royal patronage and the homage of the Commons, the respect-
ful and almost affectionate deference of scholars and nobles,
could not induce him to take the world seriously. He pro-
ceeded on his shining way with the quizzical and detached and
amused air of a thoughtful stranger in Broadway or the
Strand, or rather like a sprightly child sent out into the coun-
try for a maying, with a keen relish for the beautiful things
of life, conditioned, of course, in the expectation of a lasting
City at nightfall. He glances athwart his generation like a
happy and exotic being from some superior planet. His shy
and subtle aloofness from the world, whose history he was
making, marked him out for official beatification more surely
than his martyrdom. His mask of gentle laughter still baffles
the curious scrutiny of eyes that are worldly.
It is fascinating to observe how his jests multiplied with
his misfortunes, as if these were your true material for
comedy. When his greatness fell about him he sat among the
ruins, shaking with a quiet merriment, as if the greatest joke
in life had at last been perpetrated. The clouds gathering so
darkly over him served no other purpose than to display the
sheet-lightning of his humor. Wolsey in a similar, though less
serious, situation became for all time a tragic figure. Neither
history nor legend has been able to employ the properties of
tragedy in the last act of Sir Thomas More's life. He whistled
tragedy down all the winds with a fine and genuine uncon-
cern. He refused to live up to the traditions of prosperity in
swift collapse, of virtue in bondage and misery, of merit
trampled under foot. The spectacle which he exhibits excites
no pity nor terror. In Aristotle's phrase, it purifies the heart,
indeed; but with feelings of serenest joy.
Only once do tears leap to our eyes : it is when his beloved
1920.] SIR THOMAS MORE, SAINT AND HUMORIST 465
daughter, Meg, meets him on the Thames landing at the Tower,
just after sentence of death has been passed upon him, and
breaks her way through the spectators and the soldiers to fling
herself upon him with passionate tears, and, after pitiful
hands have loosed her grasp of him, tears herself away from
those who would hold her and rushes back to embrace him
again and again for the last time. The night before his execu-
tion her father wrote Meg a letter. They had long months
before deprived him of writing material, and he had been
using coal for pen and ink, finding his paper where he might.
He had assured Meg that pecks of coal could not suffice to
express his love for her, and now in this last letter he tells
her that he never loved her so much as on that day, a week
ago, when she clung to him and kissed him on the Tower-
wharf.
This lovely human touch was necessary to complete the
true impression of his humor and to save it from the suspicion
of a proud disdain, thoughtless, as well as heartless, of the
claims of life. For, it must be admitted, his high spirits, which
seemed to rise with the increasing imminence of death, almost
disconcert a strict sense of the proprieties. A woman in the
crowd that surged about him on his progress to the place of
execution, cried to him about some papers she had intrusted
to his keeping when he was Lord High Chancellor. "My good
woman, allow me half an hour and his gracious majesty, our
good King, will relieve me of all responsibility for your
papers." He bade the friendly lieutenant of the Tower to be
of good cheer, for they would all "be merry" together in
heaven. When the scaffold was reached he showed droll alarm
at its poor construction and tested the insecure steps leading
up to it. He begged the lieutenant very gravely to help him
up those crazy stairs. "As for my coming down," he said, "let
me shift for myself." How could the woe-begone lieutenant
remain serious? The apparatus and customary trappings of
tragedy were made ridiculous.
On mounting the scaffold Sir Thomas asked the assembled
people to pray for him and told them simply and briefly that
he died in and for the holy Catholic Church. He then called
the attention of the axe-man to the shortness of his neck,
urging him to be careful of his professional credit. After he
had laid his head upon the block he stopped proceedings
VOL. cxi. 30
466 SIR THOMAS MORE, SAINT AND HUMORIST [July,
for a moment or two that he might dispose his beard safely
from the axe, since, he said, it was not accused of treason.
The Protestant bishop, Burnet, an historian of the Reform-
ation, was shocked at what he was pleased to consider the
levity of Sir Thomas on this momentous occasion. It is true,
most of us do well "to suffer and to dare with solemnity."
When death confronts us we cannot hope, and perhaps ought
not to desire, to be in a mood for jesting, unless we have a
record like Sir Thomas' behind us. Compunction and fear
are the proper and familiar sentiments of a Christian living
and dying; and the most jaundiced critic of Sir Thomas More
dare not hint that he ever yielded to the easy refreshment of
pagan anodynes such as smug self-complacence, arbitrary op-
timism, and the illusions of a presumptuous hope. The hero
and the ascetic are not often the gentle practitioners of a play-
ful and charming humor. Human nature has to be nagged
into decency: it has to be whipped with scorpions into the
front line of saints and heroes; and it becomes grim under the
discipline. The bright and warm comforts are so much the
ordinary conditions of genial humor that when a saint smiles
without self-consciousness, the remarkable phenomenon seems
to demand some sort of explanation.
Has anyone noted that Coleridge's theory of humor ap-
pears to promise some light which will help us to understand
how seriousness and merriment, if carried to their logical
limits, meet at a common point? "There is always," he says,
"in a genuine humor an acknowledgment of the hollowness
and farce of the world, and its disproportion to the god-like
within us." And he proceeds to make the essence of humor
to consist "in a certain reference to the general and the uni-
versal, by which the finite great is brought into identity with
the little, or the little with the finite great, so as to make both
nothing in comparison with the infinite. The little is made
great, and the great little, in order to destroy both; because
all is equal in contrast with the infinite." Precisely; to Sir
Thomas his beard was of as much importance as his head,
or, if you wish to put it differently, his head was of as small
importance as his beard, because he was thinking of the In-
finite.
If Coleridge's analysis of humor has anything in it, one
can perhaps see how it may be possible to be a humorist with-
1920.] SIR THOMAS MORE, SAINT AND HUMORIST 467
out being a saint; but it is not easy to see how anyone can be a
saint without being a humorist. It would seem that solid and
sober persons who are dismayed at the quips and quirks of
the saints are not what you might call good psychologists of
either sanctity or humor.
It comes to this: if serious people are tempted to fling up
their hands at the casual air with which saints trifle with mis-
fortune, it is only because serious people are not serious
enough. Take, for instance, Bishop Burnet. It is very prob-
able that he did not wear a hair-shirt most of his life, nor get
up every morning at two o'clock to spend most of the time in
prayer and the rest in study till seven o'clock Mass. Thomas
More did these things and many other hard things like them,
which it is scarcely an injustice to the bishop to surmise that
he never dreamed of doing. It is not, therefore, idle or para-
doxical to conclude that Sir Thomas was the more serious
man. If anyone is frivolous, it must be the worthy bishop who
shakes his head sadly over Sir Thomas' willful sport with the
mournful proprieties of a melancholy occasion. It has to be
admitted in the bishop's favor that nearly all of Sir Thomas'
world shook their sadly puzzled heads over him. You could
never tell, say contemporaries, whether he was fooling or in
earnest. Imagine their bewilderment when they beheld him
cracking jokes in an imprisonment which he need not endure
and on a scaffold which he need not have mounted, if he would
only take a trifle of an oath which practically all England had
swallowed without winking. Outward appearances pro-
claimed him a farceur to most of the practical and sensible
people of his day.
Even his wife, the estimable Alice Middleton, was on
Bishop Burnet's side in her opinion of her husband's want of
seriousness. Watch her in a famous passage from William
Roper's delightful Life of his father-in-law: "When Sir Tho-
mas More had continued a good while in the Tower, my lady
his wife obtained license to see him, who at her first coming,
like a simple woman and somewhat worldly, too, with this
manner of salutations, bluntly saluted him, 'What the good
year, Mr. More,' quoth she, 'I marvel that you, that have been
always hitherto taken for so wise a man, will now so play the
fool to lie here in a filthy prison and be content to be shut
up among mice and rats, when you might be abroad at your
468 SIR THOMAS MORE, SAINT AND HUMORIST [July,
liberty, and with the favor and good will both of the King
and his Council, if you would do as all the bishops and best
learned of his Realm have done. And seeing you have at
Chelsea a right fair house, your library, your books, your gal-
lery, your garden, your orchards, and all other necessaries so
handsomely about you, where you might, in the company of
me, your wife, your children, and household be merry, I muse
what in God's name you mean here still thus fondly to tarry.'
After he had a while quietly heard her, with a cheerful counte-
nance he said unto her, 'I pray thee, good Mrs. Alice, tell me
one thing.' 'What is that?' quoth she. 'Is not this house as
nigh heaven as mine own?' To whom she, after her accus-
tomed fashion, not liking such talk, answered, 'Tilly vally,
tilly vally.' 'How say you, Mrs. Alice, is it not so?' quoth he.
'Bone Deus, bone Deus, man, will this gear never be left?'
quoth she."
Poor lady! As Francis Thompson observes, it is a griev-
ous trial to be the near relation of a saint. To Alice, who
thought of the infinite only when she said her prayers, the too
obvious difference between the pleasant park in Chelsea and
the moldy cell in the Tower was not a proper subject for
curious and patient speculation. I dare say Sir Thomas could
not help being amused at her stout opposition, but I am sure
also that her distress stretched him on a rack crueler than any
in the Tower. It was not in the nature of his humor to inflict
pain or draw satisfaction from any exhibition of it. When the
lieutenant of the Tower announced with much confusion and
embarrassment that sorely against his will he was obliged, by
the King's strict command, to cut down the comforts and small
liberties of his illustrious prisoner, Sir Thomas put him in
countenance with a laugh and a jest: "Assure yourself, Mr.
Lieutenant, I do not mislike my cheer; but whenever I so do,
then thrust me out of your doors."
The Commissioners, his former friends and associates,
who thought it best for worldly considerations to bend before
the royal will and condemn him to death, were not elated over
the performance of their task. Their pusillanimity might
have stirred the scorn and contempt of a less sweet-tempered
man than the doomed prisoner. The concluding portion of
his speech to them shows us which of them, in Sir Thomas'
mind, he or his judges, was in need of consoling words. "More
1920.] SIR THOMAS MORE, SAINT AND HUMORIST 469
have I not to say, my Lords, but like as the Blessed Apostle,
St. Paul, as we read in the Acts of the Apostles, was present,
and consented to the death of St. Stephen, and kept their
clothes that stoned him to death, and yet be they now both
twain holy saints in heaven, and shall continue there friends
forever, so I verily trust and shall right heartily pray, that
though your Lordships have now on earth been judges to my
condemnation, we may yet hereafter in heaven merrily all
meet together to our everlasting salvation."
The thought of the Infinite, it will be noticed, was always
with him, not only conferring the gift of humor but also pre-
serving it from the common form of degeneration into cyn-
icism and sardonic irony. While the sun was shining on his
side of the globe, he took no credit for seeing the way while
antipodeans walked in darkness. He thanked the God of
light and was humbled by the privilege.
Nor did he feel tempted to flaunt his privilege as a chal-
lenge. The consciences of others were not in his keeping,
and the issue for which he was laying down his life was, at
that time, somewhat subtle for the common mind. He needed
all his energy and attention for the struggle going on in his
own soul that truth and justice might triumph over the fear of
consequence. He sought to win no followers, even in his own
family. He uttered no defiance, but walked warily, as might
be expected of the shrewdest lawyer of that time, among the
cunning snares of an angry King and a scorned Queen. Per-
jury had at last to be suborned to undo him.
Sir Thomas was of a gentle and sensitive cast of character,
with a scholar's and a cultivated man's extreme dislike of
violence. He shrank in all his instincts from this rough con-
test with the Royal Supremacy, and was troubled by the doubt
whether he would be granted the grace and the strength to
stand by his conscience to the end. When the end actually
arrived he was surprised at the absence of all fear. The relief
and exhilaration of that surprise made him more than usually
mirthful, and accordingly enigmatic to people who hold that
martyrs must be fanatics. Bishop Burnet called him a buf-
foon, since he could not call him a fanatic. The Blessed Tho-
mas must enjoy this.
After all, where is the conundrum? As he had lived, so
Sir Thomas died a common fate enough measuring the
470 UPON DISCOVERING A ROSE [July,
finite with the Infinite. Contrary to his humble expectations,
he brought to the experience of dying the same buoyant spirit
which he had brought to the business of living, with some
extra zest thrown in because he was so near Home after a
delightful day.
UPON DISCOVERING A ROSE IN A BOOK OF POEMS.
To My Mother.
BY CHARLES J. QUIRK, S.J.
. . . The heart doth owe thee
More love, dead rose, than any rose. . . .
Lie still upon this heart which breaks below thee!
Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
A FADED rose : it lay before mine eyes :
Its treasured sweetness stol'n by Robber Time;
Plundered its beauty ah, but still sublime
In death it sweeps my harp of memories
And sads my soul with wailing threnodies
Of happiness and joys of olden years
This dead, white flow'r so deaf to sighs and tears-
Love's cenotaph to Youth's felicities.
With reverent care, I lift it to my lips,
Forever blest by her dear finger-tips;
And press it close my heart enshrined there
Till I shall seek my lost love faithfully
And find her on the royal steps of pray'r
A snowy rose which blooms immortally!
DRAMATIC SUCCESSES OF THE SEASON.
BY EUPHEMIA VAN RENSSELAER WYATT.
HAT "happy endings" are not necessarily synon-
omous with success, is one salient business prin-
ciple which the present theatrical season has
demonstrated to the managers. No less than
seven bona fide tragedies flaunt their posters on
Broadway; while one of the most popular of the comedies
reduces the majority of its audience to the likeness of a con-
valescent from hay fever. The matinee girl has also discov-
ered that, not even the thrill of wedding the incomparable
Miss Barrymore to the Jewish millionaire or the reformed
cad, meagrely provided by her dramatist, can equal the de-
licious agony of watching her "Lady Helen" impeccably ex-
pire to the rhythm of a slow but very languishing waltz. The
privilege of tears is apparently just coming into its own or,
perhaps, the public, with a more than geographical knowledge
of Nevada, is forced to admit that "happy endings" are too
often but the beginnings of sorrow.
Although to the casual psychologist it might have seemed
more probable that the reaction from war would tend to
farces, yet two of these, Wedding Bells and The Girl in the
Limousine, have already fluttered away, leaving but a faint
echo of giggles behind them, while John Drinkwater's tragedy
still burgeons in a well-filled theatre. Furthermore in My Lady
Friends, one of the few farces that has withstood the spring,
there is a sudden and unexpectedly poignant and human five
minutes between a husband and wife, which elicits sympa-
thetic sneezes from most of the house. And that's it it's the
human ingredient that the last five years have brought the
public to demand. They have learned that almost everyone
has a heart, although it is sometimes to be found in an unex-
pected place, and though no one wants to live over the War
in the theatres, they do want to find real men and women in
the plays. It is not because Broadway feeds by preference on
historical headliners that Abraham Lincoln has been a suc-
cess as the enterprising manager who resurrected Mackaye's
472 DRAMATIC SUCCESSES OF THE SEASON [July,
George Washington almost instantaneously discovered it is
because in Lincoln, "dramatized biography," though it be, and
earnestly ponderous at that, Drinkwater and McGlynn be-
tween them present a living, breathing man. Few things, by
the way, being more dramatic than McGlynn's sudden leap
from obscurity to fame overnight, particularly, so the story
goes, as he had just been offered a part to play in some moving
picture film in the West. But, greatly as he and his wife were
in need of the round sum this would mean, the scenario was
not one which McGlynn felt he could countenance and, after
consulting a priest, he declined to sign the contract. The next
day came the telegram that brought him to New York.
In the two very popular tragedies of contemporaneous
life, an American and an Irishman share the laurels. Both
plays are more or less filled with disillusioned men and
women, howbeit quite natural ones, but Jane Clegg, coming
from the more experienced pen of St. John Ervine, has a more
compact construction and less dependence upon forced issues
than Beyond the Horizon by Eugene O'Neill. To find two
dramatists, however, who have the skill and the time to
round and mold so carefully their minor characters is memor-
able in itself.
Jane Clegg is the mother, the devoted mother of two
children. It is for their sake that she has remained with her
worthless husband, although she has discovered some time
ago that she would be justified in leaving him; but the situa-
tion is changed upon her receiving a legacy, which is large
enough to support and educate the children until they are
grown. Of this legacy Jane will not give her husband a penny,
despite his temper and cajolery, until she discovers that
he has cashed in a check belonging to the firm, when she
parts with half her inheritance to save him. Immediately
after she also learns that he has been cheating her again as a
wife, and then she quietly turns him out of the house. Still
quiet and collected, Jane Clegg puts out the gas and mounts
her stairs alone, as the curtain falls.
Curiously enough the only excuse Mr. Clegg ever makes
for his conduct is the explanation Tolstoi has made his hero
propound in Redemption.
"It's a funny thing," remarks the Russian at the close of a
remarkably worthless career, "but I find that we love only the
1920.] DRAMATIC SUCCESSES OF THE SEASON 473
people to whom we do good and we hate those we harm. I
crucified my wife's love for me and her sufferings made me
dislike her more."
"I know all the time that you're a fine woman," says
Clegg to Mrs. Clegg or words to that effect "you're the
finest woman I know. You're too good. You don't blame me.
You don't say a word. I know I'm beastly to you, but the
more I hurt you the beastlier I am."
So it was. with Goneril and Reagan and their father; so
with Hedda Gabbler and her Tesman; so with Saul and
David; so with very many Cleggs the cry of "Barabbas" is
still rising from our midst. Why then did not the reverse of
the truth apply to Mrs. Clegg if it be true that we give not so
much because we love, as we love because we give. We are
given in the New Testament an infallible recipe for loving:
to sell all we possess, then it follows that after giving all we
have, we must give our heart, too. It must be confessed that
Jane Clegg's virtue seems more negative than positive. Her
long suffering with her husband was prompted, not by charity
but prudence; she makes good his dishonesty, not from pity
but from pride.
Jane Clegg, under the skillful stage management of
Emanuel Reicher and the cooperation of an excellent caste,
seems to give a real slice of middle class life in an English
manufacturing town; Beyond the Horizon presents an Amer-
ican farm.
On this farm, two brothers have just attained manhood
and the parting of the ways. One, an aspirant for a larger
life, has elected to join a seafaring uncle in a voyage round the
world, which may prove a short cut to Olympus; and the
other, of sounder physical mold, is only too content to stay
behind to cultivate the ancestral soil and incidentally the love
of his next door neighbor the playmate of his boyhood. It
is this young lady, herself, in an all too innocent pink bow,
who puts a spoke in both men's wheels. In the sunset glow of
the literary brother's last evening at home, she appears for
supper and palpitatingly announces that it is he and not the
agriculturist whom she loves. With surprisingly little consid-
eration for the brother he adores, the idealist decides that love
is worth any career. But when he announces to his astonished
family his sudden change of plans, the jilted brother, in spite
474 DRAMATIC SUCCESSES OF THE SEASON [July,
of his mother's tears and his father's threats, decides to take
to the sea himself.
Then the tragedy begins. The healthy brother was es-
sential to the farm; and, as an idealist in fiction must always
be impractical and this one is tubercular as well, the farm
sinks to particularly quick decay. The father dies. The
pretty girl wife between an ailing, shiftless, husband, a deli-
cate baby, a nagging, crippled mother and crops of little but
debts, degenerates into a peevish little slattern. She comes to
the conclusion that she has always really loved the other
brother; but when he comes back for a visit, prosperous and
hearty, he jovially announces that it only took a month or two
at sea to make him forget he had ever been in love. In the
last act, sorrow has made her pathetic. Her baby is dead;
everything has gone to ruin. The idealist, racked by disease
and loneliness for his child; wrung by the knowledge that his
wife has hated him as a failure, dies, with his eyes on the
horizon he could never see beyond. Life has broken him
that is all he knows.
But why has life broken him? is the question the audience
asks itself a little dully as it files out with swollen eyelids into
everyday life.
Lady Helen, of Declassee in the vibrant Barrymore voice,
solves the problem for herself. Her own particular tragedy
is, of course, due to the aristocratic tradition of misfortune her
family must maintain, and more particularly to the fortune
teller she once met and mentioned in Act I. One is left won-
dering as much at the colorful personality of the actress who
transcends the weakness of her text, as at the fostering halo
of the British peerage which preserves the heroine stainless
from the democratic dust of Fifth Avenue, even when en-
countered under the radical wheels of a taxicab. The famous
death scene of Declassee, with Lady Helen gamely puffing her
last puff of Turkish tobacco and sipping her last sip of cham-
pagne, is really tragic in that to many who witness it, it seems
a fine way to die. The materialism of modern literature is
open and undefiled. Beyond such fundamentals of the Deca-
logue as cheating at cards, nothing is particularly wrong just
as nothing is particularly right.
Mr. Clegg, however, in the depths of his caddishness, still
knows that s-i-n spells sin. His yellow soul is shocked that
1920.] DRAMATIC SUCCESSES OF THE SEASON 475
his wife won't even remonstrate with him for his transgressing
the moral law. He even implies a certain superiority in his
knowledge that there is a God Whom he is defying while she
is honest just because. And that is about as far as her honesty
goes. She has lived with him long after love and respect had
vanished because he was earning a salary, and now she will
put no obstacle in the way of his elopement to Canada
though a man's desertion of wife and children and mother
means a dessication of his moral fibre that will soon mean
total decay. Perhaps by this time she has suffered too much
at his hands to be expected to take much account of his further
moral shrinkage; and anyway responsibility for one's neigh-
bor is not at all popular at the moment. One's own happiness
and self respect is all that counts.
To explain the tragedy of Beyond the Horizon one should
first rename it "A Selfish Family." It begins, of course, with
the girl, who throws over the man who loves her and then
thwarts the man she thinks she loves, from achieving his am-
bition. He, in turn, in taking the girl, wounds his brother, who
proceeds to salve his hurt by breaking his father's heart. The
father dies from pique. The dreamer, still intent on his
dreams, fails to buckle down to the life he has chosen, while
the girl, in the misery of her discontent, succeeds in completely
wrecking the happiness of the man who had sacrificed every-
thing for her. But no one of these characters, and probably
not the dramatist, ever admits that their own faults were in
any way connected with their misfortunes.
That is the saving grace with an old-fashioned villain,
such as Richard III. Like Mr. Clegg, "Crooked Dick" had once
been taught his Catechism, and he knew very clearly the dif-
ference between right and wrong and how if, in the teeth of
one's conscience, one makes up one's bed with the wrong ma-
terials, one need not call it a problem play if one finds it
rather bumpy to sleep upon. There is no question about
Shakespeare's "wearing well" while he can still give the Amer-
ican public their favorite tidbit a character study which is
really quite as human if not so companionable as the Music
Master. Richards, nowadays, may not be forced to attain their
ends by such lively methods as seven murders, but they still
exist we won't say where. In his finely rounded conception
of the role, Mr. Barrymore has dared give Gloucester most of
476 DRAMATIC SUCCESSES OF THE SEASON [July,
the attributes that usually connote a hero. His Richard is
young; a brave soldier; a well-dressed and cultivated peer
whose slight physical deformity is always being flung in his
face by the rest of the family or what he leaves of them.
One clever detail of his make-up being the crease, which the
constant wearing of a helmet has made in the warlike villain's
sleek, but somehow very sinister, black hair. With his dare-
devil courage; his unswerving will and razor-edge mind, this
Richard towers so far above the mediocrities about him, that
the seemingly impossible scene, in which he makes successful
love to the lady, whose husband and father-in-law he has
himself murdered, becomes plausible.
Was ever woman in this humour woo'd?
Was ever woman in this humour won?
*****
Upon my life, she finds, although I cannot,
Myself to be a marvelous proper man.
I'll be at charges for a looking glass;
he chuckles as she leaves him, for no one is more amused by
his own "nerve" than Richard himself. Indeed, his sardonic
amusement and appreciation of the foibles of life and of his
own fine art in wickedness, endow him with a certain appeal.
If he can become so staggering a villain, what a Charlemagne
he might have been had he been born to the crown, instead
of having to wade to it through so much of his relatives'
blood. No one has been able to mention this revival of
Richard HI. without applauding the setting for it by Jones,
which is so simple as to obviate long waits and yet so strik-
ingly suggestive. One will long remember Richard as Glou-
cester, all in red under the Tower walls, as well as his ven-
omous regal appearance in black, wrapping himself, on his
hard-won throne, in a mantle that seemed as near liquid fire
as a serpent's scales. Edward Sheldon is said to have com-
piled the acting version of the tragedy which retains as much
of Colley Gibber as
Chop off his head so much for Buckingham.
That it starts out with Act I. of the Henry VI., Part III.,
1920.] DRAMATIC SUCCESSES OF THE SEASON 477
and condenses that play into the limits of its first act, has been
the subject of complaint, but it must be conceded that Shake-
speare's audiences had probably all seen the Henry V. trilogy
and were, at any rate, undoubtedly more familiar with the
Wars of the Roses than is the average New Yorker. The
savage internecine brutality of this period in which Gloucester
was nurtured, is lacking in Richard HI., who remarks in the
opening speech that
Grim visaged War hath smoothed his wrinkled front.
Omitting the horrible scenes of young Rutland's butchery
and Queen Margaret's offering to York the napkin crimsoned
with his boy's blood, Messrs. Sheldon and Hopkins, by pre-
senting the milder horrors of Prince Edward's stabbing and
King Henry's murder, have fixed the period in the mind of the
spectator. That period is shown at its worst when the
curtain first rises on the mailed men tossing about Somerset's
head like a baseball trophy. When we arrive at Act II.,
where Richard III. really begins, Gloucester has taken on the
refinements of peace time and commits no more murders with
his own sword.
It is a pity that lack of time has precluded the retention
of the scene with the three sorrowing Queens beneath the
Tower walls, which is similar, but even more effective, than
the one included in the present production. Personally, we
cannot applaud the interpolation of the byplay, where Richard
mixes the poison for his wife. The mystery of Anne's real fate
seems more sinister as Shakespeare and history have left it;
although a broken heart would appear as inevitable and as
effective for her as the King's potion. There is also a tradi-
tion which it seems a pity to abrogate that no Plantagenet,
no matter how worthless, ever put to death a woman. Mar-
garet of Anjou certainly wanders with impunity through the
play though with small historical accuracy breaking in with
copious curses upon the Yorks' home circle "so very differ-
ent" one might add "from the family life of our dear
Queen." And both Queen Dowagers, as well as the Duchess
of York, heap their maledictions upon Richard with a frank-
ness which would have meant almost instant headlessness to
a female relative of Henry VIII. Rut Richard is not an ogre.
478 DRAMATIC SUCCESSES OF THE SEASON [July,
He does not kill just for killing's sake but, like a lion, only for
a purpose.
That seems to be one fundamental difference between a
real drama and a melodrama. It is against all canons for a
melodramatic villain ever to look, think or know anything
decent. He must heap superfluous villainy upon superfluous
villainy up to the moment when the hero stamps him out.
Conscience which began to trouble Richard at Bosworth or
scruples are not for him. Two plays this winter, The Storm
and The Acquittal, by thus denaturizing their villains from the
knowledge of virtue to heap it upon the heroes, have sunk
from the ranks of drama to melodrama.
The Acquittal, a Cohan and Harris production, has a
theme of such tense possibilities as a wife who, for eighteen
months, has stood valiantly by her husband while he is under-
going trial for murder. Acquitted at last, he returns home,
only to have her demand a divorce. It appears that she has
known all along that he is guilty, but realized that her deser-
tion of him during the trial would probably have resulted in
his conviction. Most of Act I. in The Acquittal is taken up
with comedy business by the reporters who flock for an inter-
view. The central figure of the drama, as it is written, being
young Captain Harrigan, late of the A. E. F., who, as an en-
gaging and supremely astute cub reporter from the Pacific
Coast, is always on the spot to relieve, with a touch of farce,
any situation which, despite all the dramatist's restraining
care, have a way at times of becoming quite intense. That
the woman, whom the accused husband sends to live with his
wife during his imprisonment, happens to have a sinister con-
nection with himself, detracts rather than adds farce to this
plot. It being preposterous that any villain should sink to
such unnecessary depths of infamy, or that any wife should
consciously endure such a situation as this one does just for
the satisfaction of telling her husband what she thought of
him at the end. Yet the author of The Acquittal who should
have blushed twice daily when seeing her handiwork adver-
tised as "the best constructed play of the season" seems to
have felt she would have been old fashioned had she relied on
just plain murder and evolved a drama in which sex and im-
morality had no part.
It is the former theme, spelled with a capital S, which
1920.] DRAMATIC SUCCESSES OF THE SEASON 479
dominates The Storm. The story revolves about a Canadian
girl with the French accent and ingenuous innocence which
proved so popular in Tiger Rose. Her father's untimely death
during the first snowstorm of the season, leaves this pictur-
esque heroine stranded in a cabin in the Northwest woods with
two male strangers one a "nature's gentleman" and an
American, the other a sophisticated British bounder. It is,
of course, a severe tax on the imagination to guess who, in
that combination, will prove the villain. The two redeeming
points in The Storm are the acting of Miss Helen McKellar
and an extraordinarily good setting of the primeval forest,
where the sense of space is achieved by the perspective of a
mountan torrent, while the spectacle of a snowstorm and a
forest fire are material aids to certain deficiencies in the action.
The Sign on the Door, a straight melodrama without any
attempt at comic relief or scenic excitement, nevertheless
follows the general tendency and introduces the Mrs. Tan-
queray complication of stepmother, stepdaughter and villain
diluted to the point of having the stepmother's only connection
with the villain consist in having been photographed with
him when the police raided the restaurant to which he had
villainously lured her when she was an unsuspecting and
"fresh from the farm" stenographer. True to the ethics of
melodrama, she, of course, endeavors to conceal any hint of
the fatal flashlight from her husband and so, when it inevit-
ably comes to his hands, nothing saves his affection for her
but the timely testimony of the District Attorney, who hap-
pened to be masquerading as a waiter at the raided restaurant
that very night! So much for the elastic arm of coincidence,
but the supreme situation, around which the Sign on the
Door is built, is when the husband unwittingly locks up his
wife in the suite with the corpse of the villain, whom he had
just been forced to shoot. It is a throbbing moment, we must
admit.
The Passion Flower, a translated tragedy with suspected
literary aspirations, is a drama of the most sordid, morbid
type, chiefly distinguished by being the worst acted play on
the boards. It is a pity that Miss O'Neill, whose superb per-
formances in The Lily is still vividly remembered, should feel
that all that is necessary to personify a Spanish peasant is a
lace shawl. The responsibility, however, of her reiterated
480 DRAMATIC SUCCESSES OF THE SEASON [July,
deep, bass groans over "the doom of our house" must rest, it
is to be supposed, at Mr. Jacinto Benevente's door.
In The Son Daughter, the fifth successful melodrama, Mr.
Belasco displays with meticulous and tumultuous zeal the
mysteries, the horrors, the riches, the politics and the loves of
Chinatown. It lacks, however, almost every virtue of The
Darling of the Gods, although most of the devices, which there
proved so popular, have been retained including the juvenile
heroine with her grandiloquent language and her first love
affair; the agonizing obstacles in the path of her romance; the
perfidious supervillainous Oriental villain; the torture cham-
ber; a great deal of local color and as much sudden death.
Instead, however, of the real tragedy of the Samurai and the
shadowy meeting of the lovers after death, we now enjoy the
strangling of the villain with his own queue on his own lac-
quered nuptial couch; the murderess being the highly incensed
heroine, who has just had the misfortune to become his wife.
The little that is left to the imagination of the overwrought
audience during the process of the strangulation due to the
kindly overturning of the lamps, is amply made up for by
the exhaustive curses heaped on the corpse by the Son Daugh-
ter immediately thereafter, but to relieve any feeling of de-
pression that may ensue, the hero suddenly recovers from his
wounds just as the curtain falls, and it is to be presumed the
over-active little heroine becomes quaintly juvenile once
more.
In this production, Mr. Belasco, who always is anxious to
please, has the conversation turn frequently to nuptial cham-
bers, while in his farce comedy, The Gold Diggers, he has en-
deavored to impart an atmosphere of the most approved lax-
ity, though at the same time preserving his principal characters
from any real moral obliquity. The highest form of wit in
his worthless trifle is the warning to choose one's husband ac-
cording to the alimony he may be good for. But to offset any
too flagrant impression that may have been produced by the
multifarious show girls and their party and Miss Claire's red
frock, a little gray-haired mother from Way Down East sud-
denly pops out at the end of Act II., so that the final curtain
may descend on a scene of innocuous and thoroughly chap-
eroned sentiment.
Like Belasco, Messrs. Cohan and Harris have also paired
1920.] DRAMATIC SUCCESSES OF THE SEASON 481
their melodrama with a farce. This time it is The Hottentot,
by Victor Mapes and William Collier, the latter, as might be
suspected, impersonating the hero in the present production.
The agony of the man who is scared to death of horses and
who has to ride an equine demon in a steeplechase to get the
better of his rival, is humor of seasoned and cherished vintage.
This is really funny. Unfortunately, Collier and Donald
Meek, the Butler, have to carry the whole play. Will the
superfarce ever be written in which all the other characters
are not so much wall paper behind the comedian? And it is
such bad wall paper at that even on the real walls. The
plushy interior, which is supposedly the hallway of a country
house in an ultra smart hunting community, reminds one of
nothing but a boarding house in the Bronx. Instead of the
racing prints, the tailoredness, the stable jargon and slang
which should grate on the agonized Collier at every turn, we
meet a bevy of young females attired in the attenuated and
filmy garments which every chorus girl yearns to own, but
which smart women who can afford smart tailors do not wear
on their own farms.
One thing the Washington Square Players did prove was
that farces and satires play much more breezily against a
breezy background. Mr. Belasco, who knows so well the value
of accessories, has achieved in the Gold Diggers, with some
bright curtains and a pale wall, the brilliant affect of a tub'p
bed in full bloom, particularly when all the "gold diggers"
assemble there.
No less than three American comedies have held the
boards throughout the winter. They are all three amusing and
as original as most things can be, after so many centuries.
They are also innocent of certain dubious qualities and allu-
sions and that well-worn stage property a bed which were
the mainstay of the two comedies, Too Many Husbands and
Scandal. It is to be regretted that in The Famous Mrs. Fair,
otherwise the best of the three, the author has felt it neces-
sary to emphasize the husband's infidelity, thus tarring with
the too popular brush a play that is both appealing and
human and it must be whispered containing a full-sized
and timely moral.
In The Famous Mrs. Fair James Forbes has depicted a
mother who, after the excitement of war work abroad, re-
VOL. czi. 31
482 DRAMATIC SUCCESSES OF THE SEASON [July,
turns to find her family of husband, son and daughter a little
out of hand, but who, nevertheless, cannot resist the lure of
continuing in public life until, in the third act, she hurries
back from a lecture tour only just in time to save her home
from total dissolution. The mother of Blanche Bates and the
altogether delightful father of Henry Miller are good char-
acters, so in a lesser degree is the daughter, but one could
easily eliminate some six superfluous members of the Red
Cross Unit, who add neither fun nor interest, to say nothing
of the neighborly siren, whose charms, if they are to convince,
are more safely described than exhibited. But even if The
Famous Mrs. Fair lacks the finish and the smooth construction
of a Pinero, it tells a pertinent story in a dramatic way; it has
amusing lines; a climax; suspense, and a real emotional ap-
peal and that is saying a good deal.
Adam and Eva, by George Middleton and Guy Bolton, is
wholesomely clean and amusing and not too subtle for suc-
cess. Its greatest originality is attained by having the titled
British fortune-hunter turn out to be the right stuff when the
Private Secretary, who has been left to manage his employer's
idle and extravagant family, decides to teach them a lesson
and tells them that their father then seeking rest in South
America is a ruined man. Needless to say, everybody in-
cluding the hypochondriac cousin, who came to spend a week
and has stayed four years, a nice part nicely played by Gotts-
chalk the parasitic son-in-law; the heedless daughter; the
parlor-maid; the Scotch Laird and the heroine all prove what
a boom for good conduct and industry a little poverty can
accomplish. And the unmarried daughter and the secretary
learn to love each other madly for many more reasons than
that their names happen to be Adam and Eva.
Booth Tarkington's Clarence was at first heralded as that
great American comedy which is always coming, and which
some critics say arrived with Mrs. Fair. It is a character study
but not quite so convincing as Lightning, nor a better play.
In fact, when a plot becomes so tenuous that a fifteen minute
discussion as to the hero's name is seized upon to eke out an
act, one begins to deplore the absence of the English fashion
of curtain raisers. So many comedies are uproariously funny
for one act, moderately so for a second and wholly tragic for
a third. Of such was Too Many Husbands which, for want
1920.] DRAMATIC SUCCESSES OF THE SEASON 483
of anything brighter, tried vapid vulgarity at the end per-
haps Mr. Tarkington's idea was better. At any rate, the au-
thor's initial conception of the shy entymologist, who had to
be adopted into the bosom of a squabbling family after be-
coming acquainted with all their dreadful secrets, while he
sits waiting for a job in the father's office during the first act,
is a quaint and likeable creation. Clarence himself really
deserves a better play.
The Harvard prize comedy, Miss Butler's Mamma's Af-
fair, written for and produced by Morosco, cannot be consid-
ered as successful as the three comedies just mentioned. Miss
Butler started out with the excellent and unexplored theme of
a neurasthenic mother, who is devouring her daughter's life.
Unfortunately in writing her comedy, she over-developed her
hero, who ran away with the play. The daughter is rescued
from Mamma in Act I. instead of Act III., and all further sus-
pense is entirely artificial. Mamma's Affair degenerates into
Mr. Edeson, as the Doctor, reviving the pretty pastime of re-
fusing to make love and at the same time making it, as in the
red letter days of the Little Minister. The close of the play is
only redeemed from total futility by its clever lines and
Mamma's finally remarking to the hero, whom she doesn't
want for a son-in-law : "But it will be so nice to have a Doctor
in the family!" It serves him right for spoiling the play.
That Cosmo Hamilton's Scandal should be having one of
the longest runs of the season is a disgrace to our theatre
going public that cannot be too bitterly deplored. The fact of
morality being the best policy on the stage has been proved by
such phenomenal successes as The Old Homestead, The Little
Minister, Peg o' My Heart, The Music Master, etc., while only
this winter, Sacred and Profane Love, Bennett's dramatization
of his poorest and most meretricious novel, was withdrawn
after a short run, even with such a popular actress as Elsie
Ferguson in the caste. Has the public then lost its standard
of fitness? For Scandal is a play in which construction, situa-
tion and characterization are equally unnatural and poor, and
where all reliance for holding interest is placed on the start-
ling qualities of the second act. The only explanation for its
success that is not entirely pessimistic, lies in the fact that, like
The Gold Diggers, Scandal covers the salaciousness of its
second act by a thickly impossible coating of sentiment in Act
484 DRAMATIC SUCCESSES OF THE SEASON [July,
III., and sends its audience away with the feeling that they have
blushed all the blushes attendant on the worst French farce
without having witnessed any real infraction of the Ten Com-
mandments. How far will our people be led astray by this
new form of hypocrisy? The seventeenth century public who
countenanced the Restoration drama were at least more
honest. That suggestiveness may be just as pernicious and
much more insidious than downright sin should be recognized
and decried.
Despite all this, there are still some bright spots to be re-
membered in the past season, of which the most notable pro-
duction is clearly Richard III. Just as Richard Bennett and
Louise Closser Hale blossomed forth from a lurid melodrama,
called For the Defence, into The Far Horizon, so John Barry-
more has made another real contribution to dramatic art
after his long appearance as that decadent lily hero of The
Jest the penny dreadful in Renaissance garb, which was
conceived popularly to be a highbrow form of entertainment
possibly because no critic could decisively say that it was
not in blank verse!
Now that Mr. Barrymore has overcome his greatest handi-
cap of voice, we may soon look forward to another American
Hamlet besides Mr. Hampden's very personable Dane.
THE ARMENIAN TRAGEDY.
BY WALTER GEORGE SMITH.
HERE have been so many demands upon the
sympathy of the American people since the out-
break of the World War, that it seems some-
times as if the well-springs were almost ex-
hausted. There has been undoubtedly a reaction
all over the country from the fine, high ideals with which we
entered the War three years ago. Doubtless this is partially
owing to differences of opinion as to the relative attitudes of
the President and the Senate over the Peace Treaty, but the
main cause is, perhaps, the feeling that we are powerless to
stem the tide of events, and should not be called upon to
grapple with more than our own domestic problems.
This view is natural, but provincial. It fails to take into
consideration the vast change that has come about in the rela-
tions of all the peoples of the world owing to steam, electricity,
and other natural forces which have revolutionized commerce
and transportation. No part of the world can suffer long with-
out affecting the prosperity of all peoples. It is not less alarm-
ing to the people of the United States that all of Central
Europe is struggling with starvation, that Great Britain, France
and Southern Europe are financially embarrassed, and the
Near East partly starving and torn with racial warfare, be-
cause a great ocean divides us from these stricken lands. Our
wealth is very great and our industrial and commercial ac-
tivities are constantly adding to it, but if the other nations of
the world are reduced to bankruptcy, the reaction upon our
prosperity will inevitably follow. It behooves us, therefore,
quite irrespective of the demand upon our sympathies, to form
a correct judgment as to the causes of existing conditions, and
to seek for their remedy by radical means.
The two little volumes 1 which are the subject of this re-
view contain in small compass the salient points of the Near
1 Armenia and the Armenians from the Earliest Times until the Great War
(1914), by Kervork Asian. Translated from the French by Pierre Crabites. New
York: The Macmillan Co. 1920.
The Eastern Question and Its Solution, by Morris Jastrow, Jr., Ph.D., LL.D.
Philadelphia: J. B. Llpplncott Co.
486 THE ARMENIAN TRAGEDY [July,
Eastern question. By reason of a century of American edu-
cational and religious effort and of the recent endeavors to
bring home to the American people the supreme importance
of rehabilitating the Armenians, Mr. Asian's book is invalu-
able. He has been at pains to trace the history of this remark-
able people from the earliest times. The translator, who has
done his work well, prefixes a well written chapter on the evo-
lution of the Armenian question. He tells us that the high
tableland between the Caucasus, the Black Sea and the Med-
iterranean has about the superficial area of France, and he
quotes the language of M. Paul Deschanel, who describes this
as the cradle of "an intelligent, laborious, cultivated people
which, joining Asiatic quickness of perception to the spirit and
soul of Europe, has ever been the sentinel of Greco-Latin civil-
ization in the Orient."
The kingdom of Armenia long before the Christian era
and afterwards for a period of four centuries, was a prosper-
ous state containing as many as 30,000,000 inhabitants.
Through many vicissitudes it declined until, upon the break-
ing out of the War of 1914, its ancient territory was divided
between Turkey, Russia, and Persia, and of its race not more
than 4,000,000 survived. After the massacre of Chios by the
Turks in 1822 the European powers exacted from the Sultan
promises of fair treatment for his Christian subjects, but these
promises have been invariably broken. In 1845 the Christians
of Lebanon were slaughtered. In 1856 reform was promised.
These promises were followed by massacres that went on from
bad to worse until the war between Russia and Turkey broke
out in 1877. This was followed by the Treaty of San Stefano.
This Treaty brought about the Berlin Conference of 1878, but
before the Conference England and Turkey had entered upon
the Convention of Cyprus, whereby in consideration of the as-
signment of the island, England agreed to take up arms to
prevent the Russians keeping possession of Batoum, Ardahan,
and Kars, which meant that the Armenians of the Caucasus
were left again to the tender mercies of the Turk. Reforms
were promised but not executed, massacres broke out in 1894
and in 1895, and in 1896 the Sultan Abdul Hamid ordered mas-
sacres following his promises of reform.
In 1908 the Young Turks came into power upon a plat-
form of liberalism, but their history has been even more san-
1920.] THE ARMENIAN TRAGEDY 487
guinary and fanatical than that of the old regime. When the
adventurers of the Committee of Union and Progress seized
the government and cast in the lot of Turkey with the Central
Powers, it was determined, with the connivance of Germany,
to exterminate all Christians in the Empire. Shortly after the
failure of the attack on the Dardanelles in June, 1915, the de-
finitive extermination began. The Government decreed the
deportation of the entire Armenian people except those resi-
dent in Constantinople. The Government officials throughout
the provinces hastened to carry out these orders, and, with two
honorable exceptions, all of the Governors enforced the cruel
order.
The work of deportation was executed everywhere, in
all the nooks and corners of the land, from Adrianople to
Adana, Malatia, Kharpout, Diarbekir, Erzeroum, Sivas,
Tokat, Amassia, Samsoun, and Trebizond, without except-
ing the districts of Broussa and of Ismit. The rule was
first applied to the male population. The young were
thrown into prison, the elderly were told to depart within
a delay of twenty-four hours and the priests were burned
to death. Then the women and children were arrested.
In many instances women were forced to embrace Moham-
medanism to escape death. As soon as they left, the cara-
vans were attacked by the constabulary and brigands, who
acted in concert. All conceivable forms of torture were
applied. The men were killed, and the women and girls
violated and then killed. At Trebizond it was found simpler
to sink the barges containing the refugees.
The result of the deportations and massacres, it is esti-
mated, was the destruction of fifty per cent of the Armenian
population. Mr. Asian closes his volume with the remark:
If the Turks have thus furnished indisputable evidence
of a cruelty unequaled in the annals of history, the part
played in this hideous drama by their Teutonic Allies is
no less reprehensible, for far from acting as restraining
influences, the latter counseled the crimes which sullied a
record which was already black. The work of annihilation
which has been carried out beggars description. If some
parts of Turkey in Asia appear to show signs of life, all
that country bordering upon the Black Sea and running to
the Persian frontier represents today nothing but a picture
of desolation and death.
488 THE ARMENIAN TRAGEDY [July,
By common consent the Armenian people are better pre-
pared by natural endowment to bring Occidental civilization
into the Near East than any other people who are native
there. They have the trading instinct as highly developed as
the Greeks. The mountainous country from which they come
gives them the energy, mental and physical, the Syrians do
not possess. Even during centuries of persecution and re-
pression, which have become more and more sanguinary,
until the climax of 1915, the Armenian has been the sole con-
structive element among the Sultan's subjects.
While it is estimated that eighty-five per cent of these
people have been simply peasant farmers and tradesmen, the
remaining fifteen per cent have done practically all the con-
structive work of the Empire. Their thrift, their endurance,
their patience, have all been set in opposition to the laziness
and self-indulgence and irreclaimable barbarism of the Turk,
and superadded to these causes of difference has been their
steadfast adherence to Gregorian Christianity. Apostasy has
been rare. By the religion of Mohammed, all non-believers
are infidels, outcasts with no rights of life or property under
Islam. Yet, with all these obstacles, the Armenians have lived
and have worked, and have kept alight the flame of the spirit
in literature and lofty idealism even to this day.
The Armenians are brave soldiers. There were 150,000
of them in the Russian Army, and when the Russian revolution
caused the disbandment of the Army in the Caucasus, 35,000
of these veterans, ill-armed and underfed, held the whole
frontier of six hundred miles between Russia and Turkey to
the vast benefit of Allenby's campaign in Palestine and Meso-
potamia. For the Turks did not dare to withdraw troops to
reenforce the army opposed to it. In the Foreign Legion of the
French Army, in the English Army, and in the American
Army, Armenians won enviable records.
The Caucasus is now politically divided among three so-
called Republics: Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia. These
Republics have all been recognized by European Govern-
ments, but until lately the United States had not recognized
Armenia. The Armenians ask not only recognition, but a
definition of the boundaries of their territory to include the
provinces of Trebizond on the Black Sea and Cilicia on the
Mediterranean. They ask the privilege of recruiting and
1920.] THE ARMENIAN TRAGEDY 489
equipping troops in the United States and a benevolent atti-
tude on the part of this Government, so that these troops may
be officered, to a great extent, by Americans, and they ask that,
until they can assure the domestic tranquillity of their country,
American warships and marines may help to keep open the
only line of railroad from Batoum to Erivan.
Meantime, about 800,000 people in the Caucasus and
many thousands in other parts of the country extending as far
south as Jerusalem, are being kept alive by provisions and
supplies bought by a fund subscribed by the charity of the
American people. Obviously this cannot continue indefinitely.
These people should be repatriated and protected.
The policy of the Allies in delaying the settlement of the
Turkish question since November, 1918, has heartened the
Turks and, under Mustapha Kemal Pasha, they are insisting
that there shall be no dismemberment of the Empire. French
troops have been roughly treated in Cilicia, and the remnants
of the Armenian people in that province are being rapidly
butchered. At the Peace Conference, which assembled at San
Remo, America was not represented. The Eastern question
and all of its dangers was again submitted for solution. The
failure to settle it with courage, decision and disinterestedness
has been the cause of three great wars. The settlement at
San Remo carries the seeds of still further war.
Dr. Jastrow in his admirable, terse, lucid study of the
situation, shows how this question has been a perpetual men-
ace because the theory of all efforts to solve it has been the
balance of power and the spheres of influence of the Euro-
pean nations, considered quite without respect to the rights
of the natives of the Near East. The entry of Germany as a
competitor for Near Eastern power in 1888, the development
of the Berlin-Bagdad Railway project, and the necessity for its
success by the control of Serbia, caused Germany to back
Austria in 1914.
Our country has been free from responsibility for the
terrific blunders, the cynical, unscrupulous selfishness that has
distinguished European diplomacy in regard to Near Eastern
affairs up to this time, but we cannot escape responsibility
for the future. We have interests in that country, not com-
mercial to any great extent, but moral. There are many col-
leges, schools, hospitals, and other American works being
490 THE ARMENIAN TRAGEDY [July,
carried on there. The Congregationalists in Northern Turkey,
the Presbyterians in Southern Turkey, the Jews in Palestine,
have all made the subject one in which we have an interest.
Indifference is inexplicable, except upon the ground that all
settlements of foreign affairs and many domestic ones have
been deadlocked by reason of the differences between the
Legislative and Executive branches of the Government, and
the illness of the President, for more than half a year.
The proposition to give a mandate over Armenia to the
United States has been a subject of much discussion. Not-
withstanding the failure to ratify the Peace Treaty, it has been
formally tendered and repelled. It is exceedingly doubtful
whether it would have been accepted had the Treaty been rati-
fied. Leading statesmen and students have argued against
the assumption of any such expensive obligation, unconnected
with more than a moral interest, by the United States. Dr. Jas-
trow shares this view. Indeed he is opposed to all mandates :
Unless the nations accepting mandates have purged their
souls of all imperialistic ambitions, of all desire for ter-
ritorial expansion, a mandate is merely a thin diplomatic
disguise for occupation of a country. Occupation shades
by fine degrees into a protectorate, and the protectorate
yields, when a crisis ensues, to permanent proprietorship.
What then is the solution of the Eastern question in this
learned scholar's opinion? He quotes from Gladstone:
The greatest triumph of our time will be the enthrone-
ment of the idea of public right as the governing idea of
European politics.
He insists that notwithstanding their imperfections, the
treaties drawn up in Paris are a great advance in the direction
of giving first consideration to freeing peoples from a yoke
forced upon them by a seizure or a conquest, and our partici-
pation in that conference helped materially to bring into the
foreground the idea of public right. He looks then to inter-
national cooperation as the true rule to be adopted in settling
the Near Eastern question, and suggests nine international
commissions for the tutelage of : 1. Constantinople; 2. Turkish
Asia Minor; 3. Armenia; 4. Georgia; 5. Azerbeijan; 6. Syria;
7. Palestine; 8. Mesopotamia; 9. Arabia.
1920.] THE ARMENIAN TRAGEDY 491
Such an arrangement, in his judgment, will give hope to
the people of eventual liberty, an idea ineradical from the
human breast. Just as in Egypt political unrest follows where
the native population have no voice in government, so Dr.
Jastrow believes that the Near Eastern turmoil will never be
settled until the Near Eastern peoples are on the high road to
govern themselves. If they are led along by disinterested
commissions, the problem is in progress of solution. What-
ever may be thought of this view, it seems certain that the at-
tempt on the part of the French to expropriate Cilicia, is an
evidence of wanton imperialism which cannot but have an
exceedingly bad and disturbing effect upon the temper of
Eastern peoples; more so than their holding Syria, for they
have traditional special interests in that part of the old Em-
pire, while the English need to keep their influence in Meso-
potamia and Palestine because of their anxiety over India.
Meantime Russian Bolshevism may burn itself out, but it may
upset all calculations by overwhelming the Caucasus and, join-
ing with the Young Turks, sweep down to the Sea of Marmora.
It is inconceivable that in any such crisis of world affairs
American statesmen can be so blind to the lessons of history
as to hold back from the assertion of the moral ideas for
which heretofore our diplomacy has always stood.
In theory, Dr. Jastrow's suggested internationalism is per-
fect. Unfortunately, it presupposes a fairness and disinterest-
edness on the part of the great European powers which does
not exist. It is not probable, indeed, human nature being con-
stituted as it is, it is scarcely possible, that an international
commission would succeed if made permanent, though as a
temporary expedient pending final settlement it might do.
Any one who has been in the Near East even for a brief
time, will know something of the rancorous hostility between
different races and creeds, and this seems to be communicated
to the Occidental resident, for underneath public professions
of kindness one hears constant denunciation of all other peo-
ples by his friend, of whatsoever nationality he may be.
A radical settlement of the Near Eastern question would
involve military occupation of the strategic points in Turkey,
the deliberate dismemberment of the Empire, the building up
of a strong Armenia with the Provinces of Trebizond and
Cilicia and all of Turkish Armenia, the confining of the
492 THE ARMENIAN TRAGEDY [July,
Turkish people within the boundaries of Anatolia, with the
ancient capital of Broussa or Konia, the autonomy of Syria
under a French Protectorate and of Palestine and Mesopo-
tamia under an English Protectorate, until those countries can
become self-governing, and the Arabs to have such form of
government as they think proper, but to be confined within
their natural boundaries of Arabia with no claim on Syria.
The problem of Constantinople would be much easier if the
political domination of the Turk were removed. As between
the claims of Greece, Bulgaria and Russia to sole domination,
one may suspend judgment, but there seems no good reason
why a free city government might not be set up that would
neutralize the water ways and thus disarm very largely the
jealousy of Russia and of Black Sea countries which need this
outlet to the West. One must be cautious in dogmatizing upon
so intricate a subject. Any plan seems better than to permit
the bloody rule of the Turk over Christian peoples.
For the third time the European Congress has attempted
to settle temporarily, at least, the Eastern question, while the
American Congress has stood off in an attitude of destructive
criticism, save that the Senate has requested that the Presi-
dent send a warship and land marines at Batoum to protect
the line of railway, and the President himself has accepted
the trying task of limiting the boundaries of Armenia. It is
not clear whether this gives him a free hand or whether Cilicia
and parts of Turkish Armenia are to be outside of any bound-
aries that he may fix. The Sultan is to remain in Constanti-
nople under the direction of an International Commission.
The Dardanelles are not internationalized. The Greeks are
given Smyrna and the immediately adjoining territory and
Thrace. Meantime, as appears by the careful report of
Brigadier General Moseley, the military forces of the National-
ist Turkish Party under the command of Mustapha Kemal
Pasha, have been appealing to the patriotism and fanaticism
of the Turkish people. They have an army of 40,000 men.
Unless the Allies bring large forces to bear and crush all
opposition throughout the provinces of the Empire, all proph-
ecy is of no avail. But none the less, the two little books
which have given occasion to this review are distinct contribu-
tions to the growing literature on the subject, and will compel
the attention of dispassionate students.
CHASTITY.
BY FRANCIS CARLIN.
(Under the high altar of the church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva
in Rome, lies the body of St. Catherine of Siena, in the incorrupt-
ible flesh, though lifeless for nearly six hundred years.)
THE white brow of a woman,
Beauty's altar stone,
Is broken now, beneath the plow,
Where Deirdre lies unknown.
But the white heart of a Woman,
Beauty's living Self,
Still lies today without decay
On a Roman altar-shelf.
The white breast of a woman,
Beauty's masterpiece,
Has left its snow in the Long Ago
Of Helen's sunny Greece.
But the white mould of a Woman,
Beauty in human form,
Still lingers here, on a marble bier,
In the land where it was warm.
The white Fame of a woman,
Beauty's ivory shield,
Went down in shame when Frances' name
By Dante was revealed.
But the white soul of a Woman,
Beauty sanctified,
Left doubtful dust in Nature's trust
When Catherine strangely died.
O the white Prayers of this Woman,
Like the pleadings of larks, are heard
By God Who prefers her messengers
To the psalms of a soaring bird.
For the white Prayers of this Woman
Are breathed from the Spirit's breath
Of a Body asleep and that She may keep
Our souls from the only death.
WHEN MARY AND I WENT TO MORLAIX.
BY TOD B. GALLOWAY.
E did not go together nor, indeed, at the same
time, Mary and I. In fact, there was quite an
interval between our visits. Mary will never
know that I was there, although I am quite fa-
miliar with the fact of her visit.
Instead of living in the present time when the League of
Nations and other idealistic ideas would suggest that the
sword was, without doubt, to be beaten into a plowshare and
that this Year of Grace, 1919, was attempting to push Revela-
tions to a finish, if I had been living in the time of poor ha-
rassed Mary I would doubtless have had my head cut off for
undue familiarity of language- for I refer to Mary Queen of
Scots, whose visit, poor child, to Morlaix was a mere matter
of three hundred and seventy years before mine.
First, I must explain where Morlaix is and how Mary and
I happened to visit there.
On the storm-beaten, wind-lashed, northern coast of the
land of sabots, Brittany, two-thirds of the distance out towards
the point of Finisterre, is the little town of Morlaix one of
the most interesting and picturesque towns of timber-framed
houses, not only of Brittany, the land of quaint towns, but of
France and indeed all Europe. The little city which has ex-
isted since the Roman domination of Gaul, is nestled in the
hollow of a deep valley, and there, detached from the work-a-
day world of today seems "world forgetting, by the world
forgot." The monumental railroad viaduct, which spans in
airy space the valley and town, instead of removing that feel-
ing of the land o'yester-year, gives the surroundings a special
character, an aspect at once unique and beautiful. The nar-
row Breton streets, lined with ancient mansions and houses,
seem to wander aimlessly about as if trying to find a pathway
up the surrounding hills and, becoming discouraged in their
effort, simply come to a stop or wander off into country lanes.
Old houses, where generation after generation have
labored, lived, loved, and died, take on the grace of human
1920.] WHEN MARY AND I WENT TO MORLAIX 495
attributes. This one, an old overhanging gabled tenement, has
a meditative attitude, the head bent forward, while the dim
diamond-eyed windows seem introspective as though recall-
ing past days and glories; another, with its twisted curves of
mellowed tones, seems like a sardonic face laughing at the
present generation; one is tall, angular, austere, like a severe
spinster aunt, another short, squat and fat, good nature show-
ing in every line, while next are two leaning together in com-
radeship and we can fancy them whispering:
Now we maun totter down, John,
But hand in hand, we'll go.
Such are the houses of Morlaix which, in their youth,
looked down upon Mary and in their old age whispered the
story of her visit to me.
From the disastrous day of Flodden Field (September 9,
1513), Scottish hearts turned more and more to France, and,
naturally, Henry VIII., by his tyranny, treachery, and unscru-
pulous intrigues which no man, especially no young man of
spirit, could forgive, drove James V. of Scotland from the Eng-
lish marriage which Henry tried to force upon him, into an al-
liance with Magdalen, the sister of the King of France. She
lived only a few months, and James again looked to France
for a bride and this time married Mary of Guise. Unfortunate
Henry VIII. was also a suitor for her hand, and when she
laughingly rejected the hand of this corpulant and much
marrying gentleman in order that she might marry his nephew,
James V., a younger and gayer admirer, she little recked the
trouble and misfortune she was accumulating for the country
of her new spouse, as Henry was one who never forgot or for-
gave a slight particularly one to his amorous propensities.
The misfortunes of the Scottish throne pursued the luck-
less James. He failed to win the trust and affection of his
people and was made to feel Henry's relentless hate. He
lost both of his infant sons and finally the disastrous battle of
Solway Moss (November 24, 1542) was the climax. Broken
in spirit and health, he died in less than a month six days
after the birth of little Mary. The news of the birth of the
little princess, his sole heir, brought him no consolation and
he is said to have exclaimed when informed of it, referring to
496 WHEN MARY AND I WENT TO MORLAIX [July,
Scotland: "It came with a lass and it will pass with a lass."
Henry VIII. continued his relentless hate towards his widow,
Mary of Guise, and her little daughter, nor did his death in
January, 1547, bring any peace to distracted Scotland. The
marriage of little Mary to Edward VI. was rendered impos-
sible by the actions of the English. Instead of trying pacific
measures of conciliation the Lord Protector Somerset, fol-
lowing the example of Henry VIII., tried, by most violent
means, to force the Scots to give Mary to Edward for wife. As
a natural result, Scotland again turned to France and an al-
liance between the little girl queen and the Dauphin of France
was arranged. Henry II. promised to maintain Scotland
against the cruelty and arrogance of England, offering men,
money and arms, and to educate the young Queen. Scotland
accepted gladly, laying down as their one condition that the
laws and liberties of that land should be inviolate.
No time was lost in putting into execution the plan, and
a fleet of four galleys under the command of the valiant Ad-
miral Villegaignon was dispatched from France to Scotland to
bring the little Queen to her new home. The fleet put in at
Leith, but owing to the watchfulness of the English vessels
who were trying to capture Mary, it was deemed unsafe to
have her embark there. Therefore her mother took her to
Dumbarton Castle where, in stealth, the child, together with
her four child companions of story and song, Mary Fleming,
Mary Beaton, Mary Seaton, and Mary Livingstone, were placed
on board one of the galleys and the perilous voyage of danger
from storms and enemy was begun. The little galleys totally
unsuited for such service, sailed around the Clyde and in
order to elude the watchful English skirted around the stormy
coast of Ireland.
Of that voyage we learn from a series of letters written
by Sieur de Breze in Mary's suite, to her anxious mother in
Scotland. Indeed, no other child of bygone days has given
such vivid flashes of her life. We know of this, her progress
through the fair land of France with power granted her by
her future father-in-law, Henry II., to pardon criminals in the
towns and villages through which she had to pass, and her
first meeting with her future playmate and husband in the
royal nursery at St. Germain that nursery where so many
sad and varied careers had their opening. Again we
1920.] WHEN MARY AND 1 WENT TO MORLAlX 497
see her as a child in a street procession in Paris, carrying a
lighted candle in a gorgeous church ceremony while a woman
seeing her, breaks through the ranks, exclaiming: "Are you
not, indeed, an angel?" We have her life with her child com-
panions, her letters, Latin themes even the note of joy an-
nouncing to her grandmother that her mother is coming to
visit her, and her intention (delicious child touch) to make use
of the intervening time in studying to become very wise!
The most interesting of de Breze's letters was one written
from St. Pol four days after the party had successfully landed
in France. He wrote : "We were almost compelled on two or
three occasions to return to Dumbarton, and one night, about
ten leagues from the Cape of Cornwall, when the sea was won-
drously high with the biggest waves I ever saw, to our great
consternation, the rudder of our galley was broken. Never-
theless, Our Lord was pleased to intervene so that we re-
placed the rudder at once in spite of the heavy sea that was
running." These unfortunate children were tempest tossed
for eighteen days and we learn that Mary was not as ill as her
companions, so that she made sport of those less fortunate
girls. A very human touch, which was probably not much
appreciated by the sufferers. Finally, landing was made at
the little village of Roscoff on the fourteenth of August, 1548.
Surely this rock-bound landing place must have reminded the
little homesick Queen of her native land.
The opening lines of Enoch Arden might have been
written about it :
Long lines of cliff, breaking have left a chasm;
And in the chasm are foam and yellow sands;
Beyond, red roofs about a narrow wharf
In cluster; then a moulder'd church; and higher
A long street climbs to one tall-towered mill.
This iron-bound coast revels in legends of returning sea
ghosts, phantom ships, and wraiths of returning dead sailors,
but when we think of the dark destiny of our little traveler,
we carry the reflection of a darker tragedy than any in the
lore of Finisterre.
On the rock where Mary embarked may be seen the ruins
of a Gothic chapel erected in her honor, covering the imprint
of her foot where she first stepped. I cannot vouch for the
VOL. cxi. 33
498 WHEN MARY AND I WENT TO MORLAIX [July,
footprint. I can only say that if it were veritable, Mary must
have carried more weight for her years than she afterwards
did in the conduct of her own affairs. There also one can see
the old mansion, called the House of Marie-Stuart, with its
curious gargoyles on the chimney stack, where she is said to
have rested after her tempestuous sea trip, and the church of
Notre Dame de Croaz-Baz, where undoubtedly Mary offered
up prayers of thanksgiving for deliverance from the perils
of the deep. It was not "moulder'd" then as it was but barely
finished.
From Roscoff Mary began her triumphant progress
through France, which ended at St. Germain-en-Laye. Her
first stop was at St. Pol-de-Leon, only five kilometres from
Roscoff, that lovely old town with its interesting old cathedral
and its magnificant dockers, from whence Sieur de Breze
wrote his letter to Mary's mother. From St. Pol Mary made
her triumphant entry into Morlaix by boat. Let me quote from
one who, although not an eye witness, undoubtedly had the
details of this visit from the lips of those who were actual
spectators; for Albert Le Grand was born at Morlaix towards
the end of the sixteenth century, and therefore knew many
who had joined in the greeting to the Little Queen. He says :
"There arrived in the same town (Morlaix) by sea, the most
noble and puissant princess, Marie-Stuart, Queen of Scotland,
who was on her way to Paris for her marriage with the
Dauphin Francis, afterwards the second king of that name.
The Lord of Rohan, accompanied by the nobility of the coun-
try, went to receive her, and she was lodged in the Dominican
Convent. When Her Majesty, who was returning from the
Church of Notre Dame where the Te Deum had been sung,
had passed the town gate, which is called The Prison,' the
drawbridge, which was overladen by the weight of the horse-
men, broke and fell into the river, although without loss of
life. The Scotch gentlemen in the Queen's suite, who had
remained in town, feared some mischief had been intended
and began to shout, 'Treason, Treason,' but the Lord of Rohan,
who was walking by the Queen's litter, shouted to them at the
top of his voice, 'No Breton was ever a traitor,' and so quelled
their fears. Mary stayed two days at Morlaix to recover from
the fatigues of her voyage." To recover her land-legs, so to
speak, though Le Grand does not put it that way.
1920.] WHEN MARY AND I WENT TO MORLAIX 499
During her visit, de Rohan caused all the gates of the
town to be taken off of their hinges and the chains of the
bridge to be broken, in order, Le Grand says, that the people
could see Mary better, but more likely as a sign of peaceful
intent.
O! the joyous welcome of the garlanded and tapestry
hung streets of the old town for Morlaix was an old town
three hundred and seventy years ago! Oh, the clanking of
polished armor, the prancing of the richly caparisoned steeds,
the solemn Te Deums, songs of welcome and children bearing
flowers! Enjoy them all, little Mary. You are just commenc-
ing twelve years of blithesome carefree life your only happy
days for then comes sorrow's night of thirty-two years,
eighteen of them in prison, then the headsman and the block.
When Mary came to Morlaix she was five years and eight
months old. That she was pretty, graceful, and self-assured
we know from numerous eye witnesses, with a childish dignity
which charmed everyone. She was withal a merry, loveable
little girl. And this is how Mary went to Morlaix.
My coming was somewhat different, sans garlands, sans
flowers, sans everything except rain. Mais que voulez-uous?
Brittany in November? Are not its fertile fields always too
green on account of moisture? Do not the clever caricaturists
always picture a Breton with his umbrella, and does not our
very name for the common variety of that family imple-
ment gingham come from Giumgamp in Finisterre? But,
unlike Mary, I went alone. Our party from Brest, to accept
the charming invitation of Madame C to spend Sunday in
Morlaix, was to consist of my hostess, Madame M , with her
amiable son and daughter, Lieutenant Rush, A. E. F., and Mr.
Taylor, Divisional Y. M. C. A. Secretary at Brest. Alas, the
day before our planned excursion, Madame M - and her
family hastened off, in response to a telegram, to Toulon, to
meet a daughter and son-in-law returning from Tunis. Lieu-
tenant Rush had unexpected duties with the Secret Service
Bureau and Mr. Taylor was also called out of town, so I, per-
force, fared forth alone. Everything seemed inauspicious for
my trip. Ordinarily the market Sunday morning was filled
with masses of flowers, but as I trapsed through the down-
pouring rain to find some to take to my prospective hostess,
not a blossom was to be seen. This disappointed me greatly,
500 WHEN MARY AND I WENT TO MORLAIX [July,
and, with no companions and a dreary day, the prospect for
a pleasant time was not promising.
The railroad ride from Brest to Morlaix led me along
the Bay of Brest, through charming old Landerneau, well
worth a visit, past La Roche, beloved of artists, Landivisiau,
the centre of interesting excursions, through the green hills to
my destination.
The railway station of Morlaix is located at one end of
the wonderful viaduct to which I referred at the outset, high
above the little town, and I descended by a long flight of stone
steps, eight hundred and forty in number, literally from the
modern to the Middle Ages. Therefore, when I found the home
of my hostess, it seemed perfectly natural that it should bear
the date of 1505. This house, having been forty-three years
old when little Mary came to town, its walls must often have
heard the grandes dames describing her and all the gossip of
her arrival and surely must later have heard sous-lieutenants
describe the sea fights on the Nile or Trafalgar Bay for Mor-
laix has always furnished many men to the French navy or
have seen from its windows and welcomed Moreau, returned
from spoiling the Hun, as I saw the returned Breton soldiers in
1919; for Moreau, the victor of Hohenlinden, was born in
Morlaix.
Arrived at the home of my hostess, it was hard to tell
which was the most alluring, the delightful cordiality of the
family, consisting of grandmere, aged eighty-six, one of the
most remarkable old ladies I ever met; an aunt, a friend who
assisted in the honors, and Madam C - herself, or the won-
derful old house with its flamboyant carving of pillar and
post, of buttress and balustrade.
As it was nearly noon when I arrived and as the French
are always exact in the hours of their sacred meals, I was
shown up a fine old winding stairway through a typical Breton
cuisine, huge in size, with its great open fireplace, hung, as
were the walls and roof, with glistening vessels of copper and
pewter, into the generous salle-a-manger, with its heavy
groined beams, for a veritable feast; delicious pate de foie
gras, boiled tongue, with an ambrosial sauce, plump part-
ridges, with a salad such as only the French can serve, were
only some of the viands to which I was expected to do justice
to the accompaniment of the solicitous attentions of the whole
1920.] WHEN MARY AND I WENT TO MORLAIX 501
family and assiduously waited upon by a very attractive
bonne dressed in local costume. She wore the coiffure of Mor-
laix, which, from the odd arrangement of the chignon, is called
the "queue de homard;" the homard being the huge crayfish
which abounds on the coast of Finisterre. As the reading of
Dickens, with his menu-filled pages, always makes one hungry,
so does the memory of that dejeuner as I write.
Later my kind friends guided me over the interesting
town, making a veritable "pelerinage de Marie Stuart," com-
mencing with the Musee, which is located in what was the an-
cient Church of the Convent of the Dominicans, built in the
thirteenth century, where little Mary and her suite were domi-
ciled during their visit. One has therefore a valuable museum
to enjoy, lighted and beautified by the lovely rose window
and glass of the mediaeval church. The museum is most in-
teresting, not only for its wealth of rare old Breton china,
glass and relics, but for a remarkably fine gallery of paintings
by famous artists of Breton life and scenes. Here, as elsewhere
throughout France, one has the evidence of the Government's
encouragement of art. The State purchases and presents to
the local museum the best works of art of the artists of that
community, thus giving encouragement and inspiration both
to the artists and to others. While in our country it might
not be possible to have such encouragement given by the
Government, think what it would mean if each State or mu-
nicipality would do something of the same sort! With us too
often our artists are "prophets not without honor, save in their
own country."
Of course, we went to the Dominican Convent, founded in
1237, which had housed little Mary Stuart, and to the old
Maison de La Duchesse Anne with its ingeniously disposed
carved stairway and other charming incidents of Middle Age
architecture. That Anne of Brittany occupied this house when
she came to Morlaix in 1503 is doubtful. More likely she
stopped at the convent which afterwards received Mary, but
the ubiquitious Anne has as many "Maisons" scattered over
Brittany as there are headquarters of our George Washington
in America.
The rain, for a wonder, having ceased temporarily, we
spent the whole afternoon delving into the quaint sights of
the old town until darkness came and we wtjnt home for tea
502 THE RAINBOW [July,
and music. At six o'clock we sat down to another feast be-
ginning with a wonderful Breton soup which was like molten
pleasure, and finally ending with a delicious sweet cake pecu-
liar to Morlaix. I wonder if little Mary feasted as royally
when she was at Morlaix as I did. But duty called me at
Brest, and as there must be an end to all good things, late that
evening weighted with sorrow at parting with such kind
friends and much food I laboriously climbed the eight
hundred and forty steps back to the realities of the present
day world. My kind hostess, who had lost her husband in the
terrible War, was rejoicing because her only brother was re-
turning safely home since the armistice. May nothing ever
come in the future to disturb the peace and happiness of that
delightful, hospitable home in the Rue de 1'Aiguillon in old
Morlaix !
And this is how I went to Morlaix.
THE RAINBOW.
BY J. CORSON MILLER.
THOU art a promise, hanging high
Across the recent flame-swept sky,
That Peace shall come, whate'er betide,
When thunders rock, and tempests ride.
Thou'rt like a ribbon, bright and fair,
With colors strung from angel's hair.
Thou art Earth's tender trilogy
Of Faith and Hope and Charity.
BRITISH IMPERIALISM AND POISON GAS.
BY P. G. SMYTH.
NDER existing conditions, the present century
shall witness the practical extermination of the
Irish race in Ireland. In and around the Isle of
Destiny preparations elaborate and sinister are
being made towards this end arrangements of
impending doom, chilling and depressing.
The last remnant of the Hibernians, both the Gaelic race
and its ethnological kindred, Viking and Norman, Cymric and
Saxon still more Irish is now making its last desperate
struggle for existence in its little island citadel on the western
verge of Europe.
"Great Britain's bastion" this is, according to British
statesmen, Ireland's situation and main use and purpose,
naturally and otherwise. So the native Irish race, now de-
manding a republic, must be removed by extinction or exile,
to make the world safe for British imperialism. It is a plain,
blunt, final proposition, the logical end and outcome of Eng-
land's traditional and inherent policy with regard to Ireland.
Everything is ready for its attempted enforcement armies
and navies, tanks and aeroplanes, machine guns and flame
throwers. (The arrangements are more perfect, though, of
course, on a far more vast and comprehensive scale, than were
King William's for the massacre of Glencoe or General Dyer's
for the late human battue at Amritsar.)
But there has ensued a poignant period of hesitation, of
"watchful waiting." The masses of the English and Scotch
will strongly disapprove of the affair. What matter, once the
crucial work is over? what is the temporary turning out of a
government compared to the permanent turning out of a
nation? But it might be well to have, on the part of the Amer-
ican Republic, toleration at least, if not sanction, of the pro-
posed clearance. Thus, quivering in the yet uncertain balance,
hangs the fate of the Irish race in Ireland.
A main feature of the anti-Irish war now being desper-
ately waged in America is the lavish use of literary poison gas.
504 BRITISH IMPERIALISM AND POISON GAS [July,
It is sent in nauseous waves all over the country, in a desperate
alien attempt to asphyxiate and kill reason and common
sense, honor, humanity, and fair play. (It travels in various
forms books, pamphlets, magazines, newspapers, etc. and it
is paid for by money advanced by pro-British American finan-
ciers to a great but bankrupt power.)
As a sample of the stuff that is now being diffused from
the British trenches in America let us take a book 1 purporting
to be written on the Irish situation by "a Frenchman who for
years had taken the Irish anti-British propaganda as genuine,"
but who eventually saw a great light, and was converted from
his utterly erroneous views by admiring observation of British
virtues, and who "now feels himself able to pronounce the Irish
question 'an international imposture.' "
The advertising idea is good, though in a manner stale
and dubious. But a Frenchman in strenuous opposition to
an Irish Republic is a wonderful discovery. Such a one, how-
ever, is introduced to America as "R. C. Escouflaire."
This author goes back a few thousand years and starts
his engine of destruction over the graves and reputations of
Ireland's ancient kings! He darkly hints accusations of poly-
gamy. This is severe, unfair, the extreme of archaeological
cruelty. How can he so vilify that long silent dust, so peace-
fully reposing in the royal cemeteries of Brugh and Tailton and
Cruachan! Does he expect Rory the Great to arise in Milesian
majesty and deny the odious charge? Does he want Conn of
the Hundred Battles to get up and fight another? Fortunately,
however, for those long departed monarchs, they have no need
to vindicate themselves' either through medium or ouija board;
every reader of Irish history knows that, by strict law and
custom, they were "one wife" potentates, even the pagan ones.
Skipping down to the invasion of the Norsemen and their
final overthrow, "M. Escouflaire" makes this extraordinary
statement: "In Ireland they are always talking of the past,
and every year they celebrate in all seriousness the anniversary
of a defeat of the Danes at Clontarf in 1014." Now, probably
not one Irishman in a hundred is able to tell offhand the exact
date of the battle of Clontarf, and certainly none ever heard
of a public celebration of its anniversary. Whence, then, this
1 Ireland An Enemy to the Allies, by R. C. Escouflaire. New York: E. P. Dutton
& Co.
1920.] BRITISH IMPERIALISM AND POISON GAS 505
specific mention of a holiday of national jubilation, an Irish
Fourth of July? But hold Clontarf was fought on a Good
Friday. The mystery is cleared! Our profoundly observant
author identifies the religious services in the Irish churches on
Good Friday, in commemoration of Our Lord's Passion and
Death, with the celebration of the anniversary of Clontarf!
However, it is not the policy of their alien rulers that the
people of Ireland should know the history of their country.
It is prohibited in the so-called national schools, which are
under the control of the British Government, as those of Prus-
sian Poland were under the Prussian, although our author
makes the astounding yet amusing statement that Allen,
Larkin, and O'Brien, the Manchester Martyrs "are held up as
an example to Irish youth, and extolled in national school
manuals!" England has always censored the Irish school
books.
"The power of the Crown was never anything but a
myth," says our author an unwitting statement, but the truest
in his book, for, four centuries after the invasion of Strongbow
and the alleged "annexation of Ireland," at the beginning of
the reign of Henry VIII., English rule was limited to "six half
counties," or less than one-tenth of the island; and even for
this an annual tribute called "black rent," amounting to about
$150,000 in present money values, had to be paid to Irish chiefs
for protection or toleration.
Time rolled on, and Queen Elizabeth, by dint of over-
whelming armies, wholesale murder and rapine, the stealing
of cattle and burning of corn, established her rule in a large
portion of the country, chiefly over "carcasses and ashes." In
violation of the righteous old Irish agrarian laws she "granted"
the lands of the clansmen to favorites, who put the occupants
under heavy rents. She was the first practical exponent of
English imperial profiteering, which has been the bane of the
world ever since. "On the whole the English Reformation did
not treat her (Ireland) with much severity," says our admirer
of English imperial gentleness. At Rome, five years ago, Feb-
ruary 12, 1915, were put forward by Papal Decree for beatifica-
tion or declaration of martyrdom, the names of two hundred
and fifty-seven persons who were known to have suffered, with
unknown hosts of others, for the Catholic Faith in Ireland.
When the cruelly oppressed Irish joined in fbe great rising
506 BRITISH IMPERIALISM AND POISON GAS [July,
of 1641, the English Parliament declared forfeit 2,500,000 acres
of Irish land, occasioning a grand rush of profiteers, prominent
among whom was Cromwell, whose sinister figure casts a
lengthening gloom. Oliver Cromwell deceived numerous peo-
ple before his death and a great many more since. These
included the late Theodore Roosevelt, whose impulsive esti-
mate of this miscreant was later thought worthy of suppres-
sion. Since Carlyle cynically selected him as an idol and set
him up as the Moloch of British imperialism, Cromwell has
naturally attracted a crowd of worshippers. Among these, of
course, is the author of the book before us, who contributes a
few votive splashes of whitewash and approves Cromwell's
work of massacre and attempted extermination in Ireland.
As to history's dealings with Cromwell, there is one who
may well be cited here, General Sir William F. Butler. This
Christian soldier and philanthropist was a native of Water-
ford, a patriot and a poet. He died some years ago. Charac-
teristic of the man is his poem, "A Request." 2 Of this poem
the late lamented General Thomas F. Barry of the United
States Army, said it had "the real Irish ring to it."
Give me but six-feet three (one inch to spare)
Of Irish ground, dig it anywhere;
And for the poor soul say an Irish prayer
Above the spot.
Let it be hill where cloud and mountain meet,
Or vale where grows the tufted meadow sweet,
Or boreen trod by peasants' shoeless feet;
It matters not.
I loved them all the vale, the hill,
The moaning sea, the flagger-lilied rill,
The yellow furze, the lake-shore lone and still,
The wild bird's song.
But more than hill or valley, bird or moor,
More than the green fields of my river Suir
I loved those hapless ones the Irish poor
All my life long.
Little I did for them in outward deed,
And yet be unto them of praise the meed,
For the stiff fight I waged 'gainst lust and greed;
I learnt it there.
This poem was first published In THE CATHOLIC WORLD, June, 1911.
1920.] BRITISH IMPERIALISM AND POISON GAS 507
So give me Irish grave, 'mid Irish air,
With Irish grass above it anywhere;
And let some passing peasant give a prayer
For the soul there.
In a letter to Speaker Lenthall, of the English Parliament,
Cromwell boasts of his atrocities in Drogheda and even gloats
over barbarous details. He tells that, when he had ordered
the steeple of St. Peter's Church set on fire, one of the victims
cried out in his agony, "God confound me, I burn."
"Did ever a general commanding an army descend to such
miserable details?" says General Butler. "Imagine a com-
mander-in-chief of an army writing to the Speaker of Parlia-
ment gloating over the frenzied exclamations of soldiers whom
he had condemned to death. He deemed the incident so wel-
come to Parliament that he gave it a prominent place in his
official dispatches. . . .
"For quite two hundred years before our time not one his-
torian or writer of any eminence had had anything good to
say about him, but we have changed all that. His eulogizers
could now be counted by thousands, his admirers by millions.
The two chief objects of Cromwell's efforts were plunder and
persecution. He and his were the saints who were to possess
the earth; all the rest were sinners, who were to be cast out
and persecuted. Who could count the oaths taken and broken
by him? He swore to protect the king and then cut his head
off. He swore to be loyal and to uphold the liberties and the
rights of his country, but he trampled upon the one and
destroyed the other. . . ."
Cromwell's ruthless campaign in Ireland ran from August
to May, 1649-1650. At the head of a large and terrible army,
by his command devoid of mercy, he stormed the Anglo-Irish
cities of Drogheda and Wexford and butchered indiscrim-
inately the armed and the unarmed, men, women and children.
At Clonmel he met a real Irish army and suffered the greatest
repulse of his life, losing 2,500 of his Ironsides, after which
he returned to England. Later he took his revenge by seizing
and transporting to slavery in the West Indies 80,000 Irish
a number exceeding by 10,000 the American soldiers killed in
the late War. Says Daniel O'Connell, in his "Memoir" to
Queen Victoria : "Of the eighty thousand, in six years, the sur-
508 BRITISH IMPERIALISM AND POISON GAS [July,
vivors did not amount to twenty individuals!" But the Irish
race, cruelly robbed and sadly diminished, lived on, and so
did the national spirit; as that quaint and sterling old chron-
icler soggarth, Geoffrey Keating, says; "nor was the island
ever absolutely subdued, so as to be under a foreign yoke, from
the first arrival of the Milesians unto this day."
"Because James II. was a Roman Catholic, Ireland all of
a sudden forgot her so-called inalienable rights, began to wear
the white cockade, and for fifty years she sang:
'Twas all for our rightful King."
This is not an embarrassing memory as "M. Escouflaire" sug-
gests. It is instructive, illuminating, reminiscent of noble
heroisms and self-sacrifices, of stainless honor, manly con-
fidence sadly misplaced and grossly betrayed.
The native Irish supported James because he had taken
off the statute books the penal laws against Catholics; the
British faction feared that he might go further and give back
to the Irish the lands of which they had been robbed by his
brother, father, and grandfather. Later, in exile, he furtively
issued a proclamation to the English people that if they would
take him back as king he would leave his former opponents
in undisturbed possession of the forfeited Irish estates even
those of the gallant Irish officers who had lost then- all by
adhering to him and who were even then supporting him.
This was the only experience of the United Irish nation
with an alien or semi-alien king for the Stuarts were orig-
inally of the same Milesian stock as the MacCarthys, O'Ma-
honys, O'Donohoes, and other leading families of Munster.
Limerick surrendered after a long and gallant fight, but
on strict condition, set down in writing, that the people of
Ireland should have full enjoyment of civil and religious
liberty. But scarcely had the Irish army sailed away to France
when the Treaty of Limerick was most basely violated. "M.
Escouflaire" endeavors to make light of the infamous act with
a suitably infamous excuse: "It is too much to hope that a
piece of parchment can prevent the workings of natural and
popular reactions as irresistible as the forces of nature." The
analogy between this English "piece of parchment" and the
modern Prussian "scrap of paper" is too obvious for comment.
1920.] BRITISH IMPERIALISM AND POISON GAS 509
Let us pass in silence over the long, black, horrible night
of the Irish penal laws. "More than 500,000 of the youngest
and proudest (of the Irish) emigrated between 1691 and 1745;
they went to fight in European armies, and the English met
them again on the field of Fontenoy." The author of this
volume fails to record the result of that meeting, also its
sequel how it enabled the Irish to hear Mass without being
chased and shot down, how it set King George vehemently
cursing the penal laws.
Laying aside temporarily this deceitful volume, we listen
to the shot fired at Lexington, the shot that was "heard round
the world." Soon comes news of the prowess of the numerous
Irish fighters under Washington and their continued suc-
cesses, leading to the warning declaration of Lord Mountjoy
in Parliament: "You lost America through the Irish." A great
additional cause of alarm is given by the music of the "Mar-
seillaise" and the flutter of the conquering tricolor. The nu-
merous Irish Catholic youths who, by law debarred from an
education at home, were forced to go abroad, were likely to
come home with reenforced convictions of national independ-
ence. That spirit has endured; and never were prelates,
priests, parsons, and people more united in Ireland than they
are today, in the demand for national independence.
The agitation begun in Ireland to make Catholics eligible
as members of the British Parliament, was headed by Daniel
O'Connell. It occasioned, says John Mitchel, "the most tre-
mendous clamor of alarmed Protestants that had been heard
in the three kingdoms since the days of James II." far greater
than the cry against Home Rule raised by Carson and his
followers. The prime minister at the time was the Duke of
Wellington. He said it was impossible to place Roman Catho-
lics with safety in a Protestant legislature. But the Iron Duke
soon changed his attitude as a result of information that
privately came to him from across the water.
The cogent reason for this is given by the late William
John Fitzpatrick, expert historical writer: "The late Stephen
Coppinger, of the Catholic Association, informed the writer
of these pages that he had been himself assured by Dr. Eng-
land, Bishop of Charleston, South Carolina, that he (Dr. Eng-
land) almost personally organized, in 1828, a force of 40,000
men, which, headed by General Montgomery, the son of an
510 BRITISH IMPERIALISM AND POISON GAS [July,
Irish refugee, was intended for the invasion of Ireland had
Emancipation continued to have been withheld." This is an
important historical fact, though little known or noticed.
O'Connell knew little about Bishop England's army. But Wel-
lington had the whole scheme of it, with the result that Catho-
lic members were allowed in Parliament.
Let it not be forgotten, however, that among the best of
the English people, when the anti-Irish poison gas was even
stronger and viler in Great Britain than it is now in America,
the cause of Ireland had many champions, hearty, generous,
and devoted as it has at present fine and loveable char-
acters.
Among these was the celebrated Sydney Smith, Canon of
St. Paul's, a Protestant churchman popular in London society.
With all his playful wit and kindly humor he could be in
deadly, gripping, biting earnest when aroused by canting at-
tacks on the much maligned Irish. On one occasion he thus
read the law of humanity to his astounded audience:
"Why will you attribute the turbulence of the Irish to any
cause but the right to any but your own scandalous oppres-
sion? If you tie your horse up to a gate and beat him cruelly,
is he vicious because he kicks you? If you have plagued and
worried a mastiff dog for years, is he mad because he flies at
you whenever he sees you? Hatred is an active, troublesome
passion. Depend upon it, whole nations have always some
reason for their hatred. Before you refer the turbulence of
the Irish to incurable defects in their character, tell me if you
have treated them as friends and equals. Have you protected
their commerce? Have you respected their religion? Have
you been as anxious for their freedom as your own?
"Nothing of all this. What then? Why, you have confis-
cated the territorial surface of their country twice over; you
have massacred and exported her inhabitants; you have de-
prived four-fifths of them of every civil privilege; you have
at every period made her commerce and manufacture slavishly
subordinate to your own.
"And yet, the hatred which the Irish bear to you is the
result of an original turbulence of character and a primitive
obdurate wildness, utterly incapable of civilization!"
Compare this generous outburst with the characteristic
snarl of Carlyle: "Ireland is a mouse in the path of an ele-
1920.] BRITISH IMPERIALISM AND POISON GAS 511
pliant. What will the elephant do? Squelch it, by heaven,
squelch it."
The sole purpose of this volume is most evidently mis-
representation and calumny. "Calomniez, calomniez, H en
reste toujours quelque chose." Throw plenty of mud, some of
it will stick. The book is merely a ghastly parade of lies,
long dead and dishonored, drawn from unhallowed graves and
arrayed with some new and vile ones of the writer's own
manufacture, emanations of a diseased and prejudiced mind.
Some passages reveal, not a Frenchman at all but a rabid
English imperialist.
Since little Greece obtained her freedom, not so very long
ago, her population has more than doubled. Since Sydney
Smith hurled his denunciations of English intolerance, since
O'Connell agitated, since Bishop England organized his army,
the population of Ireland has sunk to less than one-half!
The remnant, the only white nation now unfree, is men-
aced with extermination in response to its peremptory and
uncompromising demand for freedom and independence. The
alien circle of steel is strengthening and contracting. Erin's
very darkest day seems to be at hand. But she is no longer the
sad and submissive Erin with the tear and the smile in her
eyes. She is a very active, fearless, determined Erin, bearing
aloft the torch of liberty.
"Though the aeroplanes of the foreigners manoeuvre and
the tread of their marching soldiers is heard so often in our
streets," says the vigorous young prelate, Bishop O'Doherty
of Clonfert, "the fight for freedom so well begun shall go on
uninterrupted. Ireland is not to be governed by any alien
power. We shall yet, with God's help and grace, bring Democ-
racy before the eyes of the world, when Ireland is free, as
she shall be free, and one of God's own nations."
THE LOYALIST.
BY JAMES FRANCIS BARRETT.
CHAPTER V.
BUSIER man in the city of Philadelphia during the
winter and spring season of '78 than John Ander-
son, would have been hard to find. For weeks he
had applied himself with relentless energy to the
work before him; for months he had deprived him-
self of the customary rounds of pleasure in the
interests of the seemingly gigantic task allotted to him. At last,
the results of his toil appeared appreciable. It was now past
Eastertide and the moments were hurrying faster and faster to-
wards the culmination of the conspiracy that was forming, little
by little, in the heart of the community like an abscess in the body
of a sick man.
Progress had been made at New York, although it was
acknowledged the recruiting there had fallen far short of all ex-
pectations. Still it was much simpler to effect the formation of
such a regiment where the work could be carried on openly and
under the protection of General Clinton; and where no sym-
pathizer of the Colonists, however loyal, would dare to enter a
formal protest against the proceedings. It is quite true Catholics
were divided there as elsewhere; for not every one lent his spon-
taneous, complete, and energetic adhesion to the cause of Amer-
ican Independence.
But it was found impossible to gather in the city, now held
by the enemy, the thousand or more men sufficient to compose
a regiment. Hence it was necessary to draw from the neighbor-
ing Colonies. Anderson had come to Philadelphia with this object
in view and, as an aid to his work, had established himself im-
mediately in the graces of the military authorities. Quietly,
privately, secretly, he pursued his quest, seeking out likely indi-
viduals whom he impressed into the service of His Majesty with
not so much as a scruple as to means, fair or foul. Blackmail he
employed freely, and the pressure of unpaid debts reaped for him
a harvest of names.
The currency was then worthless and the cost of living
enormous. He was exceptional who could boast of being
free from debt, and the common gaol and the stocks in the market
1920.] THE LOYALIST 513
place at Second and High Streets were tireless in meting out their
punishments to the delinquent debtors. Anderson took royal
advantage of this state of affairs, either by resolving the debt in
favor of an enlistment in the company, or by effecting a threatened
punishment on the part of the creditor unless his wishes were
complied with. Many recruits, who otherwise would have re-
jected flatly the base proposition, were secured by such means.
At length he had registered about an hundred names, drawn
from all classes of the city. The services of Father Farmer had
been sought as chaplain, but he had gently but firmly declined.
Colonel Clifton was still in charge of the regiment, but the other
officers were to be Roman Catholics and appointed by the colonels.
A meeting for the purpose of organization would be held in the
Provincial Hall in the course of a few weeks. Then the company
would be shipped as soon as possible to New York for incorpora-
tion in the regiment there.
Anderson found General Arnold a ready and effective instru-
ment in the perfection of the plot. Not only had the latter sup-
plied him with all manner of information, but his authority had
been employed on more than one occasion in the matter of im-
pressment. Whatever motives actuated the General were ascribed
by Anderson solely to his profound dislike of Catholics and all
things Catholic. A further incentive to the success of the project
was furnished by the issuance of a pass by the Military Governor
enabling a vessel to leave the port of Philadelphia, where it had
been tied up, for New York, for the purpose of transporting to
that city the members of the recruited company. This was, of
course, a violation of the military code, but the affair was done
so secretly that it was known only to Anderson and the Governor.
The remote preparations were now completed. All was in readi-
ness for the meeting of the so-called volunteers.
Meanwhile, Marjorie had continued to be an object of in-
terest to the busy Anderson, and he had paid attention to her
with a marked gallantry. Through the late winter and early
spring he had been a frequent visitor at her home, and had often
escorted her in public to the theatre and dancing assemblies.
He flattered himself that her confidence had been gained, and
much information helpful to his scheme had been obtained. He
had played his part well, although, on one occasion, he had almost
revealed himself; nevertheless he was completely satisfied that
she did not for a moment suspect the real purpose of his designs.
Now he felt obliged to hold one more conference with the
Military Governor, for it was required that he know definitely
the time set for the vessel's departure. That was the sole obstacle
VOL. CXI. S3
514 THE LOYALIST [July,
to his plans, for the date of the assembly depended upon the
sailing day of the transport. Arnold would know of its readiness;
its clearance was then a matter of personal convenience.
So, this fine afternoon in early May, he resolved to direct his
steps in the direction of Mount Pleasant and complete his plans.
It was a long walk but less attention would be aroused by his
going afoot, and so he started early. Little did he suspect, how-
ever, that his every move was being observed, and that a pair of
eyes had pursued him to the very park, watching him even as he
ascended the great stone steps of the mansion.
He lifted the brass knocker and gave two or three slight taps.
Even as he did so the blue eyes were fixed upon him.
The dining hall at Mount Pleasant was such as was befitting
the noble proportions of the mansion. It adjoined the hall oppo-
site the great drawing-room, its eastern side terminating in an
ell extension from the hall proper, where a wide easy staircase,
with a balustrade of gracefully turned spindles, ascended to the
second floor. It was lighted, not only by the fire that burned in
the reredos at the northern wall, but also by eight cresset-lamps
and as many candles set in huge silver candelabras on the centre
table.
Anderson was hungry from his long walk and ate well. A
great roast goose reposing in a huge silver platter was brought in
by the servants and set before them. There were vegetables of
every sort, jellies, sweetmeats, floating islands, and a dessert of
fruits, raisins and almonds. Madeira was drunk freely by all
without any apparent disadvantage.
"And how were all at home?" asked Peggy when they were
seated. The conversation was on general topics for the servants
were coming in and out with the food.
"I saw only your sister when I called with Marjorie. Mr.
Shippen was away and Mrs. Shippen had a cold, a very slight one,
I believe."
"She is susceptible to asthmatic attacks," observed the Gen-
eral.
"Quite!" replied Anderson.
"She bears up remarkably. I think she has never missed a
function."
"Her will power alone," replied Peggy. "She can surmount
obstacles; she has never lost an opportunity."
They lapsed into silence, occupying themselves with the deli-
cious repast. Sometimes they talked of this, that and the other
quite freely and easily of the society news, of the presence of
1920.] THE LOYALIST 515
Miss Franks at the wedding, of the splendor of it all. Indeed,
there was nothing to indicate more than a company of old-time
friends.
"I am ready to take my charges along with me," announced
Anderson at length.
"Hush! Not so loud," cautioned Arnold. "Later in the
park, we shall treat of that."
Then the servants came again and removed the dishes. After
another goblet of Madeira they left the table, going immediately
out of doors, for it was now dusk.
"I can do no more with the recruiting. I have, in round
numbers, an hundred." Anderson began when they had been
seated in the cypress walk. The moon was not yet half way to
the zenith and lay, a dull copper disk, in the eastern sky, partially
eclipsed by the chimney of the great house. A solemn silence,
terrifying and rife with mysterious sensations, seemed to per-
vade the place. It was a setting well fitted to shroud deep and
dark designs. No one would dare to venture near.
"You have done well. Egad! I know of none who could
have done better."
"Yet it was no easy task, I assure you. They thrill with the
very spirit of rebellion. Cadwalader will never forgive me, and
will haunt me when he dies."
"You got him?" Arnold asked.
"I did. But I had to take proceedings against him which por-
tended the stocks. I promised him a wheelbarrow to be pushed
every day in the resolution of his debt. Only when I had the
gaoler at hand did he reconsider. The debt has been paid, and
he has already signed."
"I am glad you got him. He's a Papist, isn't he?" inquired
Peggy.
"He is, and a stanch one at that," replied her husband.
"Let's get down to business," interrupted Anderson. "How
soon may your vessel sail?"
"This week, or the early part of next," replied Arnold. "I
drew the pass three weeks ago. With the time for clearance and
sailing allowed, she should be ready now. You had better make
an allowance of a week."
"How about the crew?"
"They can be depended upon. They are beholden to her
owner. Have no fears concerning them."
"How soon may she clear?"
He was persistent in this.
"In a few days. Tomorrow if pressed."
516 THE LOYALIST [July,
"I want to get through with this business as soon as I can
and get out of this town. It may get too hot for me. If I had
that meeting off my mind and the men on board bound for New
York I would enjoy greater repose."
"I thought you were never apprehensive," remarked Peggy.
"With such composure and gallantry the world would judge that
cares set lightly upon your head."
"Happy is he who can abandon everything with which his
conscience is burdened. I have enjoyed no peace of soul for years,
and I see an untimely end."
"Be not so melancholy," observed Arnold. "My boy, the
future and the world lie before you."
"Like a yawning abyss," was the grave reply.
"Oh! spare us your terrible verdicts," cried Peggy with a
smile.
"I believe that I should have crushed with my scorn the
philosopher who first uttered this terrible but profoundly true
thought," said Anderson. " 'Prudence is the first thing to forsake
the wretched!'"
"Have you been imprudent?" she asked.
"I did find a charm in my escapades. At first I tingled with
fear, but I gradually laid aside that cloak of suspicion which
guards safety, and stalked about naked. A despicable contempt
arises from an unreserved intimacy. We grow bolder with our
efforts."
"What is success?" asked Peggy.
Their mood was heavy. A sadness had settled upon them
like the blanket of the night. Only the moon climbing into the
heavens radiated glory.
"Come! Away with those dismal topics!" exclaimed the
General. "This is the time for rejoicing."
"Can you rejoice?" inquired the visitor.
"I, too, should be happy, but I fear, alas, I am not. My
people give me no peace."
"Why not render your country a lasting service?"
"How?"
"By performing a heroic deed that will once for all put an end
to this unseemly conflict."
"Never! I have been shattered twice for my efforts. I am
done with active field duty."
"I do not think of that," Anderson assured him.
"Of what, then?"
"You know that the mother country has already offered con-
ciliation. The Colonies shall have an American Parliament com-
1920.] THE LOYALIST 517
posed of two chambers; all the members to be Americans by birth,
and those of the upper chamber to have the same title, the same
rank, as those of the House of Lords in England."
"What? A Marquis of Pennsylvania, a Duke of Massachu-
setts Bay?" he laughed aloud at this.
"No less fitting than the Duke of Albermarle."
"Why do you mention him?" Arnold inquired immediately.
A thought flashed before his mind. "Had Peggy and this man
conversed on that point?"
"He simply came into my mind. Why?"
"Oh! Nothing. Continue."
"As I was saying; all laws, and especially tax laws, shall be
the work of this legislature, with the signature of the Viceroy.
They shall enjoy in every relation the advantage of the best
government. They shall, if necessary, be supported by all the
naval and military force of England, without being exposed to
the dangers or subjected to the taxes from which such a military
state is inseparable."
"But how? What can I do that I have not already done?"
"You have the courage, you have the ingenuity to render
that important service. Why allow your countrymen to shed
more blood when the enemy is willing to grant all you are fighting
for? You can save them from anarchy. You can save them
from the factions of Congress."
"God knows how ardently I desire such a consummation,"
breathed the Governor.
"I am confident that he would perform any act, however
heroic or signal, to benefit the cause of his country," remarked
Peggy with deliberate emphasis.
"Name it. What shall I do?" he asked.
"Act the part of General Monk in history," announced
Anderson.
Arnold recoiled. He could not believe his ears. Then the
awful truth dawned upon him.
"Is this your work?" he turned to Peggy fiercely.
"On my honor, I never thought of it." His wife was fright-
ened at his sudden change of manner.
There was silence. The trio sat in thought, one awaiting the
other to speak the first word.
"Never," blurted Arnold. "Never, so long as I wear this
uniform."
"And yet the world resounds with his praises, for he per-
formed a disinterested and humane act."
"A treacherous and cowardly act!"
518 THE LOYALIST [July,
"Listen, I shall confide in you. If you would but exert your
influence in favor of an amicable adjustment of the difficulties
between the Colonies and the mother country, you might com-
mand ten thousand guineas and the best post in the service of
the government."
"Would that mean a peerage?" asked Peggy suddenly.
"Assuredly," was the reply.
She stood up and strutted in a pompous and stately manner
before them; then she turned and courtesied before her husband.
"Your Grace, the carriage waits without. The Duchess is
already in waiting," she announced with a sweeping gesture.
He scowled at her, but did not answer.
"Clive saved the British Empire in India and you can save
the Colonies," insisted Anderson.
"Would not a proud position at court, the comfortable in-
come of a royal estate, the possession of a peerage on home soil
more than reward a man as was the case with General Monk?"
challenged Peggy, with a flash of sudden anger.
"And leave my country in its hour of need," he finished the
sentence for her.
"Your country!" she taunted. "What has your country done
for you. The empty honors you have gained were wrung from
her. The battle scars you bear with you were treated with in-
gratitude. You were deprived of your due honors of command.
Even now you are attacked and hounded from every angle. Your
country! Pooh! A scornful mistress!"
She sat down and folded her arms, looking fiercely into the
dark.
It is strange how human nature could be touched by such
small affairs. The war of continents meant very little to her
imagination. Certainly the parallel was not perfect; but it seemed
to her to fit.
He looked around slowly.
"You took me for what I am," he said to her. "I gave you
prestige, wealth, happiness. But I have promised my life to my
country if she requires it, and I shall never withdraw that promise
while I live. Better the grave of the meanest citizen than the
mausoleum of a traitor."
"But think of your country!" insisted Anderson.
"Anderson," was the reply. "I know the needs of the coun-
try and I know deeply my own grievances. Suppose I yield to
your suggestions and Britain fails" he paused as if to measure
the consequences "I shall be doomed. I shall be called a bigot.
My children will hate me."
1920.] THE LOYALIST 519
He seemed to waver. His earlier enthusiasm apparently di-
minished before their attack.
"But," continued Anderson, "with your aid Britain cannot
fail. And remember how England rewards those who render her
great and signal services. Look at the majestic column at Blen-
heim Palace reared to the memory of John Churchill, Duke of
Marlborough. Contrast with it what Peggy has just said, the in-
gratitude, the injustice, the meanness, with which Congress has
treated you."
"Must the end justify the means?" he mused. "Can you con-
tinue to urge me to duplicate the treachery of Churchill, who can
never be forgiven for his treason? Whatever else he may have
achieved, you must remember he was first and last a
traitor."
"He was doubly a traitor, if you please to call him so. He
first betrayed his benefactor, James, to ally himself with the
Prince of Orange; and then on the pretext of remorse, broke
faith with William; acted the part of a spy in his court and camp;
offered to corrupt his troops and lead them over to James; and
still all was forgotten in the real service which he rendered to his
country, and his name has gone into history
He was interrupted by a sharp sound, as if someone had
stepped upon a branch or a twig causing it to snap beneath his
feet. On the instant, Anderson was upon his feet, his hand feeling
instinctively for his revolver.
"We are betrayed," he whispered. "There is a spy here."
All had arisen in silence and were peering into the blackness
of the night whence the sound apparently came. Anderson
thought he saw a figure emerge from behind a tree far off in the
distance and he immediately gave chase, opening fire as he did
so. Several times he fired into the dark space before him, for it
was bristling with shade notwithstanding the obscure light of the
moon. As he covered the wide area between him and the river,
the lithe form of a man emerged from the wooded area and dis-
appeared down the incline which led to the water. Nearing the
bank, he heard distinctly the splash of the body and he fired
again into the spot whence the noise arose. The waters were still
in commotion when he reached them, but there was no one to be
found; nothing save the gentle undulation of the surface as it
closed over its burden, and gradually became placid under the soft
stillness of the night. After several minutes of intense vigilance,
he slowly retraced his steps.
"The river has swallowed him," he exclaimed as he neared
520 THE LOYALIST [July,
Arnold and Peggy, who were standing quite motionless at the side
of the settees.
"Who was it?" the General asked eagerly.
"I did not see him. He disappeared into the river. I heard
the splash of his dive and fired several times in its direction,
but saw no one."
"Did he swim it?"
"No! I would have seen him. The water was unruffled ex-
cept for the disturbance caused by his dive. The poor devil must
have sunk to the bottom. Perhaps one of my shots took effect."
"I don't like this," muttered Arnold. "I would not have that
conversation overheard for the crown of England. An enemy was
near. I hope to God he is in the bottom of the river."
"Still, I may have hit him. I was no more than fifty yards
away."
"I shall have the bed dragged in the morning. I could not
rest without finding him. His identity must be learned."
Leaving the settees, they set off in the direction of the house,
entering by the rear door. The servants were already in alarm
over the shooting, and were standing in a group behind the thres-
hold motionless with awe. Peggy paused to assure them of their
safety, narrating briefly the cause of the disturbance, together
with the probable fate of the spy. She rejoined her husband and
his guest in the drawing-room.
"I wonder who the intruder was?" Arnold muttered. There
was a look of worry and anxiety on his face. His fingers nerv-
ously locked and interlocked and the next moment grasped his
chin and rubbed his cheek. He put his foot upon the stool and
took it down again. Then he sat forward in his chair.
"Reed is behind this," he ejaculated. "You will find out
that I am right. Reed has done this, or has sent one of his
lieutenants. D - him ! He has hounded me."
"I may have been tracked. Perhaps it was I who was sought.
My late movements might have created suspicion, and it is pos-
sible that I was shadowed here."
"No, Anderson. No! It was not you they were seeking.
It is I, I tell you. Reed has been watching me like a sharp-
shooter from the day I arrived. He has been the author of the
rumors which you have heard about town, and he would risk his
life to be enabled to establish a serious charge against me. I
am sure of it. Reed is behind this; Reed and the City Council."
"It was a nimble form^"
"Did you say you thought you hit him?" he asked nervously,
seeking some source of comfort and assurance.
1920.] THE LOYALIST 521
"As I live, I hit him," Anderson promised him. "Else I
would have discovered him in the act of swimming. He is in the
bottom of the river."
"That's good, d - him. Oh! If it were but Reed himself!
He haunts me."
"He would not haunt you, did you but remove yourself from
here," volunteered Peggy.
"I know it. I know it," he repeated. "But how can I?"
"I suggested one avenue to you," proposed Anderson.
"Which?"
He awaited the answer.
"Via England."
His face glared with a livid red. He brought his fist high
above his head.
"By heavens!" he roared. "I won't hear that again. I won't
listen to it. I tell you, I'm afraid to do it. I cannot do it. I
cannot."
He shook his head as he slowly repeated the words.
"Pardon me," Anderson pleaded, "I intended no harm. I
apologize most sincerely for my impertinence. It will not happen
again, I assure you."
"That will do. Drop it at that."
"The vessel will be ready next week? The meeting, then,
can take place a week from Thursday."
"Undoubtedly."
"You will assure me of your interest?"
He was on the point of going. Though he had conquered,
still he did not know that he had conquered. He believed, as
he turned and faced his friend for the last time in Mount Pleasant,
that his mind was fully made up, and that he had decided for all
time in favor of the cause, at the sacrifice of himself.
"I shall do what I can," Arnold whispered, "but no more."
He parted from them at the threshold.
CHAPTER VI.
"I have always contended, Griff, that a bigot and a patriot
are incompatible," remarked Stephen as he sat on the side of his
bed and looked across the room to the window and the sunlit
street beyond.
"Is that something you have just discovered?," answered
Sergeant Griffin without taking his eyes from the newspaper
which he held before him. He was seated by the window, musing
over the paper, his curved pipe hanging idle from his mouth from
522 THE LOYALIST [July,
which fragments of smoke lazily issued, and as lazily climbed up-
ward and vanished through the open window into threads of
nothingness.
"No," was the reply, "but I have come to the conclusion that
the philosophy of religious prejudice cannot be harmonized with
true patriotism. They stand against each other like night and
day. The one necessarily excludes the other."
"Do you know, Captain," the sergeant reasoned, pointing
towards Stephen with the stem of his pipe, "a hard shell and a
fool are somewhat alike; one won't reason; the other can't."
"I guess you're right," Stephen laughed. "But love of coun-
try and love of one's neighbor should be synonymous. This I
have found by actual experience to be almost a truism."
He was idling about the room gathering wearing apparel
from the closets and drawers, pausing for a moment to feel a pile
of wet clothing that lay across the back of a straight chair.
"You must have fallen overboard last night," observed the
sergeant.
"I didn't fall, Griff; I jumped. And let me tell you, Griff,"
Stephen continued, "Arnold has become one of the most danger-
ous men in the whole American Army."
He was dressing quietly.
"And you discovered that, too?"
"I am certain of it, now."
"That is more like it. I don't suppose you ever had any
doubts about it. Now you have the facts, eh?"
"I have some of them; not all. But I have enough to court-
martial him."
"And you got them last night?"
"I did."
"And got wet, too?"
"I almost got killed," was the grave response.
"How?"
"Anderson shot at me."
"Was he with you, also?"
"No. After me."
"Come, let us hear it. Where were you?"
"At Mount Pleasant."
"With Arnold and Anderson?"
"Yes. But they did not know it. I shadowed Anderson to
the house and lay concealed in the park. In the evening they
came into the park, that is, Arnold and Peggy and Anderson."
"And they discovered you?"
"I think they did not. I was unfortunate to break a branch
1920.] THE LOYALIST 523
beneath my foot. They heard it. Of course, I was obliged to
leave hurriedly, but Anderson must have seen me running. The
distance was too great to allow him to recognize me. Then again,
I was not in uniform."
"And he shot at you, I suppose."
"He did, but the shots went wide. I decided the river was
the safest course, so I headed for that and dived in. I believe I
was fortunate in attempting to swim under water; this I did as
long as I could hold my breath. When I arose, I allowed myself
to float close to the shore along with the current until I had moved
far down the river. After that I lost all sight of him."
He was now dressed in his military uniform and looked little
exhausted from his experience of the night before, notwithstand-
ing the fact that he had enjoyed but a few hours' sleep. Still, it
was past the hour of ten, and he could tell from the appearance
of the street that the sun was already high in the heavens. He
went to the window and looked out at the citizens hurrying to
and fro about their several errands. From an open window di-
rectly across the way resounded the familiar strain of "Yankee
Doodle" drawn from a violin by a poor but extremely ambitious
musician. He stood for a minute to listen.
"There are a few of them in the Colonies," he remarked.
"I would there was one less," was the reply.
Stephen turned from the window.
"We have some work ahead of us, Griff," he said after a
long pause. "The plot is about to sizzle. Are you ready?" he
asked.
"Of course. When do you want me?"
"I cannot tell you now. I have learned that the work of re-
cruiting is about finished, and that the organization will take
place some time next week. The company will leave the next day
for New York on a vessel for which Arnold has already issued a
pass."
"Arnold?"
"Yes, Arnold," he repeated. "He has been in this thing from
the start. Remember that note I told you about? I have
watched him carefully since then, awaiting just such a move. I
can have him court-martialed for this."
"For this pass?"
"Certainly. That is a violation of Section Eighteen of the
Fifth Article of War."
The sergeant whistled.
"And I am going to this meeting."
"You are going?"
524 THE LOYALIST [July,
"Yes."
"How?"
"That I do not know. But I will find a way. They have
forced Jim Cadwalader into the company."
"Jim?"
"Yes. I learned that last night. Today I mean to see Jim
to learn the particulars. After that we shall be in a position to
decide further. You will be here when I return?"
"Yes. I shall stay here."
"I won't go until late this afternoon. Until then keep your
eye open."
"Yes, sir," he replied, saluting.
When Stephen presented himself that afternoon at Jim Cad-
walader's modest home, he had almost persuaded himself that all
would not be well. That the members of the Catholic regiment,
whom Anderson boasted had totaled nearly an hundred, could
so easily be dissuaded from their original purpose, he thought
highly improbable. He was well aware that some of his co-
religionists had been subject to British official or personal influ-
ence; that other some were vehemently opposed to the many out-
rages which had been committed and condoned in the name of
Liberty; that others still were not unmindful of the spirit of hos-
tility displayed by the Colonists during the early days, and now
refused for that reason to take sides with their intolerant neigh-
bors in their struggle for Independence. Hence it was quite true
that many Catholics were loyal to the mother country, more loyal,
in fact, than they were to the principles of American Independ-
ence and the land of their birth. These, he feared, might have
composed the bulk of the recruits, and these might be the less
easily dissuaded. On the other hand, he was satisfied that many
who were unwilling to barter their allegiance had been con-
strained to yield. If the complexion of the regiment was of the
latter variety, all would be well. His misgivings were not without
foundation.
He knocked upon the small white door of Jim's house and
inquired of Mrs. Cadwalader if he might see her husband. Jim
was at the door even as he spoke, and grasped his hand warmly,
exchanging the greetings of the day. He then led him to the
chairs under the great tree.
"I want to see you on a matter of great importance," Stephen
said with no further delay. "Tell me about Mr. Anderson."
"I guess ther' ain't much t* tell," Jim replied.
"You have held conference with him?"
1920.] THE LOYALIST 525
" Twas him thet held it; not me."
"About the Regiment?"
"Ay!"
"Have you signed your name?"
"I bed t'."
He was all in a fever; for his manner and his hesitation indi-
cated it.
"When do they meet?"
"Thursda* next."
"Are you sure?"
"Anderson hisself jest told me."
"He has been here already?"
"Ye eh, this aft'rnoon."
He looked down upon the ground, considering.
"Where do they meet?"
"Th" basement o* th' Baptist Church."
"Tell me, Jim," Stephen asked quietly. "Why did you enlist
in that company?"
"I hed t', I told ye."
"Were you compelled to?"
"I was."
And then he told him of the number of debts which beset
him, and the starvation which was beginning to prick him. He
told of the first visit of Anderson and his offer of four pounds to
every volunteer in the new regiment of Catholic soldiers. He de-
clared that he had refused absolutely to take part in any disloyal
act, however great might be the reward, and had said that he
preferred to starve until the Colonists had obtained their rights.
He then told of Anderson's second visit during which he offered
to relieve him of all financial obligations on condition that he
would sign with him; which offer he again refused. And finally
he related how he was threatened with imprisonment for his in-
debtedness, and was actually served with the papers of arrest
and confinement in the stocks unless his signature was given,
and how he was at length obliged to yield and sign over the
allegiance.
Stephen listened intently throughout it all, oddly studying
the face of his companion, reading into his very soul as he spoke.
He was satisfied now with Cadwalader's story.
"Jim," he said at length. "You do not want to join this
regiment?"
"No, sir!" he exclaimed aloud. "Not a bit uv it."
"If I promise to assist you to escape from this man will you
lend me your help?"
526 THE LOYALIST [July,
"Will I? Ev'ythin' y' ask, sir."
"His eyes brightened with manifest ardor.
"I want to go to that meeting, and I want you to let me take
your place."
"Sure, y' ken."
"And I want to borrow your clothes."
"I ain't got much," observed Jim, extending his hands and
looking down at his clothing, "but what I hev, is yours."
"And I want you to be in the vicinity of the building to join
in any agitation which may result against Mr. Anderson."
"I'll do thet, too."
"Of course, if we fail it may go hard with us. A crowd is
an uncertain element to deal with, you realize. But it is our only
chance. Will you take it?"
"O' course, I'll take it. I'll do enythin' y' say, enythin'."
"And Jim! You know of many so-called members of that
company who have been impressed in a manner similar to yours
and who, very likely, are of the same state of mind as you."
"I know meny, sir."
"Very good! Can you not move among them and acquaint
them secretly with what I have just told you. Secure their co-
operation for me so that when the moment comes I may depend
upon them for their support. Urge them, too, to join in what-
ever demonstration may be made against the project."
"I'll do thet, sir, and 'y may depend 'n me fur it."
"You say Thursday night? Keep me informed of any fur-
ther developments. At any rate, I shall see you before then.
Remember, however," he cautioned, "what I have just confided
to you must be kept with the utmost secrecy."
He raised his hand high above his head and stood up.
"I hope t' -
"Never mind swearing," interrupted Stephen pulling him
back again into his chair. "Simply be on your guard, that
is all."
"Yes, sir."
"You are right to come back," he said, "you should have per-
severed in your resistance."
"I couldn't help it, could I? I was made t'."
"We become vigorous under persecution," answered Stephen.
"I'm sorry."
"Well then tell me. Do you know aught of this Mr. Ander-
son?"
He stared at him with a questioning look. He was com-
pletely bewildered.
1920.] THE LOYALIST 527
"Thet I don't. Why? What what could I know?"
"I mean do you know who he is?"
He sat up.
"Why, I never thought o' him. He seem'd c'rrect 'nough, I
thought. Marj'rie brought 'im here, I think."
Stephen set his teeth.
"Marjorie?" he repeated. "Are you sure of that?"
"I am, sir."
"When was this?"
"It's a good time now. I jest can't r'member."
"Did she know of his purpose?" He paused as if he would
say more, but dared not.
"That I can't say. If I r'member c'rrectly she kept herself
wid th' old lady."
"How often did she accompany him?"
"Just thet once."
"You mean she simply made you acquainted with him?"
"Yes, sir."
A light began to glimmer in Stephen's mind; and gradually
the truth began to dawn upon him.
"In her presence, I presume, the conversation was more or
less general. He alluded to the scheme which was uppermost in
his mind only secretly with you?"
"Thet wuz all, sir."
He knew well enough now what his friend meant, though
nothing of the details; and from the uncertainty and the appre-
hension of his manner he judged that there was much of which
he was still completely in the dark. Anderson had come to Jim
with the girl to secure an advantageous introduction; after that
he had no immediate need of her company. He was still of the
opinion that she was entirely ignorant of his character and mo-
tives, although she was unwittingly an important instrument in
his hands. Stephen longed to reveal the truth of the situation
to her, but dared not; at any rate, thought he, when the proper
time came she would be enabled to appreciate for herself the
trend of the whole affair.
"Can I ask ye," inquired Jim in a voice that indicated timid-
ity, "will this affair I mean, d'ye s'pose this thing '11 bring us
t' eny harm, 'r thet they'll be a disorder?"
Stephen's eyes danced with excitement.
"Do they observe the courtesies of the law? If it comes to
the worst, yes there will be a scene and the grandest scene in
which a villain ever participated."
528 THE LOYALIST [July,
Marjorie, entering through the gate posts, immediately com-
manded their attention.
"I should be happy to be permitted to accompany you home,"
Stephen whispered to her at a moment when they chanced to be
alone.
"I should be happy to have you," was the soft response.
"You look well," she said to him after they had made their
adieus to the Cadwaladers and begun their walk together down
the street. Her eyes twinkled, and a pretty smile stole across her
face.
"I am as tired as I can be. I have endured some trying expe-
riences."
"Can you not leave here and take a rest? I fear that you will
overtax yourself."
He turned and looked seriously at her.
"Honestly?" he asked.
"Yes. I mean it. Do you know that I have allowed no day
to pass without praying for you?"
"To know that, and to hear you say it, is worth a series of
adventures. But, really, I could not think of leaving here now;
not for another fortnight at least. The moments are too critical."
"Are you still engaged in that pressing business?"
"Yes."
"For your success in that I have also prayed."
She was constant after all, he thought. Still he wondered
if she could be sincere in her protestations, and at the same time
remain true to Anderson. For he really believed that she had
been victimized by the latter's infatuation.
"I suppose you know that Jim has been ensnared?" he asked
suddenly.
"Jim? No. I What has happened?"
She was genuinely surprised.
"He has enlisted in the regiment."
"Has he forsworn?"
"Not yet. But he has signed the papers of enlistment."
"I am sorry, very sorry." Then after a pause, "It was I
who brought Anderson to Jim's house, you know."
"Yes. I know."
"But I must confess that I did not know the nature of his
errand. I, myself, was seeking an advantage."
"No matter. It may eventually redound to our credit."
"I regret exceedingly having been the occasion of Jim's mis-
fortune."
1920.] THE LOYALIST 529
Her eyes were cast down, her head bent forward as she
walked in what one might characterize as a meditative mood.
"I, too, am sorry; but there are others."
"Many?"
"That I do not know. Later I shall tell you."
"And why not now?"
"I cannot."
It was a troublesome situation in which the two found them-
selves. Here were two souls who loved each other greatly, yet
without being able to arrive at a mutual understanding on the
subject. They were separated by a filmy veil. The girl, natur-
ally frank and unreserved, was intimidated by the restrained and
serious mien of her companion. Yet she felt constrained to speak
lest deception might be charged against her. Stephen, troubled
in his own mind over the supposed unfavorable condition of
affairs, skeptical of the affection of his erstwhile confidante, felt,
too, a necessity to be open and explain all.
So they walked on for a time, he thinking, and she waiting
for him to speak.
"For two reasons I cannot tell you," he went on. "First, the
nature of the work is so obscure and so incomplete that I could
give you no logical or concise account of what I am doing. As a
matter of fact, I, myself, am still wandering in a sort of maze.
The other reason is that I have taken the greatest care to say no
word in any way derogatory to the character of Mr. Anderson."
"You wouldn't do that."
"That's just it. I should not want to be the cause of your
forming an opinion one way or the other concerning him. I
would much prefer you to discover and to decide for yourself."
"That is charity."
"Perhaps."
"And tact."
She peeped at him, her lips parted in a merry smile. Evi-
dently she was in a flippant mood.
"It would be most unfair to him were I to establish a preju-
dice in your mind against him."
"Yet you have already disapproved of my friendship with
him."
"I have, as I already have told you."
"Yet you have never told me the reason," she reminded him.
"I cannot." He shook his head.
For he would not wound her feelings for the world; and still
it pained him to be compelled to leave her in a state of perplexity,
not to say bewilderment, as a result of his strange silence. A
VOL. cxi. 34
530 THE LOYALIST [July,
delicate subject requires a deft hand, and he sensed only too
kneely his impotency. He, therefore, decided against any attempt
at explanation at least for the present.
Furthermore, he was entirely ignorant of her opinion of
Anderson. Of course, he would have given worlds to know this.
He was persuaded that the man had made a most favorable im-
pression upon her, and if that were true, he knew that it were
fruitless to continue further, for impressions once made are not
easily obliterated. Poor girl ! he thought. She had seen only his
best side; just that amount of good in a bad man that makes him
dangerous just that amount of interest which often makes the
cleverest person of a dullard.
She was still an enigma. As far as he was concerned, how-
ever, there had been no variation in his attachment to her. She
was ever the same interesting, lovely, tender, noble being; com-
plete in her own virtues, indispensable to his own happiness.
Perhaps he had been mistaken in his analysis of her; but no
very likely she did care for the other man.
"Stephen," she said at length. "What are you thinking of
me?"
"I Why? That is a sudden question. Do you mean com-
plimentary or critical?"
"I mean this. Have you misjudged my relations with John
Anderson?"
"I have thought " he began; and stopped.
Marjorie started. The voice was quite enough, most signif-
icant in tone.
"Please tell me," she pleaded. "I must know."
"Well, I have thought that you have been unusually kind to
him."
"Yes."
"And that, perhaps, you do care for him just a little."
There! It was out. She had guessed right.
"I thought as much," she said quietly.
"Then why did you ask me?"
"Listen," she began. "Do you recall the night you asked
me to be of some service to you?"
"Perfectly."
"I have thought over that subject long and often. I won-
dered wherein that service could lie. During the night of Peggy's
affair, it dawned upon me that this stranger to whom I was pre-
sented might be more artful than honest. I decided to form his
acquaintance so that I might learn his identity and his mission in
the city. I cherished the ambition of drawing certain information
1920.] THE LOYALIST 531
from him; and this I felt could be accomplished only by an
assumed intimacy with him."
Stephen stopped suddenly. His whole person was tense and
magnetic as he stared at her.
"Marjorie!" he exclaimed. "Do you mean it?"
"Truly. I read his character from the first. His critical
attitude displeased me. But I had to pretend. I had to."
"Please! Please forgive me." He turned and seized sud-
denly both her hands. "I thought I thought I cannot say it.
Won't you forgive me?"
Her eyes dropped. She freed her hands.
"Then I tricked you as well," she exclaimed with a laugh.
"And you mean it? I am made very happy today, happier
than words can express. What loyalty! You have been helping
me all the time and I never knew it. Why did you not tell me
this before?"
"You never gave me leave. I wanted to talk to you so much,
and you seemed to forbid me. I prayed for an opportunity, and
none came."
"I am very sorry."
"Anderson interested me only in this he came into our
society for a very definite purpose and the nature of that quest
I was desirous of learning. I know now that he is not of our
Faith; although he pretends to be. He is not of French extrac-
tion, yet he would lead one to assume that he was. He is a
British officer and actively engaged in the service of the enemy.
At present the recruiting of the proposed regiment of Catholic
Volunteers for service with the enemy is his immediate work.
He hopes to find many displeased and disloyal members of our
kind. Them he would incorporate into a company of de-
serters."
"You have learned that from him?"
"Aye! And more. General Arnold has been initiated into
the scheme. I do not know what to think, except that he has
yielded to some influence. His antipathy toward us would re-
quire none, nevertheless I feel that some undue pressure has
been brought to bear upon him."
"Anderson?" he asked.
"I do not know. At any rate, he will bear watching. I
think he is about to ask for a more important command."
Stephen then told her of his adventures, relating to her
wholly and candidly his suspicions and his plan for the future.
Throughout it all she listened with attention, so much interested
that she was scarce aware that they were crossing the wide road
532 THE LOYALIST [July,
before her own home. Her eyes had been about her everywhere
as they walked, yet she had failed to perceive anything.
"Won't you come in?" she asked. "You are almost a stranger
here now."
"I -would like to more than I can tell you; but truly I have
business before me, which is pressing. Pardon me just once more,
please."
"Mother would be pleased to see you, you know," she in-
sisted.
"I should like, indeed, to see your mother. I shall stop to
see her, just to inquire for her."
"Will you come when this terrible business is completed?"
"Gladly. Let us say next week. Perhaps you might be
pleased to come canoeing with me for the space of an after-
noon."
"I should be delighted. Next week."
"Yes. Next week. I shall let you know."
"Here is mother, now."
He went in, and shook her hand, inquiring diligently con-
cerning her.
As Stephen walked away from the home of his beloved,
ruminating over the strange disclosures of the day and how satis-
factory and gratifying they were to him, his state of mind was
such that he was eager for the completion of the more serious
business that was impending so that he might return to her who
had flooded his soul with new and sudden delight. Never was
he more buoyant or cheerful. He was cheerful, notwithstanding
his remorse.
For he did chide himself over his absurd stupidity. He
should have known her better than to have entertained for even
a passing moment a thought of her inconsistency, and that he
should have so misjudged her her whom he himself would have
selected from among his host of acquaintances as the very one
best fitted for the office assumed disturbed him not a little. His
own unworthiness filled him with shame. Why had he ques-
tioned her?
And yet he would have given his own life to make her
happy, he who was quietly allowing her to vanish out of it.
He tried to explain his fallacy. First of all, the trend of circum-
stances was decidedly against him. There was his arrest and
subsequent trial, days when he had longed to be at her side to
pursue the advantages already gained. Then, there were the
days of his absence from town, the long solid weeks spent in
1920.] THE LOYALIST 533
trailing Anderson and in meeting those who had been approached
by him in the matter of the recruiting. It was well-nigh impos-
sible, during this time, to seize a moment for pleasure, precious
moments during which Anderson, as he thought, had been mak-
ing favorable progress both with his suit and with his sinister
work. If Marjorie had forgotten him quite, Stephen knew that
he alone was responsible. Him she had seen but seldom; Ander-
son was ever at her side. No girl should be put to this test.
It was too exacting.
Despite his appreciation of these facts, his soul had been
seized with a very great anguish over the thought of his lost
prize; and if he had failed to conceal his feelings in her presence
it was due to the fact that his sensitive nature was not equal to
the strain imposed upon it. A great joy filled his heart to over-
flowing now that he had learned from her own lips that, through-
out it all, she had been steadfast and true to him alone. His great
regard for her was increased immeasurably. Her character had
been put to the test, and she had emerged more beautiful, more
radiant, more steadfast than before.
This new analysis led him to a very clear decision. First of
all, he would defeat the cunning Anderson at his own game;
then he would rescue his countrymen from their unfortunate and
precarious condition; and finally, he would return to Marjorie to
claim his reward. Altogether he had spent an advantageous and
a delightful afternoon. He was filled with renewed energy for the
business at hand.
[TO BE CONTINUED.]
flew
THE ENGLISH CATHOLICS IN THE REIGN OF QUEEN ELIZA-
BETH. A Study of Their Politics, Civil Life and Govern-
ment. By Rev. John H. Pollen, S.J. New York: Longmans,
Green & Co. $7.50.
Father Pollen has written a well documented history of the
English Catholics under Elizabeth from the fall of the old Church
to the advent of the counter-Reformation (1558-1580). He him-
self gives us the reasons of his beginning with the reign of Eliza-
beth: "Henry's revolt is indeed the proper starting-point for a
history of the Reformation taken as a whole; but Elizabeth's ac-
cession is better, if one is primarily considering the political and
civil life of the post-Reformation Catholics. Reform and counter-
reform under Henry, Edward and Mary were transitory. The
constructive work of each was immediately undone by their suc-
cessor. But the work done by Queen Elizabeth, whether by Cath-
olic or Protestant, lasted a long time. There have, of course,
been many developments since, but they have proceeded on the
lines then laid down. On the Catholic side the work of reorgan-
ization began almost immediately after the first crash, though it
was only in the middle of the reign that the vitality and perma-
nence of the new measures became evident."
The author begins with the fall of the old Church after the
passing of the bills of supremacy and uniformity. The bishops
gave an example of magnificent courage and splendid unanimity,
although they were a body of very mediocre men, unable to cope
with a political genius like Cecil who was supported by the might
of the Tudors, and unfettered by any scruple of honor or fair-
ness. The opposition of the laity, on the other hand, was very
faint. They raised no protests, organized no resistance, and
looked on with little show of disapproval while the clergy were
transferred in numbers from one camp to the other. Money,
lands and office were the price of apostasy; the new men held
all the churches, all public education, all offices. In Chapter II.
Father Pollen shows that Pope Paul IV. (1555-1559) did not ex-
communicate Elizabeth, although his Bull of February 16, 1559,
declared that all heretical sovereigns fell from their right by the
mere fact of their heresy. The excommunication and deposition
of princes who had sinned enormously against God and man, was
an outcome, an almost inevitable development, of legislation dur-
ing those ages when the laws of the Church were most intimately
1920.] NEW BOOKS 535
united, like woof with warp, with the laws of the land. Once the
unity of Christendom was broken, the canon law began to suffer
eclipse, and its sentences began to be ignored by the ordinary
laymen.
This Pope's formation of a league to extirpate heretics is
a fable of the Protestant imagination, although writers like Tytler
in his History of Scotland and Motley in his Rise of the Dutch
Republic have lent their names to this absurdity.
Pope Pius IV. (1559-1565) by his moderation and his great
diplomatic ability, managed to bring the Council of Trent to a
conclusion despite the bitterest opposition. He sent two nuncios
to Elizabeth, but Parpaglia never got farther than Brussels owing
to the opposition of Philip II., and Martinengo was kept out of
England by Cecil's fabrication of a "Popish plot" against the
crown.
Many historians fail to record that Philip II. of Spain acted
as Elizabeth's jealous protector during the first two years of her
reign, until she had firmly established her power in England, and
had finally driven the French from Scotland. His motive was
his intense hatred and fear of France, whose power he had grossly
exaggerated. His peace-at-any-price policy was continued all
through the first decade of Elizabeth's reign, and the price he had
to pay was the license for English piracy at sea. How differently
history would have been written had Philip II. possessed the
ability of Cecil. As a matter of fact, he was always wavering and
undecided, a bad financier, a man absolutely without originality
or foresight, and misled for years by his unreasonable and fool-
ish dread of French power and influence. When true statesman-
ship would have dictated a French alliance and a strong friend-
ship for Mary Stuart, he seemed bewitched by his stupid and in-
fatuated friendship for Elizabeth.
Many fail to realize that Mary Stuart at the height of her
popularity 1565 was by no means regarded by English Cath-
olics as the Pope's champion. On the contrary, they considered
her a Catholic opportunist. She had governed Scotland through
Moray and Lethington, and had she gained the English crown
she would most likely have ruled through Cecil and Bacon. If
she had conquered Elizabeth, the era of religious liberty might
have dawned a few centuries earlier, but she gave no sign of
advocating any sudden change either in foreign or domestic
policy.
An excellent chapter is devoted to Pope Pius V.'s Bull of Ex-
communication, February 25, 1570. Many have declared it ill-
inspired, for it angered Elizabeth beyond measure, caused bitter
536 NEW BOOKS [July,
persecution of English Catholics, and drove many hesitating souls
out of the Church. But, on the other hand, it taught the world
clearly that Elizabeth and her followers were absolutely cut off
from the Catholic Church; that to accept and to submit to her
was to reject that Church. In a day of doubting, the Bull made
clear the iniquity of attending Protestant churches at her com-
mand, which nothing hitherto had been able to bring home to the
Tudor Catholics, so prone to give up religious liberty at the com-
mand of the sovereign.
The story of the Rising of the North is graphically told, and
the schemes of Sir Thomas Stukely, Don Juan, and James Fitz-
gerald to overthrow Elizabeth are detailed at length.
The volume ends with the Catholic revival which began in
1568 with the foundation of the English College at Douay. We
have pen portraits of Cardinal Allen, Father Persons, and the
martyr, Campion; descriptions of the English colleges of Douay,
Rheims, and Rome, and brief accounts of the first labors and
writings of the men who kept the faith alive in the darkest days
of persecution.
The author has consulted the Spanish dispatches in Madrid
and Paris, the Vatican Archives, the French Diplomatic Papers of
Fenelon, and de Mauvissiere, and the English State Papers at the
Record Office.
OPEN GATES TO RUSSIA. By Malcolm W. Davis. New York:
Harper & Brothers. $2.00.
The Soviet Government, the present keeper of Russia's gate,
has begun to bargain with the Allied Powers. Russia needs the
manufactured products of the Allied nations and the Allied na-
tions need the raw products of Russia. This, in a sentence, ex-
presses the two sides of the gate that Mr. Davis is writing about.
It is hoped that by the time the ice is out of the Neva, the gate
will swing open and trade begin to flow back and forth. Just
what will Russia require? Just what can she give? Here is a
book devoted to answering those momentous questions.
First it was necessary for the author to describe the activities
of outside powers in Russia immediately before the gate was shut.
The picture is neither edifying nor encouraging. A fast and loose
policy, an effort to grab, a blundering misconception of Russia
and the Russians seem to have characterized the efforts of all
the powers there. Having been driven forth from the country
and the gate shut, they expend their fury in either epithets or
watchful waiting. Meantime, in the midst of her own chaos still
stands the fabric of those idealistic and successful structures
1920.] NEW BOOKS 537
the Zemstovs, and the cooperative societies. It is really these
economic factors with which the nations will have to deal when
the gates are opened. These are the great customers.
Then the author begins to enumerate all the things these
customers will want. The list runs the gamut from locomotives
to needles and pins. Patiently, deliberately and succinctly, he
outlines the material requirements of this vast empire. Never was
such a market set before the world. During four years of war
and two years of internecine strife the larder of necessities has
been scraped bare. Russia has to be built again from the bottom
up an appalling bill of goods. And, in return, Russia can offer
raw materials.
The only difficulty with this picture is the question as to the
reality of these raw materials. The Soviet Government is holding
them up as bait before the world. In exchange, they want loco-
motives, rolling stock and rails, so that these materials can be
moved to the markets of the world. A commission of American
business men has been sent to find out the real facts. Locomo-
tives cannot be made over night, nor can Russia produce vast
stores of raw stuffs on immediate order. Mr. Davis' book, then,
is a study of future conditions. It is a resume of the Russian
markets for twenty-five years to come.
Business men who plan to expand their export trade will
find these pages a mine of information. The conditions and needs
are presented in detail, and valuable suggestions for the conduct
of trade with Russia are given.
The final chapters of the book present a pleasant picture of
the color of old Russia the mingled East and West, the mael-
strom of peoples and purposes. That is the Russia we dream of.
But why should it be necessary for us to change this? A sanitary
Russia yes. Good roads in Russia by all means, yes. Good
schools, good trains, good papers all these things are required.
But if Russia loses her faith in the supernatural, if she barter her
living soul for material improvement, she will be worse off than
she is today.
In the great work of restocking, restoring, reviving the war-
worn Russia, we must be very careful not to let her fall into the
same material pit that brought disaster to Germany. Russia
must maintain her individuality. We must refrain from making
odious comparisons between her form of civilization and ours.
The author is prone to make comparisons of this kind. They
smack a little of spread-eagle Americanism. Had the author
restrained his hand at this point, his book would have been well-
nigh perfect.
538 NEW BOOKS [July,
PENAL LEGISLATION IN THE NEW CODE OF CANON LAW.
By Very Rev. H. A. Ayrinhac, S.S. New York: Benziger
Brothers. $3.00 net.
This work is a brief explanation of the fifth book of the
Code, which contains the present legislation on ecclesiastical of-
fences and penalties. The order followed is that of the Code it-
self, special emphasis being laid upon those canons which are more
practical in English-speaking countries.
In nineteen titles of the Code, the author discusses the na-
ture of delinquency and its divisions; the imputability of delin-
quencies, and their judicial effects; attempted delinquencies; the
nature, species, interpretation and application of penalties; supe-
riors having' coercive power; persons subject thereto; the remis-
sion of penalties; censures in general; particular censures such
as excommunication, interdict and suspension; vindictive penal-
ties, penal remedies and penances; delinquencies against faith,
religion, and ecclesiastical authorities; against life, property, and
morals; the crime of falsehood; delinquencies committed in the
administration of the sacraments, and in the conferring of ec-
clesiastical dignities; and finally the abuse of ecclesiastical power
and office.
THE MODERN WORLD. Part I. By Rev. Francis S. Betten, S.J.
$1.40. Part II. By Rev. Francis S. Betten, S.J., and Rev.
Alfred K. Kaufmann, S.J. $1.20. New York: Allyn &
Bacon.
The authors of these books give to the term "modern" an
unusual and interesting extension. All history is divided into
Ancient Times and The Modern World, but in his arrangement
the Ancient Times end with Charlemagne, A. D. 800. Of the two
books on The Modern World, here under review, Part I. treats of
the Era of Religious Unity, through its disruption to about A. D.
1650. Part II. covers from that time to the present day. Pre-
fixed to Volume I. of The Modern World series is a summary of
Ancient History which is an admirable review, as well as an in-
troduction to the study of Modern History. This is distinctively
a review and requires previous knowledge for complete under-
standing. The student is referred to Father Betten's Ancient
World from the Earliest Times to 800.
The chapters on "Feudalism" and "Life in the Feudal Ages,"
in the first volume, are worthy of very particular commendation
for their succinct statements full of valuable information.
The sections on guilds and free cities are also very good. Some
of the chapters are less satisfactory, possibly because the events
1920.] NEW BOOKS 539
lack interest; possibly because complex subjects are dealt with
too generally as, for instance, the Great Schism.
In Part II. the historian is confronted with a wealth of detail.
Chapter XXX. clearly shows the French Revolution as the logical
outcome of the absolutism of Louis XIV., while the wars of the
preceding century are used to illustrate the chivalry and courtesy
of the nations particularly the Silesian War.
The books impress by their ability, impartiality, ripe judg-
ment and experience. Evidently, they are the work of teachers
who have tried out their ideas before offering them to others.
There is an excellent analytical table of contents, and helpful
section headings, a good bibliography, some enlightening foot-
notes, but few dates. Many will consider this a merit, as this
point has been rather overdone in the past. The maps and
the illustrations are extremely suitable and good. That showing
Spain at three crises of its story, between 711 and 1492, are the
best we have seen in books of this kind. Views are not expressed;
facts are left to speak for themselves. They do not speak
eloquently for permanent peace.
ROBIN LINNET. By E. F. Benson. New York: George H.
Doran Co. $1.75.
Mr. Benson's intention is so long delayed in making its ap-
pearance that when at last it comes, it fails to score effectively.
Its theme is, we take it, the regeneration of a worldly-minded,
sensuous woman, Lady Grote, through love for her son, Robin
Linnet, and the patriotism which begins to kindle when her boy,
a Cambridge undergraduate, "joins up" at the outbreak of
War.
This affords opportunities, but they are not fully grasped.
The transformation of Lady Grote's character is obscure, thus
lacking vitality. We find her unconvincing, both on the low
plane of living in which we make her acquaintance, and the
higher level she has attained when the story ends. The master
touch is missing which should link together the two phases into
one living, consistent personality.
The novel is, of course, not without traces of its authorship.
Robin is another of the pleasant studies of adolescence of which
we have had many at this hand; and there is interest and clever-
ness in depicting the mental attitude of some German residents
in England. But the action moves cumbrously; too much time
wasted in irrelevant talk by superfluous characters. This tries
the reader's patience, and makes negligible a book which might
have been one of Mr. Benson's most successful efforts.
540 NEW BOOKS [July,
THE DOUGHBOY'S RELIGION. By Judge Ben. B. Lindsey and
Harvey O'Higgins. New York: Harper & Brothers. $1.25.
Mr. O'Higgins writes the introduction to this collection of
essays, and though professing that it is the work of collaboration,
asserts that the book contains the message and spirit of Judge
Lindsey. The publication, at this date, seems to be an after-
thought, since the essays, presumably, were written in the light
of contemporary events. The war work of the Y. M. C. A. has
already been pronounced a failure in many respects, and yet
Judge Lindsey presents his case against it as something new. In
the chapter, "A League of Understanding," he appeals for the
ratification of the Peace Treaty. And the chapter on "The
Junker Faith" might well have been written in 1915. However,
the book will have some interest, since it presents the thoughts of
a man so well-known as Judge Lindsey.
A COMMENTARY ON THE NEW CODE OF CANON LAW. By
Rev. Charles Augustine, O.S.B. Volume V. St. Louis: B.
Herder Book Co. $2.50 net.
The fifth volume of Father Augustine's scholarly Com-
mentary of the Code has been published before the fourth, on
account of the great practical importance of the matrimonial law
in the every day work of the clergy. In a dozen chapters the author
treats of matrimony in general, the banns, prohibitive and diri-
ment impediments, matrimonial consent, the form of celebrating
marriage, the marriage of conscience, the time and place of mar-
riage ceremonies, the effects of marriage, the separation of mar-
ried couples, the revalidation of marriage, and second marriage.
The canons from Book IV., treating of matrimonial trials,
are added for the sake of convenience, although the author dis-
claims any intention of correcting the logical order of the Code.
These seven chapters will prove of special interest to the dio-
cesan court officials.
IRISH IMPRESSIONS. By Gilbert K. Chesterton. New York:
John Lane Co. $1.50.
Time was when the announcement of a new book by "G. K.
C." stirred readily enough these pulses, but for some
years past since shortly before the War, in fact Mr. Chester-
ton has been showing a marked deterioration both as writer and
thinker. We want him to give us back the wild freshness of his
morning, of those early and precious books, his Dickens, his
All Things Considered, his Defendant. But the richest of his
gifts, the humor which once upon a time made us boldly rank him
1920.] NEW BOOKS 541
beside W. W. Jacobs, as one of the two greatest living English
humorists even that has hardened into a mechanical formula,
and we can see one of his jokes a page off. The Chesterton of
Orthodoxy and Heretics has indeed suffered a war-change. His
recent Short History of England, however, gave us a glimmer of
hope for him which this latest book confirms. There is, however,
little that is new or valuable said here about the eternal Irish
question, little that has not been said as well or almost as well by
others before. But Chesterton, one is glad to see, scorns the foot-
ling and dishonest attempts of recent administrators of the
country to dodge the plain issue.
This book recounts the author's impressions during a visit
he made to help on recruiting in 1918. Now and then one comes
upon a phrase that shines out from the page, as when he speaks
finely of the "brilliant bitterness" of Dublin as contrasted with
the stagnant optimism of Belfast.
NOTHING AND OTHER THINGS. By the Author of Vices in
Virtues. New York: Longmans, Green & Co. $1.40.
This volume consists of sixteen papers of very light texture,
for the whole work is concluded in one hundred pages. They
were written the preface tells us, "in bed ... by a very old
invalid, solely for his 'own amusement.' " It would, of course, be
unreasonable and unkind to expect a sick man to add notably
to our knowledge or instruction. Very few of the papers are
real essays we mean literary or philosophical discourses on the
heading selected. And even these few essays never seem really to
grapple with their title, but merely gossip about it in the most
desultory and perfunctory way. The majority of the papers are
character sketches. Unquestionably, the author can sketch
vividly, and limn the picture he desires in brief, but telling,
strokes. He is evidently a keen satirist and no little of a cynic,
and he has long viewed la comedie humaine with shrewd, con-
temptuous eyes.
THE MOUNTAINY SINGER. By Seasamh MacCathmhavil.
Boston: The Four Seas Co. $1.50.
The author of these interesting lyrics and as they are writ-
ten in English, it would seem obviously desirable to state at the
outset that his name in the vernacular is Joseph Campbell
prefers to call them a "pedlar's pack" of rhymes, because the
pedlar's love of wandering, of novelty, of the primitive outdoor
things, has gone into them. Published some ten years ago in
Dublin, the poems belong distinctly to what was then called the
542 NEW BOOKS [July,
Celtic Renaissance. But their occasional use of "free" and un-
rhymed verse, and their sudden fragments of flashing imagery,
will serve to show how close that poetic movement was when
it chose to be to the later developments of the ultra-
moderns.
The vividness and the insularity, the brooding fancy and im-
memorial wisdom of the peasant are of the fibre of these songs
the peasant who feels just a few things with passionate intensity
and who is always, always, always an Irish peasant. They
will not fail to stir and to charm the heart that can sympatheti-
cally understand all that is comprehended in the
.... voice of the peasant's dream,
The cry of the wind on the wooded hill,
The leap of the fish in the stream.
THE LOVE OF BROTHERS. By Katharine Tynan Hinkson.
New York: Benziger Brothers. $1.75 net.
This story of the concealment of a marriage, and its many
distressing results, is composed of the elements which have for
a long time served the writers of melodrama. The situations
are emotionally intense, and might readily escape from under the
control of a hand less competent than Mrs. Hinkson's. Needless
to say, her mastery of her material is complete; she shapes it
into fresh form, leaving no suggestion of the hackneyed or the
improbable. We are taken beneath the surface of circumstance
and shown the reactions of human frailties and errors from
which the circumstances spring.
It is a serious book, though all ends happily, and there are
occasional bits of humor in presenting types of the Irish country
people. The characterization is excellent, especially that of "Mrs.
Wade," whose fidelity to her promise of secrecy works disaster,
and that of Mrs. Comerford, the haughty woman whose violent
temper is the real cause of all the trouble.
THE COSSACKS, THEIR HISTORY AND COUNTRY. By W. P.
Cresson. New York: Brentano's. $2.50.
There are three stock legends about the Cossacks. One holds
their name to be synonymous with organized cruelty, murderous
reaction and unrelenting terror. The second is, that they were
the pets of the Tsar. The third and this seems to be the last
word in epithets that they were stanch upholders of the Ortho-
dox Church.
It is well to keep these legends in mind when reading the
pages of this volume by the former secretary of the American
1920.] NEW BOOKS 543
embassy at Petrograd, because any reliable history of the Cos-
sacks will quickly put such legends in their place. Instead of
reactionary tribesmen we discover that the Cossacks are a free-
dom-loving people, who always have been free, and whose dream
has been a federal republic in Russia very much like the gov-
ernment that obtains among themselves. We also discover that
making the Cossacks pets was the better part of Tsariatic wis-
dom. Wild, liberty-loving tribesmen have no middle ground
they are either favorites or foes. And finally we learn that noth-
ing could be truer than the belief that the Cossacks were pillars
of Orthodoxy, although, in their time, they have slaughtered and
persecuted every other type of believer.
Captain Cresson has set down the Cossack history in a
fashion that is readily understood. He begins with the origin of
the "Free People" in the steppes of south Russia, where the rov-
ing tribes rose in the wake of the receding tide of Mongol invasion.
Thence he follows them to that stage of almost monastic militar-
istic life, the peak of which was the Brotherhood of the Zapora-
gian Cossacks. For centuries they were the frontiersmen of
Russia, enemies of its foes, and enemies of Russia itself until the
final submission of the Free Cossacks of the Don to the Tsar. In
those early days of 1500 the Cossacks enrolled no less than 65,000
men yearly for the defence of the frontiers. When the frontiers
were no longer attacked, these bold horsemen pushed the boun-
daries eastward and westward until Russia extended from the
Baltic to the Pacific, from the White Sea to the Black one-fifth
of the earth's land surface.
It was at this period that the history of the Cossacks began
to be crystallized in the names of their leaders in Yermak, who
conquered Siberia, and whose followers later reached the shores
of Alaska; in Bogdan, the implacable enemy of Poland, who
fought for Cossack rights, secured autonomy of the Ukraine
provinces, and finally submitted to the policies of the Tsar
Alexis; the hetmans, George Hmelnicky, Samvilovitch, and
Razin, who led revolts against the crown's usurpation; and the
perfidious Mazeppa, who, for an instant, held the balance of
power in the momentous struggle that fixed the supremacy of
Russia among the "Powers of the North," and helped precipitate
the end of the free Ukraine; and Pougatehev, who set himself up
as one of the False Dmitris in the Troublous Times; and finally,
Platov, who, among other accomplishments in a checkered career,
successfully harried the rear of Napoleon's retreating forces. Mr.
Cresson groups the Cossack history about each of these figures a
commendable technique that makes for readability.
544 NEW BOOKS [July,
The last chapters of the book are devoted to the Cossack
government and life before the Revolution, and to their capitals.
It is perhaps unfortunate that the author could not include a
chapter on what the Cossacks did in the Great War. He is wise,
however, in not making too extravagant claims for what they
might do in the present Russian situation. They have an envi-
able record for loyalty and love of freedom. It is only logical to
believe that they will continue this record in the face of Bolshevik
tyranny.
Students of Russia will appreciate Captain Cresson's volume,
because it is, so far, our most reliable account of the Cossacks in
English. He has brought within its pages information that
hitherto was scattered and difficult to collate, and he has shown,
in its presentation, a scholarly viewpoint and a ready pen.
THE SORROWS OF NOMA. By Abraham Mapu. Translated by
Joseph Marymount. New York: National Book Publishers.
$1.50 net.
Joseph Marymount of Detroit has translated Ahavath Zion,
an historical romance of the times of King Hezekiah. Its author,
Abraham Mapu, was the first Russian to introduce the novel into
Hebrew literature. The story is well told in language borrowed
for the most part from the Old Testament, and the manners and
customs of the Jewish people are well described.
MEMORIES OF BUFFALO BILL. By His Wife, Louisa F. Cody.
In Collaboration With Courtney Ryley Cooper. New York:
D. Appleton & Co. $2.50 net.
If we mistake not, these chapters, fourteen in number, made
their first appearance serially in one of our popular magazines.
The very name, "Buffalo Bill," conjures before the imagination
all sorts of stirring incident, for the younger generation as well
as for their elders. It is bound up inextricably with the young
life of the West, and one looks to it, more perhaps than to any
other, for adequate and colorful interpretation.
It may be that the closeness of the author to the scenes of
which she writes has marred the perspective. In any case, the
present volume very largely fails both in color and adequacy. The
first two hundred pages are far too redolent of incident, ex-
clusively, tiresomely, domestic. The reader cannot but wish that
more space had been devoted to an account of Colonel Cody's
travels with his "show," scarcely less famous than Barnum's.
By way of compensation, the concluding chapters exhibit a good
deal of dramatic power. Indeed, we have seldom read a story
1920.] NEW BOOKS 545
more pitifully fascinating than that of the massacre at Wounded
Knee, as told by the aged Short Bull in his tepee on the blizzard-
swept prairie near Pine Ridge. It is worth knowing, for it is
history.
GROWTH OF RELIGIOUS AND MORAL IDEAS IN EGYPT.
RELIGIOUS AND MORAL IDEAS IN BABYLONIA AND AS-
SYRIA. By Samuel A. B. Mercer, Ph.D., D.D. Milwaukee,
Wis. : Morehouse Publishing Co.
This little volume on Egypt from the prolific pen of the
erudite professor of Western Theological Seminary, Chicago, is
a very complete story on the subject of the idea of God in Egypt,
the concept of man, the notions of morality, and the concepts of
future life. The author traces the development of the idea of
God which Egyptians had at various periods of history. Their
ideas developed from a form of anthropomorphism to a more
spiritual and elevated conception of God; they probably arrived
even at some notion of practical monotheism. Man is a creature
of the gods. The psychology of man is most complex, much more
so than with the Greeks; the social conditions of the Egyptians
were most favorable. Their idea of mediation is associated with
the person of the God-manifesting Pharaoh. The priestly sacri-
fices receive their value from the fact that they are offered up in
the name of the king. The king is in fact the only mediator be-
tween man and the gods. The Egyptians showed themselves to
be a very religious people, free from skepticism in matters of
faith, convinced of the obligations which they owed to their
gods. No people of antiquity clung more persistently to the idea
of the survival of man after bodily death than the Egyptians.
For this reason they erected strong and lasting sepulchres; the
idea of immortality in all its details developed by degrees in the
history of this interesting people. Whilst there is little in the
volume that is new, the work, nevertheless, briefly and succinctly
furnishes an accurate idea of the most interesting phases of the
history of the Egyptians. A bibliography is placed at the end of
the interesting volume.
Religious and Moral Ideas in Babylonia and Assyria is an-
other contribution to the author's Biblical and Oriental series.
It shows him thoroughly acquainted with his subject, and basing
his conclusions upon original sources and texts. In spite of the
brevity of the volume, there is offered more than an outline to the
reader on the ever interesting topic of the Babylonian and As-
syrian peoples. Their idea of God, of the origin, nature and
VOL. cxi. 35
546 NEW BOOKS [July,
destiny of man, their notions of morality and mediation are
dealt with in a scholarly manner. The work is intended for lay
readers, but the scholar will find in the volume a useful and
interesting account of the development of religious, social, ethical,
eschatological ideas in Assyria and Babylonia. A selected bibli-
ography is added for the readers who wish to pursue the study
of the subject in greater details. The chronology in the begin-
ning of the volume furnishes a useful aid to the perusal of the
work.
THE CHRONICLES OP AMERICA. Edited by Dr. Allen Johnson,
Professor of American History in Yale University. New
Haven: Yale University Press. Fifty volumes at $3.50 per
volume by the set.
The Sequel of Appomatox, by Walter L. Fleming. Stu-
dents of the reconstruction epoch will welcome this volume by
Professor Fleming, whose intensive studies, The Documentary
History of Reconstruction and The Civil War and Reconstruction
in Alabama, have given him an unusual mastery of the field.
Here we have a clear resume of the facts of reconstruction,
straightforward, sparing no man, yet told without rancor or
malice. There is neither a brief for the South nor a prosecution
of the North, but an account as detached as human sympathy
will permit of the sordid wickedness, flagrant corruption, and
partisan tyranny of the radical Republican rule of the defeated
"rebel States" during the penal days of their spoliation. It is the
story of America at its worst, in its darkest days.
The "Aftermath of the War," a chapter essay, portrays the
terrible condition of the seceded States after Lee's surrender, the
whites divided and demoralized, the negroes bewildered with lib-
erty and disorder, government in a collapse, accumulated capital
dissipated, general bankruptcy, schools and public buildings de-
stroyed, railroads wrecked, roads impassible, machinery, tools,
and even household furniture worn out and impossible of replace-
ment. Wealthy planters were reduced to penury and their fami-
lies to mendicancy. Corruption was rife, cotton-thieves, scalla-
wags and carpet-bag agents stole and speculated in crops and tax-
sold lands. Despite all, Southern leaders were anxious to ac-
cept the situation and unequivocally fulfill all obligations. Had
the North only met the South as Lee did Grant, a sad page of
our history would be brighter. If Lincoln had only lived, has
been the lament of conservative men on both sides of the Line.
The author outlines Lincoln's plan of reconstruction and
Johnson's; the struggle between Johnson and the Congressional
1920.] NEW BOOKS 547
leaders, and finally the actual method by which the South was
dragooned back into the Union. Partisan, political influences,
intense jealousy of the President's prerogatives, the unkindly
personalities of Stevens, Sumner, Wade, Stanton, and Johnson,
are quite justly emphasized. Civil Rights Bills, the Freedman's
Bureau with its meddlesome agents, the uncompromising Black
Codes of Southern legislatures, the rejection of the Fourteenth
Amendment, the Stanton-Johnson episode, led to the radical
policy of revenge, the rule of the Cromwellian major-generals, the
adoption of martial law, and the forcing of negro suffrage at the
point of the bayonet. An interesting chapter dwells on the im-
peachment of Johnson, for whom considerable sympathy is
aroused. Valuable hints are given as to the means used to build
up a Republican machine in the Solid South. Statistics are
quoted to show the financial burden of the corrupt black rule in
the Gulf States in scandalously increased appropriations, taxes,
bond issues and in huge expenditures and un-concealed graft.
Truly, it was a time when "the bottom rail was on the top." No
wonder, even Ku Klux Klan irregularities are condoned by his-
torians. With a sigh of relief one finishes the volume, as he sees
the exploitation of the South ended by the liberal Republican agi-
tation and the Hayes policy of pacification.
The Red Man's Continent, by Ellsworth Huntington. Pro-
fessor Huntington, through his association with the Carnegie
Institute and Yale University, has traveled widely, carrying
on explorations in India, China, Siberia, Turkestan, Mexico, and
Central America. His impressions have been printed in several
volumes. Hence, Dr. Huntington was particularly well fitted to
study geographical environment as modifying American history.
As is suggested in the preface, emphasis is placed upon the simi-
larity of form between the Old and the New World, between
North and South America, the distribution of indigenous types
of vegetation, relation of climate to health and energy, and geo-
graphical influence on the life of the various Indian tribes. In
a chapter on the "Approaches to America" the author commits
himself to the Asiatic origin of the Indians, whom he sees enter-
ing this continent by Behring Straits. The chapters on the "Gar-
ment of Vegetation" and "The Red Man in America" are by far
the most interesting to the man whose inclinations are neither
toward geology nor anthropology. Excellent physical and racial
charts add to the book's value. The vastness of the Continent
strikes one, as he reads of the jungles of Yucatan and the wild
forests of Hudson Bay, of the torpid heat of Death Valley and the
548 NEW BOOKS [July
icy trails of the Yukon, and of aborigines of a thousand dialects
and hundreds of modes of living from that of the Esquimo to the
Astec, the Abenaki of Maine or the northern Sioux to the Semi-
noles of Florida.
The bibliography is disappointingly brief. One is surprised
to learn that an account of early Indian life can be written with-
out reference to the Relations of the Jesuits and French adven-
turers.
The Quaker Colonies, by Sydney G. Fisher. Professor Fisher
in this volume on the Quaker Colonies, allots the first seven
chapters to Pennsylvania and the last five to the Jersies, East
and West, and Delaware. While the subject matter is fraught
with interest, the work as a whole is hardly up to the standard
set by the series. Irrelevant material, for one thing, is too
frequently incorporated in the text. Again the author occa-
sionally allows his bias to prejudice his judgment. Yet one
cannot blame him, for the contribution of the Society of Friends
to America is by no means small.
Dr. Fisher in a pleasing narrative tells the story of the
Quakers, their origin in seventeenth century Puritanism, rejec-
tion of Anglicanism, and persecution in England and the old
Colonies. Finding a leader in the idealistic William Penn, who
through his close association with the Stuart court was granted
proprietary rights over Pennsylvania, the Friends turned to the
New World. Religious freedom was found. Like Baltimore a
couple of generations earlier, Penn granted toleration to settlers
of any Christian persuasion. Free government was granted, the
English penal code was modified with capital punishment only
for murder and treason, with prisons corrective agencies not
dungeons, children were taught trades, and lands were sold in fee
simple with a small quit rent. Penn's system made such a wide
appeal that, by 1750, Pennsylvania was one of the largest col-
onies, with both the Germans and Scotch-Irish quite as numerous
as the English and Welsh Quakers. Politically, however, the
Quakers retained control through their influence over the Ger-
mans.
A fascinating chapter depicts life in Philadelphia, the
thriving business carried on, the social life, the taverns,
coffee houses, and wonderful country seats. The author digress-
ing a little, gives an interesting list of men whom he considers
Quakers: Franklin, Rittenhouse the astronomer, Bartram the
botanist, Lindley Murray the grammarian, Cadwalader, Generals
Green and Mifflin, Benjamin West the painter, John Dickinson of
1920.] NEW BOOKS 549
The Farmers' Letters, Whittier, Cornell, and John Hopkins. A
darker chapter deals with the troubles of Penn, his accusation
of being a Jesuit in disguise and a Jacobite plotter, his fight to
retain the charter, his imprisonment as a debtor, the apostasy of
his son to Episcopacy, and the decline of Quaker government.
Less interesting, but not less valuable, is the chronicle of the be-
ginnings of New Jersey and the exceedingly brief account of
Delaware.
The Fathers of New England, by Charles M. Andrews. The
name of Charles M. Andrews of Yale University gives authority
to any study of colonial America. No living man has made the
field so much his own, by years of the most intensive and minute
research. No one will leave behind him more in the way of
books, monographs, and bibliographical guides. His is a broad
vision, which views the Colonies from their English background,
considers their relative place in the scheme of empire, and traces
their development, religious, social, economic, political, and con-
stitutional. Endowed with a splendid style, a perspective that
makes judgment certain, he can weigh down a volume with the
detailed information of his research without losing the readers'
interest or overlooking for a moment the main trend of develop-
ment. Furthermore, and a good test of a volume, many a sum-
marizing sentence or characterization is quotable.
In the "Coming of the Pilgrims," as an explanation of the
migrations, England is described as passing into a materialistic
period of adventure, commercial strivings, restlessness due to the
emancipation from feudalism, desire for land and wealth, and
revolt from an established church. "A desire to improve social
conditions and to solve the problem of the poor and the vagrant,
which had become acute since the dissolution of the monasteries,
was arousing the authorities to deal with the pauper and dispose
of the criminal in such a way as to yield a profitable service to
the kingdom." The Pilgrims, simple but courageous Non-con-
formists, are described: their persecution, their wanderings, their
arrival at Plymouth, the failure of their communistic system, and
their establishment of representative government. Dr. Andrews
sees "the Pilgrim Fathers stand rather as an emblem of virtue
than as a molding force in the life of the nation." The second
chapter treats of the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay and the
settlements about Boston. The Puritans are portrayed as they
were, not as the Cavaliers saw them, nor yet again as perfect as
later historians would make them: "The first leaders were ex-
ceptional men, possessed of ability and education, and many were
550 NEW BOOKS [July,
university graduates, who brought with them the books and the
habits of the scholar of their day. They were superior to those
of the second and third generation in the breadth of their ideas
and in the vigor and originality of their convictions." The Puri-
tan commonwealth was never a democracy in the modern sense,
revolt was silenced by deportation or exile, theocracy must be ac-
cepted, and toleration was only for unquestioning members of the
church. Professor Andrews writes : "The franchise was limited
to church members which barred five-sixths of the population from
voting and holding office; the magistrates insisted on exercising a
negative vote on the proceedings of the deputies, because they
deemed it necessary to prevent the Colony from degenerating
into a mere democracy; and the ministers exercised an influence
in purely civil matters that rendered them arbiters in all dis-
putes between magistrates and deputies." Continuing, he says:
"The dominance of the clergy tended to the maintenance of an
intolerant theocracy, and was offensive to many in Massachusetts,
who having fled from Laud's intolerance at home had no desire
to submit to an equal intolerance in New England. . . . The
Massachusetts system had thus become not a constitutional gov-
ernment fashioned after the best liberal thought in England of
that day, but a narrow oligarchy in which the political order was
determined according to a rigid interpretation of theology. This
excessive concentration of power resulted in driving from the
Colony many of its best men." "Only an iron discipline that
knew neither charity nor tolerance could have successfully re-
sisted the attacks on the standing order," when leaders like Vane,
John Winthrop, Jr., Wheelwright, Roger Williams, Anne Hutch-
inson, and many another left the confines of the Colony. Thus,
the author leads up to his discussion of the foundation of the
Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Haven settlements.
The sketch of early New England life is particularly illumi-
nating. While the author appreciates the true greatness of the
Puritan and his contribution as a lasting one in non-theological
ways, he does not hesitate to strike at the theocratic system, the
intolerance, and the oligarchic rule. Himself a New Englander,
he is writing history not an eulogy, when he suggests: "By no
stretch of the imagination can the political conditions in any of
the New England Colonies be called popular or democratic. Gov-
ernment was in the hands of a very few men." Immigrants
were from every strata of English society, but only under Will-
iams did they find toleration. Economic motives are stressed as
a chief cause of immigration, with the hint that as "hardly a fifth
of those in Massachusetts were professed Christians," it is doubt-
1920.] NEW BOOKS 551
ful how far religious motives impelled men to seek the New
World. As for toleration, consider the Quakers "scourged in
Plymouth, branded in New Haven, flogged at the carts' tail on
Long Island, and chained to a wheelbarrow in New York."
Other chapters deal with colonial attempts at union, the win-
ning of Charters by Connecticut and Rhode Island, the Indian
wars, the royal disciplining of the Bay Colony, and the Andros
regime.
Colonial Folkways, by Charles il. idrews. Professor An-
drews here draws a picture of social lu'e, which will prove of
immense value to the student of social conditions, and also a
background for the student of history and American literature.
Estimates of the population and the proportionate racial
numbers are given for the various Colonies on the eve of the
Revolution. A description follows of the land holdings, the
small freeholds of New England, the feudal manors of New York,
Virginia, and Maryland, and the large plantations of Georgia and
the Carolinas. Some idea of the size and characteristics of the
chief cities is given in another chapter. In an essay on "Habili-
ments and Habits," attention is called to the early marriages, the
unmoral chemise marriages and bundling, large families, early
deaths of mothers, high infant mortality, rarity of divorces, ex-
pensive funerals, burial of suicides at cross-roads in New Eng-
land with stakes driven through their bodies, and the scandalous
drinking at funerals. The prevalence of unrestricted consump-
tion of liquor and wines by all classes is emphasized. An ac-
count of the diet is not overlooked, any more than the lack of
amusements in Puritan commonwealths or the too numerous
diversions of the Southern and Central Colonies. The intoler-
ance of things Catholic is apparent in the general celebration of
Gunpowder or Pope day, and the child's game of "Break the
Pope's Neck." An essay on the intellectual life notes the status
of learning, the text-books, schools, grammar school foundations,
colleges, libraries, and the necessity of foreign training for lan-
guages, medicine, and law, while another essay deals with the
religious life of the Colonies. The labor problem, ever pressing
because of the call of the free lands, was partially met by the
ever increasing number of petty convicts and indentured servants.
One learns that Irish Catholics were rarely "bought," if German
and British Protestants were available, so great was the hostility
to their faith. A suggestive chapter on colonial travel, sea dis-
tances, and inter-colonial highways concludes this highly inter-
esting volume.
552 NEW BOOKS [July,
THE BOOK OF GENESIS. By Samuel A. B. Mercer, Ph.D., D.D.
Milwaukee, Wis. : Morehouse Publishing Co.
The purpose of the series of studies to which the present
volume belongs is "to give to the laity an opportunity to intro-
duce into their daily life a systematic study of Holy Scripture."
A similar undertaking on the part of Catholic Scripture scholars
would certainly be productive of the best results. The author pre-
sents in this volume a systematic study of the Book of Genesis.
The introduction is followed by three chapters bearing the titles:
"Beginning of the Race," "Patriarchal History," "History of
Joseph." Anyone following the outline and the directions given
by the author in the study of the first book of the Bible will be-
come thoroughly acquainted with its contents. A large number
of questions are offered for further study and consideration in
connection with various passages of Genesis. Such topics vary
from Darwin's natural selection to the morality of mental reserva-
tion. The attempt is made throughout this exegetical work to
emphasize the value of the Bible for the modern man, to set forth
the permanent actuality of the inspired writings. The author's
definition of inspiration is far from satisfactory. A list of
reference works is placed at the head of every chapter.
MESLOM'S MESSAGES FROM THE LIFE BEYOND. By Mary
McEvilly. New York: Brentano's. $1.50.
THE TRUTH OF SPIRITUALISM. By "Rita" (Mrs. Desmond
Humphreys). Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co. $1.50.
The author or should one say amanuensis of Meslom's
Messages is an artist who became acquainted with automatic
writing while pursuing her studies for grand opera in Paris.
Gradually developing good automatism, she became convinced
that Meslom, her soi-disant "spirit control," had selected her for
important work, and she finally gave up all other occupations.
That was in 1914. Having come under the influence of Spiritists,
she read works of William Stead and Andrew Lang. It was after
this that she received for the first time "spiritual messages of a
high order."
Meslom reveals himself as an Oriental savant and mystic
of the fifteenth century, now endeavoring to teach the truth of
immortality through automatists. In an Indian monastery will
be found the results of his researches while on earth, containing
irrefutable proof of the truth of his teachings, and some day this
treasure will be recovered by Miss McEvilly.
In 1917 Miss McEvilly met a lady who had recently lost her
son, L . It is L who is thought to be the chief com-
1920.] NEW BOOKS 553
municator, under Meslora's guidance, of the "messages" con-
tained in the present volume.
Meslom teaches the truth of immortality, but he addresses
himself only to unbelievers. There is a God, "Who is not person,
nor power, nor intelligence, nor love, nor life alone; He is Spirit,
and Spirit includes all these." He exists from all eternity, He
is of infinite perfection, and He became man in Christ to suffer
and atone for the wrongdoings of His children. There is also a
Holy Ghost.
Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. But for the last
nineteen centuries men have not understood Him. Hence Mes-
lom's efforts. Man has an imminent knowledge of God which
has been obscured by materialism. His business in life is to
learn to know God in order to love and to serve Him; love of God
and neighbor is the law of life. There is personal sin which is
punished, and merit which is rewarded, but there is no hell. To
know and love God better we should daily practice meditation,
self-denial, and prayer of praise and thanksgiving. Purity and
innocence are inestimable virtues. Thus speaks Meslom.
The "messages" have no evidential value whatever there is
not a single test of "identity." There are vastly more verbal ex-
pressions than thoughts expressed. Is it not safe to assume that
the central element in the treatise, the love of God, is part of the
author's conception of Christianity, and that the "messages"
simply are subconscious elaborations of her mind? Everything
points in that direction.
The Truth of Spiritualism is a book of entirely different
character. Mrs. Humphreys begins her treatise on Spiritism,
which, by the way, is advertised as "no indictment of any religion
or any creed," by denouncing what she terms the Church, and
particularly Catholic beliefs and practices, with a virulence and
bigotry rare among educated people in our times.
First she attacks the foundations of the Church; its tradi-
tions are unreconcilable, and its claims to doctrinal authority is
an arrogance which the Church alone can explain. The Bible is
an unreliable chronicle which gives a false impression of Christ.
We wonder whence Mrs. Humphreys got her true impression.
The whole doctrine of the Church is confusing and contradictory,
and its interpretation of "vicarious salvation has only proved it-
self a basis of irreligion." Christianity gives no hope of a future
life, no consolation to the dying. The Church's one endeavor is
to keep man in subjection to itself.
The Mass is a means of making the soul a plaything for pious
554 NEW BOOKS [July,
experiments, a subject for priestly autocracy. The ceremonies
of the Church do not glorify a Supreme Being, they "merely
pander to priestly self-importance, to that man set in a little
brief authority whose ecclesiastical antics might well make the
angels weep." Religious observance "panders to the lower in-
stincts of vanity, self-gratification, greed, and ambition "
It would be wearisome to enumerate more of Mrs. Humph-
reys' grievances against the Church and Christianity. But what
is it that she wishes us to substitute for Christian belief? What
is this Truth of Spiritualism?
A maze of vague, incoherent, unproven assertions, a jumble
of rambling nonsense, of stuffy, sickly sentimental Raymondiana,
interspersed with impassioned tirades against Christianity as seen
through the spectacles of ignorance, prejudice, and calumny, and
hovering above all this the arrogant, self-canonized opinion of
Mrs. Humphreys, run amuck among truths beyond its grasp and
appreciation, ignorant, irrational, defiant, indecent, and sacri-
legious.
EAST BY WEST. By A. J. Morrison. Boston : The Four Seas Co.
$1.50 net.
Mr. Morrison has succeeded in his purpose of surveying the
history of civilization through the development of the world's
commerce. In a colloquial style he traces with zest the causes
which led to the shifting of trade from Babylon and Phoenicia to
Greece, Rome, Constantinople, Venice, Bruges, Spain and Portu-
gal, England and America. The methods of transportation, from
their crude beginnings in the East to the growth of the merchant
marine and the modern network of canals and railroads, are
colorfully presented. The second half of the book deals largely
with the history of English and American commercial expansion.
His record ends with the construction of the Bagdad Railway,
and the reopening of the centres of the East to the world's
markets.
WOUNDED WORDS. By Cora Berry Whitin. Boston: The
Four Seas Co. $1.00 net.
This is a little volume of charades in rhyme. The author
explains that they were originally written in the hope that their
"reconstruction" might relieve some weary hours for convales-
cents wounded during the War. They are now published for the
entertainment of those who are endowed with the faculty of
guessing, and enjoy its exercise. An ingenious key is furnished
by which they may establish the correctness of their interpreta-
tions,
1920.] NEW BOOKS 555
THE WORLDLINGS. By Leonard Merrick. New York: E. P.
Button & Co. $1.90.
Some years ago Mr. Leonard Merrick's novel appealed to an
appreciative, but comparatively small, circle of readers. It has
recently been his singular experience to be re-discovered and to
have his works reprinted, each with a eulogistic preface by some
literary celebrity. Whether or not the writings deserve all the
praise now lavished upon them, their revival is welcome, not only
on account of the talent displayed, but also by reason of their
freedom from certain objectionable features that disfigure too
much of contemporary fiction. The author is absolutely of this
sophisticated age, modern in mind and manner; yet though he
frequently deals with grave transgressions, he does so without
the degrading grossness so often found elsewhere; moreover,
there cannot be charged to his account any responsibility for con-
tribution to the chaos produced by putting evil for good and good
for evil.
The Worldlings, now republished under its original title,
hardly represents Mr. Merrick at his best; nevertheless, it is a
readable novel and, in the main, true to its author's form.
LITTLE MOTHER AMERICA. By Helen Fitzgerald Sanders.
Boston: The Cornhill Co.
This War novel has for its heroine a mysterious young Bel-
gian refugee who lands in New York alone, unable to recall her
name or anything of her past, speaking, at first, only the word,
America. Her adventures, her eventual marriage to an American,
followed by the establishment of her identity and the return of
her memory, make up a story with possibilities that the author
has not handled to the best advantage. Interest would have been
increased by letting the reader into the secret earlier; as it is,
the attention is distracted by speculating on complications that
prove to be non-existent. This, with inconsistencies, errors in
construction, and the use of a too rhetorical style, militates
against effectiveness.
CREATION VERSUS EVOLUTION. By Rev. Philo L. Mills, D.D.
Washington, D. C.: The Andrew B. Graham Co. 50 cents.
Trailing clouds of glory did early man come from God,
but ere long shades of the prison-house began to close upon the
growing race. Physically, mentally, morally, and religiously,
primitive man stood upon a plane enormously higher than that
of the highest sub-human anthropoids, enormously higher indeed
than that of the great bulk of his offspring the modern, uncivilized
556 NEW BOOKS [July,
I
"primitive" peoples. Such is the thesis proposed and defended by
Reverend Doctor Philo L. Mills in this pamphlet. Father
Mills has gathered his evidence not so much from theological as
from archaeological and anthropological sources, with which he
shows wide acquaintance. Even those who may not be willing to
accept all of his conclusions, will nevertheless find in this modest
brochure, particularly in the third section on moral and religious
data, much material and many suggestions that have an interest-
ing bearing on the question of the physical and cultural begin-
nings of the human race a subject that has lost none of its
witchery since the publication of the Descent of Man, and upon
which much new light has been shed that was hidden from the
eyes of Darwin.
THE Extension Press of Chicago has rendered another service
to Catholic art in the Life of the Blessed Virgin in Pictures,
by Rev. William D. O'Brien ($1.50). The book presents sixty-
three full page reproductions in sepia of the best works
of religious art, both ancient and modern, illustrating the life of
the Blessed Mother. Each picture is faced by a page of explan-
atory text. The result is a charming volume, a worthy companion
to Christ's Life in Pictures, which appeared from the same Press
some time since.
A HELPFUL collection of "Daily Thoughts from the Gospel" is
entitled Our Saviour's Own Words, selected and arranged by
Rev. F. J. Remler, C.M. This pocket companion for the busy man
is published by the Abbey Student Press, St. Benedict's College,
Atchison, Kansas, and sold for 75 cents, 80 cents with postage.
Discounts are allowed on quantities.
THE student of French will find a valuable aid in How to Speak
French Like the French (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co.
$2.00. The authors are Marie and Jeanne Yersin, the originators
of the "Phono-Rhythmic French Method," which has already been
put out in book form by Messrs. Lippincott. The book under re-
view presents that bane of the foreign student, the "Idioms and
Current Expressions of the French Language," in concise form
yet amply illustrated. It should prove a valuable aid to schools
and students.
THE recent volumes of "The Modern Library" (Boni & Live-
right, 85 cents each) include Best American Short Stories,
edited by Alexander Jessup, and A Modern Book of Criticisms,
excerpts from the critical thought of the times, edited with an
introduction by Ludwig Lewisohn.
1920.] NEW BOOKS 557
FOREIGN PUBLICATIONS.
GABRIEL BKAUCHESNE, PARIS:
La Parousie, by Cardinal Louis Billot, S.J. (9 Jr. net). The am-
bition of all Catholic theologians is to account for the apparent fact
that the end of the world is presented in the New Testament as near.
The eminent professor of theology in the Gregorian University finds
the solution in the nature of prophecy as distinct from history.
Prophecy is without perspective. This fact is undeniable in the Old
Testament, and instructive for the interpretation of the New. We
should not be surprised, therefore, to find the end of the world and
the destruction of Jerusalem represented in the New Testament as
connected events, portrayed under a single image, which literally re-
fers to the overthrow of the Jewish commonwealth, yet at the same
time typifies the final consummation of things. The Scriptural image
is a tableau vivant, and the mentioning of two events together does not
imply by any means that they are as near in time and history as in
the singleness of vision which embraces both. Events under the eye
of prophecy are not tied together by "simple continuity or chrono-
logical simultaneity;" they have a particular quality of connectiveness
not found elsewhere, because prophecy has a category all its own;
and thus we find in the eschatalogical Discourse of the Saviour two
events simultaneously predicted, two catastrophes of unequal grandeur
set forth under the same perspective : the near destruction of Jerusalem
and the final consummation of the world. Neither is regarded in it-
self; both are confusedly presented together; and reason, guided by
analogy, is able to overcome what is indistinct to the eye.
Cardinal Billot applies this principle of solution to all the texts
of difficulty from St. Matthew to the Apocalypse. A freshness of illus-
trative analogy pervades the presentation; and though it be invidious
to single out any one part more than another, this is especially true
of what the Cardinal has to say concerning the famous difficulty in
1 Thess. iv. 13-17, where St. Paul seems to include himself among those
destined to survive unto the Parousia. His Eminence expresses the
hope that "this modest work will help to enlighten some of good will,
dispel the doubts raised by recent controversy, and solve one of the
chief difficulties urged by modern criticism against the Gospel." We
join heartily in this holy hope. The stronghold attacked is one we
may all pray to see laid low, so long has it stood as a threatening
salient thrust deep into the Christian battle front.
Les Origines du Dogme de la Trinite (24 /r.) is the fourth edi-
tion of the Abbe Jules Lebreton's well-known work on the Blessed
Trinity. The first edition appeared in 1909. He has re-written the
chapters on the Messianic Hope, the Logos of Philo, and the Trinity
in the synoptic Gospels, and added a number of changes here and
there in answer to his critics and reviewers. The same publishers
announce a brief summary of this scholarly treatise, entitled Le Dieu
Vivant, la revelation de la sainte Trinite dans le Nouveau Testament.
Genevieve Hennet de Goutel is a delightful sketch by Marthe Amal-
bert, her friend and fellow-worker in the hospitals of Rumania dur-
ing the late War. Genevieve de Goutel was a writer and an artist of
more than average ability, but gave up her career for a life of social
service first with Marc Sangnier of Le Sillon in his great social
apostolate, and later on with the wounded soldiers in far-away Ru-
558 NEW BOOKS [July,
mania. Father Sertillanges writes a most interesting preface to the
volume. (7 fr.)
We also recommend to our readers three helpful volumes of ser-
mons, instructive for the layman, suggestive for the priest, Instructions
d'un Quart d'Heure, by the Abbe J. Pailler; Vade-Mecum des Predica-
teurs, by two Missionaries of long and wide experience, and Tome II.
of the Dominicales (5 fr.) of Abbe Eugene Duplessy, already noticed
in these pages. This second volume covers from the Feast of St.
Joseph to the Feast of St. Peter.
PIERRE TEQUI, PARIS :
Je Crois en Jesus Christ, by Abbe Lemoine, the sequel to Je Crois
en Dieu by the same author, is an equally beautiful book. It is a life
of the Saviour explained and meditated. The author runs over the
great events from the Annunciation to the Resurrection one by one
and, absorbing the infinite richness of the Gospel, comments its en-
semble and detail with his heart as well as his mind. There is noth-
ing artificial here, not a page that he has not lived, not a line, not a
word which he has not felt. This is the real originality of this work,
and the mark that distinguishes it from so many others.
It is also, here and there, a work of science, rich in opulent in-
formation, where the apologetic takes an elevation and a depth truly
exceptional, a work where the idea is condensed in robust and strik-
ing formulas, where conviction and sentiment unite to produce beau-
tiful and powerful effects. We meet with remarks of singular pene-
tration, flashes of light on pages of magnificent plenitude. The brief,
compact and rapid glosses of the discourses and the maxims of Christ
bring out in strong relief the sweetness and the severity of the evan-
gelical doctrine.
Le Belevement National, by Monseigneur Gibier, is perhaps the
most remarkable book which has come from the pen of the Bishop of
Versailles. At the present moment there is no subject more intensely
practical than National Reconstruction, and Monseigneur Gibier, whose
intellect is so keen and whose judgment so sure, is admirably qualified
to treat it. We may judge of the interest of its pages by the eminently
suggestive titles of its chapters. First part Those who cannot uplift
us Les Aveugles Les N6gateurs Les Sceptiques Les Sectaires Les
Arrivistes Les Jouisseurs Les Corrupteurs Les Utopistes Les In-
souciantes Les Timides- Les Decourages Les Inutiles Les Routi-
niers Les Intransigeants La Femme inferieure a sa mission. Sec-
ond part Those who shall uplift us Nos morts Les Saints Les
Apotres Les Gonvaincus Les Bienveillants Les Laborieux Les
Adaptes Les Organisateurs Les Dirigeants Les Educateurs Les
Chefs de famille La Femme chretienne et francaise.
LIBRAIRIE VICTOR LECOFFRE, PARIS:
Le Livre de Jeremie, by Rev. Albert Condamin, S.J. (24 /;.), be-
longs to the collection of Biblical studies undertaken by a number of
Catholic Biblical scholars in France. The present volume deals with
the prophet Jeremias and the most critical period of the Jewish people,
the Babylonian activity. The author deals in an exhaustive manner
with the prophecy of Jeremias and the many difficult problems it pre-
sents. His work is an introduction, a translation and a commentary
1920.] NEW BOOKS 559
of the prophecy of Jeremias. Biblical criticism mutilates this
prophecy almost beyond recognition; some critics regard only about
one-fifth of the prophecy as authentic. The author of the present
volume defends the traditional conservative view: the prophecy is in-
spired in its entirety, with the sole exception of unimportant, often
explanatory, glosses.
The Septuagint version of the prophecy is much shorter than the
Hebrew text. The explanation of this discrepancy may, in the opinion
of the author, be found in the fact that the Septuagint translator
omitted many details and unnecessary repetitions in which the
Hebrew abounds. The chronology of the prophecy of Jeremias pre-
sents difficulties, not, however, insurmountable. The prophecies were
written at different times. When these parts were placed together into
one book the prophecies were grouped according to subject matter.
Again the chronological disorders may be due, in part, to the different
manner in which the Hebrews and Babylonians recorded events of
importance. "The prophecies against the nations" probably circu-
lated at first as a separate volume and were eventually placed at the
end of the book, whilst, in another revision, they were placed else-
where. The Messianic hope finds a prominent place in the ministry
of Jeremias; the present evils and misfortunes suffered by the people
are contrasted with the glory of the coming Kingdom. The author
of this work enumerates various interpretations of the famous passage,
"a woman shall compass a man," but offers no definite solution be-
yond the statement that the entire poem is Messianic in character.
A valuable bibliography and a chronological arrangement of the
chapters add much to the value of the study of the ministry of the
great Prophet of Israel. Throughout the work the traditional con-
servative position is defended by the author, in opposition to the anni-
hilating destructiveness of radical criticism.
CIA EDITORA "EL DEBATE," HABANA:
Lo que me enseno la vida (De mi jardin y del cercado ajeno),
por David Rubio, O.S.A. Spanish literature does not abound in minia-
turists of thoughts; therefore the booklet of Dr. David Rubio, O.S.A. ,
is, for the Spanish speaking world, to some extent a literary novelty.
As a writer, his thought covers the whole field of human experi-
ence and strikes always a note of originality. His satire finds an easy
mark in the national characteristics of other people. While he ad-
mires the United States, the practical genius of its people, the free-
dom granted to the Catholic Church, and the religious organization of
American Catholicism, he does not believe in American democracy.
Some of his expressions are not theologically correct, as, for in-
stance, when he says: "The fate of man is to be a slave, as when he
lost his innocence he lost his freedom;" and "Great souls are portions
of Eternity." Doubtless we must ascribe these lapses to poetic license
and exaggeration. They do not impair the merit and beauty of style
of a book that commands the attention of thinkers and all lovers of
Spanish literature.
IRecent Events.
Fighting of the severest character has con-
Russia, tinued all through the month between the
Polish and Bolshevik armies. Despite
their forced evacuation of Kiev, which occurred on June 12th, the
advantage on the whole seems to rest with the Poles. In the
South and the region around Kiev the Poles have been forced
to retire, but are putting up a stubborn defence. In the North
they have been generally successful and have launched against
the Bolsheviki, between the Dvina and upper Beresina, a power-
ful counter-offensive, in the course of which they have wiped out
two Bolshevik divisions. There are twenty Bolshevik divisions
on the northern front. Militarists consider this the greatest con-
centration ever brought against the Poles, but the Polish com-
mand has assured the people that there is no danger of their
breaking through. General Alexis Brusiloff, former Commander-
in-Chief of the Russian Armies, is understood to have assumed
command of the Bolshevik offensive against Poland.
The Cabinet of the Polish Premier Spulski, which succeeded
that of Premier Paderewski on December 15th last, has resigned.
The resignation is believed to have been brought about chiefly
by opposition to the Government's policy regarding the creation
of a buffer state between Poland and Russia.
After the Polish-Bolshevik campaign, the negotiations in
London between Gregory Krassin, the Soviet envoy, and the Brit-
ish Premier occupy the foremost place in the Russian news of the
past month. The English Government has definitely committed
itself to the resumption of trade. Krassin has succeeded in ob-
taining a promise from the Lenine-Trotzky Government that all
the concessions demanded as preliminaries by Lloyd George
would be granted. British and Allied prisoners in Russia are to
be returned; the Bolsheviki agree not to interfere in the political
affairs of other nations; and they promise to assist in every way
the reorganization of transportation systems in Russia. Already
Krassin has contracted for shipments to Russia of large quantities
of medicines, hospital supplies, woollen goods and shoes. He is
negotiating also for shipments of tea, coffee, machinery and cot-
ton. Both the French and American Governments look with dis-
favor on this resumption of trade with the Soviet Government.
Italy, however, as a result of recent negotiations, has agreed to
1920.] RECENT EVENTS 561
an exchange of merchandise with Russia. Contracts amounting
to 100,000,000 Swedish kroners have also been negotiated be-
tween Sweden and Bolshevik Russia. Norway has also informed
the Russian Soviet Government of her willingness to resume
trade.
Besides the campaign in Poland, the Bolshevik! have en-
gaged in important fighting in other fields. In the middle of
May a Bolshevik army landed from thirteen ships near Enzeli, in
Persia, on the Caspian Sea, and forced the British troops sta-
tioned there to withdraw. The British retreated to Rehst, which
was also occupied later by the Bolsheviki, who continued their
advance, and early in June were reported to have captured
Teheran, the Persian capital. This last report, however, is un-
confirmed. The results of the Persian invasion have been chiefly
two: first, the capture, at Enzeli, of the entire White (Denikin)
fleet, consisting of six cruisers and seven transports and a large
quantity of war material from the Caucasus; and, second, the
exchange of parleys between the Bolsheviki and Mustapha Kemal
Pasha, leader of the Turkish Nationalists, resulting in the recog-
nition by the former of the Nationalist Republic. The Persian
Government has forwarded a strong protest against these pro-
ceedings to the League of Nations.
Meanwhile the Bolsheviki have been less successful in the
Crimea, where General Wrangel, Denikin's successor, has re-
organized a force of 70,000 men and started a successful offensive.
In a recent action he is reported to have captured two ports on
the Sea of Azov, together with five thousand prisoners, twenty-
seven guns and five armored trains. Denikin's former volunteer
army has been disbanded and a new regular army organized
under the strictest discipline.
The so-called Far Eastern Republic, with headquarters re-
cently established at Verkhneudinsk, has opened up peace nego-
tiations with the Japanese. The military basis would be the dis-
armament of the troops of General Semenoff, Commander-in-Chief
of all the Russian Armies, and the evacuation of Transbaikalia by
the Japanese. Harmony appears to reign between the Moscow
(Bolsheviki) and Verkhneudinsk and Vladivostok Governments,
the Soviet Government having recognized the two latter govern-
ments, each of which is claiming independence.
The election for the first Parliament under
Germany. the German Constitution took place on
June 6th. The result was a smashing de-
feat for the coalition Government that has been in power. Two
VOL. CXI. 36
562 RECENT EVENTS [July,
of the three coalition parties, namely, the Democratic and the
Majority Socialists, the representatives of moderate principles,
suffered severe losses and the consequent gains went to the ex-
tremists of the Right and Left. The Independent Socialists
gained nearly 2,000,000 votes. The Nationalists and German
People's Party gained together about 1,300,000 votes. Including
the deputies from plebiscite districts, who retain their National
Assembly mandates in the new Reichstag, the latter body will
consist of four hundred and sixty members. Although the Ma-
jority Socialist-Democratic Centrist bloc still retains a nominal
balance of power, the heavy drift to the Right and Left has made
a stable government practically impossible.
As a result of the elections, the Cabinet of Premier Braun
immediately resigned, and President Ebert requested Chancellor
Mueller to form a new ministry. Herr Mueller declined the task,
however, owing to the refusal of the Independent Socialists, the
second strongest party in the Reichstag, to participate in any but
a purely Socialistic government. Thereupon Dr. Rudolf Heinze,
a Moderate conservative, endeavored to form a Cabinet, only to
renounce the attempt on meeting with opposition from the Ma-
jority Socialists. The solution of the difficulty is at present a
matter of speculation. What is anticipated is the establishment
of the old coalition, with a certain amount of stability given to
its precarious majority by a promise of benevolent neutrality
from the People's Party. This expedient can be but temporary.
Any Government formed will be merely a provisional one to carry
on affairs till the Spa Conference is over.
It has been recently announced that the reduction of the
German Army to 2,000,000 men has been accomplished in accord-
ance with the Versailles Treaty. A late order issued by President
Ebert creates a Provisional Army Advisory Committee to work
with the Ministry of Defence, and a similar Navy Advisory Com-
mittee. Non-commissioned officers and men will have member-
ship on these committees. The soldiers and sailors will be
elected by trustees in different districts. Each committee will
organize sub-committees to be convened for a three-day confer-
ence in Berlin.
The Ministry of Transport announced toward the end of
May that the delivery of 5,000 locomotives to the Entente, in ac-
cordance with the Peace Treaty, had been completed. The for-
mer Prussian-Hessian railway system now possesses 23,000 loco-
motives, which is 1,400 more than it had before the War, but
only 13,000 locomotives are capable of being used.
Restoration of the Louvain Library was begun in May by
1920.] RECENT EVENTS 563
the German Government at a cost of more than 5,000,000 francs
gold, in execution of the agreement with Belgium. Restoration
of paintings carried off during the War is also proceeding. Up
to April 1st, Germany is reported to have restored to France eight
billion marks in cash and securities and large quantities of art
works, documents and archives, and to Belgium about the same
amount.
Because of their participation in the Kapp revolt last March,
Admiral von Trotha, ex-Chief of the Admiralty, Rear Admiral
von Leventzow, recently Governor of Kiel, and Major von Falken-
hausen, at one time an Assistant Secretary of State, have, with
twelve other military and naval officers, been dismissed from serv-
ice. Their cases have been laid before the Public Prosecutor for
further action. Eighty-five cases arising out of the Kapp revolt
have so far been disposed of by Government officials.
Early in June the terms of an alliance
France. between France and Belgium were agreed
on by representatives of the two countries.
The general lines of the alliance are as follows: Aviation, Engi-
neering, Artillery, Cavalry, and Infantry Staffs will choose one
delegate each for each country. The alliance will be strictly de-
fensive, and Belgium's liability is excluded in case of French ag-
gression or colonial conflict. The duration of the Treaty, whose
purpose is the defence of the Belgian and French frontiers, will
be for from five to fifteen years. Belgium agrees to maintain a
larger army than before the War and to restore the Antwerp
fortifications and others. The alliance, which marks the end of
Belgium's guaranteed neutrality in time of peace, has long been
expected as the natural outgrowth of the War. It will not include
any other nation.
Since these last notes were written, France has completely
withdrawn her troops from the occupied German cities, Germany
having fulfilled the conditions of the Allies. Marshal Foch occu-
pied Frankfort, Darmstadt, Hanan, Dieburg, and Hamburg be-
cause the Germans, in violation of the Treaty, sent heavy forces
into the neutral zone. Those troops having been withdrawn,
France evacuated the German cities. There were no disorders
during the withdrawal.
Up to May 30th German deliveries of coal to France under
the Treaty of Versailles amounted to 4,686,000 tons, according
to a recent announcement of the Reparations Commission. Of this
total, 405,000 tons were given to Luxemburg. In the same period
Italy received 306,000 tons and Belgium 98,000 tons. Germany,
564 RECENT EVENTS [July,
up to the end of May, the announcement shows, also had deliv-
ered to France 6,547 horses, 40,720 head of cattle, 67,476 sheep
and 7,575 goats. German deliveries to Belgium in this period
were 3,116 horses, 43,489 head of cattle, 32,644 sheep, 6,140 goats
and 28,339 fowl.
Governmental control of the purchase and distribution of
wheat will probably be extended for another year. It is held the
economic situation will not yet permit the Government to allow
wheat to be sold in the general market, as the price would tend
to equal that paid abroad, and so increase the price of bread in
France. Winter wheat prospects throughout France are very
good, according to reports of the Ministry of Agriculture. It is
announced that a good grade of wheat covers approximately
8,500,000 acres. In 1919, a poor year, France raised 173,000,000
bushels of wheat and had to buy 150,000,000 bushels abroad.
This year, with 800,000 more acres seeded than last year, the crop
is estimated to be at least fifty per cent better, bringing the yield
to 260,000,000 bushels.
In May the General Federation of Labor called off the strike
it had ordered in support of the railway men's walkout. The
motion provided for the immediate resumption of work. The
Federation asserted that the hasty presentation in the Chamber of
Deputies of the Government's railroad reorganization plan, showed
that their action in calling the strike for nationalization of the
roads was justified, and that nationalization was demanded by the
country. But the general belief is that the strong attitude of the
Government and hostile public opinion have, between them, ad-
ministered a definite defeat to the laborites. In former big
French strikes, even if they were unsuccessful, the men have been
strong enough to insist on "no dismissals" as one of the condi-
tions of the resumption of work. But in the present strike they
were unable to carry even that point.
With regard to the general international situation, the
month's record has largely been one of negotiations and half-
negotiations, but of no definite decisions. Shortly after the close
of the San Remo Conference in May the British and French
Premiers met at Hythe, England, to discuss preliminaries for the
Spa Conference with the Germans. The chief topic discussed was
the matter of the German indemnity. What the French want is,
in the very near future, actual cash or its equivalent for what
Germany owes, or at least of a good part of the debt. To that end
Premier Millerand proposed an international loan, based upon
the German debt to the Allies, the bonds of which should be
guaranteed by all the Allies. English statesmen appear to
1920.] RECENT EVENTS 565
object to guaranteeing this issue, of which England is to receive
only twenty-five per cent.
As the Italian Government is discontented with the portion
of the German reparations money allotted her, and in addition
has protested against the settlement of this question in a private
conference between the British and French Premiers without dis-
cussion with the other Allies, the meeting of the Supreme Council
at Brussels and the conference with the Germans at Spa, orig-
inally set for June 21st, have been postponed. It is understood
that the general Brussels Conference of the heads of the Allied
Governments will be held on July 2d, 3d, and 4th, and this will
be followed by discussions with the German representatives on
July 5th.
New and substantial credits for the relief and reconstruction
of Central European countries, including Austria and Hungary,
have been arranged by the Governments of Great Britain, Den-
mark, Holland, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland. The French
Government has asked the Chamber of Deputies for the necessary
resources in order that France may participate in the relief plans.
The credits are mainly in the form of raw materials and food.
Premier Nitti and his Ministry, the third
Italy. to be formed under his leadership, resigned
office on June 9th. Since then former
Premier Giolitti has been requested by the King to form a new
Cabinet. Premier Nitti's resignation was the outcome, appa-
rently, of a resolution introduced by the Socialist Parliamentary
group. This was to the effect that the Government statement on
the annulment of the bread decree should not be heard, since the
original decree raising the price of bread was a violation of the
Parliament's prerogatives. Every party in the House had pro-
tested against the decree, which the Government sanctioned to
avoid a Government loss of 8,000,000,000 lire through the bread
subsidy. The loss next year is expected to amount to 14,000,-
000,000 lire.
The controversy over the bread decree, however, was merely
the culmination of a series of incidents throughout the month, all
tending to increase Signor Nitti's unpopularity. One of these
was the summary wholesale arrests of Dalmatian residents in
Rome, old and young, at dead of night, and the clumsily con-
trived fiction of a Dalmatian plot to justify the blunder which
aroused general indignation. Then, too, when the Premier
formed his third Cabinet toward the end of May, he constructed
it by sacrificing the best elements of the second Nitti Cabinet in
566 RECENT EVENTS [July,
favor of newcomers who had not the requisite prestige, authority
or experience. The chief cause of the Nitti downfall, however,
was due to the fact that the recent elections brought into Parlia-
ment representatives of the newly organized Popular (Catholic)
Party, and the balance of power was held between them and the
Socialists. As the programmes of these two parties were diamet-
rically opposed, the Premier's various measures inevitably met
the disapproval of one or the other, and he found it impossible
to reconcile them.
Signer Giolitti was Premier at the time of Italy's entrance
into the War, which he vigorously opposed, and it is anticipated
that his foreign policy will include a resumption of full relations
with Germany. He is looked on with considerable distrust by
Allied statesmen, especially by the French, so much so that the
question now is, not whether the French will meet the Germans at
Spa, but whether they will even sit with representatives of the
Giolitti Government. His Ministry is expected to contain repre-
sentatives of all the parties of the Left, and probably will be a
coalition which will exclude none but the ultra conservatives and
the official Socialists. At last accounts he was reported as en-
deavoring to arrive at an arrangement with the Catholic Party.
The internal situation throughout Italy is giving grave con-
cern. Rioting in widely separated parts of the country, as the re-
sult of dissatisfaction with economic conditions, has assumed a
serious aspect. The looting of shops in principal cities and
clashes between civilians and members of the State police are re-
ported in recent dispatches. Several strikes are in effect and
industry is being severely handicapped. General strikes have
been declared in Carnia, in the northeastern provinces, in Verona,
and in Palermo, and an agricultural strike is in progress in the
Province of Bari.
Severe fighting between Italian troops and Albanian insur-
gents has occurred recently at Avlona, Albania, over which Italy
has a mandate. The Albanian forces succeeded in driving the
Italian garrisons from the interior of Avlona, and communica-
tions with the hinterland by telephone and telegraph have been
completely severed. Thus the port is now inaccessible to the
Italians except from the sea. Avlona itself was only saved from
capture by the Albanians after a furious night battle lasting over
four hours. Italian battleships were engaged in the action, and
they are reported to have shelled and completely wiped out three
villages. At present writing Avlona is in a state of siege and
Italian naval reinforcements are being hurried from Brindisi and
Taranto.
1920.] RECENT EVENTS 567
Early in June Premier Nitti was reported as having made
new compromise proposals to Jugo-Slavia, intended to solve the
Adriatic question. Because of his subsequent resignation this,
of course, has all gone for nothing, and the situation remains the
same. D'Annunzio is still in control at Fiume, and has even
threatened to make incursions into Jugo-Slav territory in the
interior.
After prolonged delays and numerous vain
Hungary. efforts to obtain modification of the Allied
terms, Hungary finally signed the Peace
Treaty at Versailles on June 4th. Certain provisions of the
Treaty have aroused much opposition throughout Hungary ever
since their presentation last January, and demands were voiced
in every section that the Government refuse to sign the docu-
ment. Count Albert Apponyi, head of the Hungarian peace dele-
gation, resigned rather than sign what he declared to be "a rag of
iniquity."
By the terms of the Treaty, Hungary, which six years ago
had an area greater than Italy and a larger population than Spain,
is now left with an area hardly twice that of Switzerland and a
population less than that of Belgium. Hungary is now smaller
than all of her neighbors and rivals, Rumania, Jugo-Slavia and
Czecho-Slovakia, each being more than twice as large, both in
area and population. Moreover, whereas before the War Mag-
yars were masters of millions of alien subjects, today many Mag-
yars are under foreign rule. This last was the most objection-
able feature of the Treaty in Hungarian eyes. Provisions for
holding plebiscites in territory awarded to Jugo-Slavia, Rumania
and Czecho-Slovakia, formerly included within Hungarian boun-
daries, constituted the major demand of the Magyar representa-
tives in their request for the revision of the Treaty.
Though these and other requests were refused by the Allies,
the Hungarians draw some hope from the phraseology of the cov-
ering note, which is somewhat milder than the notes accompany-
ing the German and Austrian treaties. The covering letter also
points out that in the application of the terms a certain amount
of latitude will be allowed, and that, in cases where the Allied
Commission for Fixing Frontiers finds that obvious injustice has
been done, a report on the subject may be addressed to the Coun-
cil of the League of Nations.
On June 9th, the Hungarian Cabinet, headed by Premier
Semeden, Premier and Minister of the Interior, resigned. The
Cabinet was fomed on March 14th last, and its resignation was
568 RECENT EVENTS [July,
caused by its inability to suppress the White Terror exercised
for some months by the "Society for Awakening Hungarians,"
and by army officers. It will be the task of the new Government
to reestablish order and security for all citizens and to prevent
the "boycott of Hungary," which has been announced by the Inter-
national Federation of Trade Unions to start on June 20th, and
to be maintained while the White Terror exists.
The decision to proclaim a general boycott on commerce with
Hungary, was reached on June 3d by the executive committee of
the International Trades Unions and the General Council of the
International Federation of Transport Workers, in session at
Amsterdam. Communications by rail, sea, port, telegraph and
all other means, between Hungary and the outside world, will be
cut off, according to the resolutions passed, as a protest against
the "persecution of Hungarian workmen by the White Terror."
Instructions to this effect have been sent to all unions of trans-
port workers and railway men.
It was reported several months ago that Admiral Horthy,
who still continues as Regent of Hungary, had secretly, but offi-
cially, offered the Hungarian throne to former Emperor Charles,
with the assurance that everything was arranged for the restora-
tion of the Hapsburg monarchy with the consent of the majority
of the population. Over half the Hungarian population, espe-
cially the peasants, are said to want a return of the monarchy to
end the present political chaos. The Allies, however, have de-
clined to permit this solution, and the ex-Emperor is still in resi-
dence at Prangins, near Geneva.
The Austrian Cabinet, headed by Dr. Karl
Austria. Renner as Chancellor, which has been ad-
ministering the country's affairs for the
greater part of the time since the armistice, resigned office on
June llth. The break came unexpectedly over the Minister of
War's decree on army discipline, which question had been raised
in the National Assembly by the Christian Socialists. It is be-
lieved a new Coalition Cabinet will be formed pending the elec-
tions.
It is said that the members of the Left had stood ready for
some days to seize the first pretext for a break, feeling that the
Christian Socialists were steadily blocking legislation to which the
former were pledged. The crisis was hastened by external events,
and also by a recent incident at Gratz when gendarmes fired into
crowds, who were demonstrating against profiteering in food, and
killed twelve people. The Conservative Provincial Government is
1920.] RECENT EVENTS 569
charged with blocking an investigation and the punishment of the
gendarmes. Moreover, a recent reactionary anti-Semitic demon-
stration was followed by monarchist agitation. Reports of a
strong movement in Tyrol, Salzburg and portions of Upper
Austria to join Bavaria and create a Catholic kingdom under
Prince Rupprecht, also contributed to the fall of the Government.
An Austrian Commission sent to Belgrade to negotiate for
foodstuffs and other supplies, has reported that the Serbs are
unwilling to accept in exchange luxuries, which are all that
Austria has to offer, nor will the Serbs accept Austrian money.
The most formidable anti-Semitic demonstration which
Vienna has witnessed since last autumn occurred on June 9th after
a great mass meeting of the German and Austrian ex-Officers'
Association combined with other anti-Semitic elements. The as-
sembly took place in Rathaus Square as a protest against the
Jewish element in the government and army. The elimination
of the Jews was demanded. After inflammatory speeches a great
crowd began spontaneous demonstrations through the various
boulevards, and a number of persons were maltreated.
According to late dispatches the Allies have proposed to take
over the financial administration of Austria to insure her economic
recovery, and have agreed to allow Austria to contract a loan for
food and other needs which shall have a priority over reparation
claims. In return the Reparations Commission will assume direc-
tion of Austrian finances. The Entente proposal, which is signed
by the French and English members of the Reparations Commis-
sion, Vienna section, authorizes the issue of Treasury bonds, for
which the public property and all the revenues of Austria will
serve as guarantee for all foreign obligations, including war debts
and reparations. The Reparations Commission will have control
of Austrian finances and will eventually be able to take in hand
the imposition of taxes and will assure strict economy in State
expenditures. Strong opposition to the proposal is expressed by
the newspapers and by the pro-Germans in Austria, as they think
this intervention of the Entente will make impossible the success
of their movement for annexation to Germany. In political
circles, however, the proposal is considered favorably.
June 17, 1920.
With Our Readers.
FOR many months past the Catholic weeklies of the country
have endeavored to arouse Catholics to the dangers that
threatened Catholic education. There is no more patent fact than
that the steadying and saving influence of the nation during these
critical days of reconstruction has been the religious education
and the consequent practical religious principles fostered by the
Catholics of the country. For decades they have not only cham-
pioned the right and proclaimed the necessity of religious educa-
tion, but they have given the strongest proof of their belief
therein; have shouldered a double taxation and contributed hun-
dreds of millions that their children might receive the education
to which by every right of earth and of heaven they were entitled.
* * * *
THE fruits of education cannot be fully seen in one individual
or group of individuals. They cannot be seen in one genera-
tion. Traditions of the race have a tenacious way of holding out
against assault. And even when denied, Christian traditions in
faith and in morals oftentimes hold sway over the conduct of
men and the laws of a nation. The present day must be some
hours old before any one can deny that there was a yesterday.
And the Christian truth of the ages must be worn threadbare
and made no longer attractive before it may be denied.
* * * *
MENTAL attitudes must work themselves out before their value
for good or their power for evil can become clearly and un-
deniably apparent. Christianity did not suddenly reform the
world. It required centuries for the world to understand:
the Church was, during this process, in part conquered by the
world. The Faith of Christ is really too much for us: achieve-
ment in making it incarnate shows us also how much of beauty
is still unattained, what heights of selflessness are still to be
reached. Education in Christian truths means at least a more
and more spiritual outlook on the world: a more spiritual inter-
pretation of life, less seeking for oneself and for one's own:
the surer death of opportunism: the closer brotherly approach
to every one of our fellows : an acceptance of the mind, teaching,
love, mystery and leadership of Christ.
1920.] WITH OUR READERS 571
OPPOSED to Christian education is the education that is not
Christian. However, it may begin: no matter on what imi-
tating pretexts it may be founded: no matter that it may deceive
even the elect, it will in the long run lead to the acceptance of
such beliefs, or lack of them, as will mean a departure from the
spiritual and from spiritual values and an approach to material-
ism and self-seeking opportunism.
HRIST was a Man of clear intellect. He came to teach the
truth and He said that any man who would not accept His
truth would not know the way to eternal life. To permit the
questioning of Christ's teaching to enter into education, is to
make education the protagonist of skepticism. It is the first step,
though apparently no line is crossed, on the road to doubt, fear,
uncertainty concerning the fundamental sanctities and responsi-
bilities of life. Such education holds the seed of universal de-
struction. It robs one of direct touch with God. It takes from
him the commanding supremacy of Christ. It leads him to be
self-centred, and almost persuaded that he should be self-suf-
ficient. The world is narrowed to himself. Authority no longer
inspires him; individualism is his only law. The spiritual
drifts further away and at last becomes unreal. The sensible and
the material win him because they, at least, are certain, tangible,
appealing. Law is measured by convenience: opportunism is his
creed. The history of the race proves to him that the fittest
survive, and they are fittest who make themselves so by surviving.
Self-interest is the goal, therefore, not self-sacrifice. If any man,
Christian or not, were asked to give an estimate of the world as
at present it shows itself in greater and extended issues, ten-
dencies, philosophies and practical conduct, he would undoubt-
edly describe it as well illustrating what we have just written.
Indeed, we might fill these pages with judgments to that effect
from widely different sources.
THE two kinds of education have worked themselves out far
enough to show that they are intrinsically antagonistic.
Life a journal which will not be charged with over-seriousness
recently quoted the statement of the President of a non-Catholic
University and added, "this is a faithful description of a disease
generally prevalent." The statement itself was as follows: "Man's
attention and interest have been increasingly turned to himself,
his immediate surroundings and his instant occupation. Having
572 WITH OUR READERS [July,
come to feel himself quite superior to all that has gone before,
and being without faith in anything that lies beyond, he has
tended to become an extreme egoist. The natural result has been
to measure the universe in terms of himself and his present satis-
faction."
* * * *
WITH these facts so glaringly evident, with the eternal well-
being of so many millions of souls jeopardized, with the
future of our country hanging in the balance, the forces of ma-
terialism, of secularism are endeavoring to extend the disease
and have it eat deeper and deeper into the social structure of
the country. That they are so powerful is the best proof of how
anti-Christian much of our modern education has been.
* * * *
IT certainly behooves every Catholic that has the interest of his
Faith at heart to rise from sleep, to keep in touch with and
to study these movements, to go out upon the battlefield and not
only to pray, but to fight for the rights that are inalienable.
We have said "to study" these movements; for they never present
themselves under their true colors nor with their real purpose.
Materialism never yet had the courage to show its philosophy un-
clothed. Opportunism would be damned at once if it showed its
unmasked countenance.
* * * *
WE have no word of attack here against those who are pro-
moting the welfare of the public schools. Public educa-
tion is a necessity for the welfare of the nation : its schools ought
to be of the highest standards, their teachers ought to receive
just salaries higher, than in many cases, they are at present
receiving. Our words here are directed against those who are
seeking to make public education the sport and spoil of politics,
and many of whom are seeking to rob us of the freedom of edu-
cation, and indirectly, at least, to destroy our parochial schools
and our Catholic colleges.
* * * *
STUDIED strong efforts have been made of late to federalize
education. The first step is to secure the appointment of a
federal secretary of education. He is to labor for the standard-
ization of education. But following his apparently innocent lead
is the plan to have passed a federal bill that will grant subsidies
for general educational purposes to all the States. This, of course,
will mean a great retinue of federal officers, inspectors, etc., a
golden opportunity for schoolbook publishers who have political
1920.] WITH OUR READERS 573
influence with the administration in power: a further centralizing
of federal authority, indeed the ultimate control of the thought of
the people. Today resounds with cries of self-determination and
self-government, yet what is so often on our lips is seldom in our
hearts.
* * * *
MATERIALISM the hunger for money, for position, for au-
thority is the power and incentive back of these measures.
To the State belongs the power and responsibility of caring for its
schools, and there is no State in the Union that could not, if it
honestly tried, provide adequately for its schools and its teachers.
Everyone conversant with the history of such "pork barrel"
measures knows that they never achieve an honest beneficial
purpose. Public education would suffer irretrievably by their
passage into law. The States would cease to increase their own
appropriations. The States would shirk their own responsibility.
Education would become a matter of barter between the local
political party in power and the national party in federal power.
Incentive, progress, improvement born of direct responsibility and
of State freedom would be done away with, and another serious
wound be inflicted on the cardinal principle of our Union's life
State Rights.
* * * *
BACK of the movement are organizations who know their
members will receive, if it be successful, lucrative and hon-
ored positions : back of it are those who wish higher salaries for
teachers: back of it are many schoolbook publishers. It matters
not with them how much the federal taxes, already high, may
have to be increased: nor how the people may be further bur-
dened. With its supporters it is a matter of expediency, of op-
portunism. Not one organization supporting it does so as a mat-
ter of principle.
This is the truth no matter how specious their arguments.
And their arguments are at times so specious as to deceive some
Catholics. Catholics who, for example, live in States where
there is legislation inimical to Catholic schools, think it would be
better to deal with a federal secretary of education than with
their own bigoted legislators. They forget that they would have
the latter to deal with in any case, and it is hardly wise not to
see that curing a local evil through such means, is injuring not
only the Church throughout the country but the national life
itself.
574 WITH OUR READERS [July,
IT is well to proceed on principle instead of expediency even
though the latter travels at times faster. The former saves
us from dangerous places and guides us happily and successfully.
Principle is the voice of God and it knows no accent but that of
victory.
The evil sign of this dangerous movement is not its imme-
diate plans but its abandonment of principle, its rank opportun-
ism. It is favored by its supporters because it is a quick, easy
way to secure large sums of the public funds. It may be sup-
ported by a national political party because the party leaders
think it will command a large number of votes. It is a discour-
aging sign that the spiritual is forgotten: that the dignity of the
individual is hardly worth considering and that America is drift-
ing from her ancient and her safe moorings.
THE work done by the Catholic Hospital Association may well
be a matter of interest and congratulation not only to all
Catholics, but to all who are seriously anxious for the care of the
sick. The Association as a happy evidence of its growth and its
extended purpose has published the first issue of its official organ,
Hospital Progress. It comes to us not as an infant, but as an
inviting full-grown magazine with thoughtful articles of interest
to a wider field of readers than those interested only in hospital
technique.
* * * *
WE are sure that the reader will be surprised at the splendid
results obtained by the union into one Association of the
Catholic hospitals of the country: and he will be most surprised
when he reads this statement from Dr. Will Mayo, President of
the American College of Surgeons : "Half the hospitals in America
are under Catholic auspices."
It brings home to us again the truth that we are ignorant of
the great work of our own: of the silent labor and untold sacri-
fices which we hear of and admire as particular instances, with-
out realizing fully their magnitude and their sustaining inspira-
tion.
* * * *
HOSPITAL PROGRESS is well named. May it see accomplished
all that it aims to achieve, and may its praiseworthy mission
be known and supported by Catholics.
It has a very sacred purpose to fulfill. Secular magazines,
moving pictures, learned articles in serious magazines are incul-
cating false, perverted ideas concerning health, the giving and
1920.] WITH OUR READERS 575
taking of life. Our belief with regard to these matters insidiously
affect our relations with God, with our fellows and our own per-
sonal conduct. Hospital Progress will do effective work in cham-
pioning the truth among the medical profession and, let us hope,
among the wider public as well.
WITH two articles in this present issue speaking of the uncon-
querably happy spirit of Blessed Thomas More, which this
miserable world of today might with great advantage imitate, it
is meet that we quote the lines of Francis Thompson, taken from
his To the English Martyrs.
Ah, happy Fool of Christ, unawed
By familiar sanctities,
You served your Lord at holy easel
Dear Jester in the Courts of God
In whose spirit, enchanting yet,
Wisdom and love, together met,
Laughed on each other for content I
That an inward merriment,
An inviolate soul of pleasure,
To your motions taught a measure
All your days; which tyrant king,
Nor bonds, nor any bitter thing
Could embitter or perturb;
No daughter's tears, nor, more acerb,
A daughter's frail declension from
Thy serene example, come
Between thee and thy much content.
Nor could the last sharp argument
Turn thee from thy sweetest folly;
To the keen accolade and holy
Thou didst bend low a sprightly knee,
And jest Death out of gravity
As a too sad-visaged friend;
So, jocund, passing to the end
Of Thy laughing martyrdom;
And now from travel art gone home
Where, since gain of thee was given,
Surely there is more mirth in heaven.
WE welcome the appearance of a new French Quarterly, de-
voted to exploring and tilling the fields of ascetical and
mystical theology, so redolent of the choicest blossoms and most
substantial fruits of the spiritual life. Its comprehensive title,
Revue d'Ascetique et de Mystique embraces, of set purpose, the
common ground of asceticism and mysticism, disclaiming from
576 BOOKS RECEIVED [July, 1920.]
the outset any desire to define and limit and so, possibly, exclude
legitimate experiences and aspirations of the spiritual life.
It purports to present the best thought on principles and
practice, to extend knowledge of the noblest exponents of ascet-
icism and mysticism, and to keep its readers au courant, through
a bibliography appended to each issue, with the ablest studies of
the day, in book or magazine, which touch in any way the vital
questions of spiritual birth and growth.
That it may live and achieve, is our sincere hope.
BOOKS RECEIVED.
THE MACMILLAN Co., New York:
Divine Personality and Human Life. By C. C. J. Webb. The Library of Photius.
Volume I. By J. H. Freese. $3.75. Dionystus the Areopagite on the Divine
Names and the Mystical Theology. By C. E. Rolt. $2.75 net. Mediccval
Medicine. By J. J. Walsh M.D., Ph.D. ?2.75.
DODD, MEAD & Co., New York:
Westminster Cathedral and Its Architect. By W. de L'Hflpital. 2 volumes.
HAMPER & BROTHERS, New York:
The Human Costs of the War. By Homer Folks. $2.25.
LONGMANS, GREEN & Co., New York:
A. Short History of the Doctrine of the Atonement. By L. W. Grensted, M.A.
$3.75.
D. APPLETON & Co., New York:
Don Strong, American. By William Heyllger. 31.75 net.
BONI & LIVEBIGHT, New York:
Albany: The Crisis in Government. By L. Waldman. $1.50 net. The Best
Psychic Stories. Edited by J. L. French. $1.75 net. Lilull. By R. Holland.
P. J. KENEDY & SONS, New York:
The Credentials of Christianity. By M. J. Scott, S.J. $1.50.
AMERICAN BOOK Co., New York:
Political Economy. By E. J. Burke, S.J.
BBENTANO'S, New York:
Memories of My Son, Joyce Kilmer. By Annie K. Kilmer. The Peace Conference
Day by Day. By C. T. Thompson.
BENZIGER BROTHERS, New York:
The Foundation of True Morality. By Rev. T. Slater, S.J. $1.25 net. Talks to
Nurses. By H. S. Spalding, S.J. $1.50 net.
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, New York:
Negro Migration During the War. By E. J. Scott.
THE DEVIN-ADAIH Co., New York:
Moods and Memories. By Edmund Leamy. $2.00 net.
GF.OHGE H. DOHAN Co., New York:
The Light Out of the East. By S. R. Crockett. The Shadow-Show. By J. H.
Curie.
FHF.DEBICK PUSTET Co., New York:
A Manual of the Ceremonies of Low Mass. Compiled by Rev. L. Kuenzel.
$2.50 net.
THE FOUR SEAS Co., Boston:
The First Volley. By M. F. Sanborn. $1.75 net.
THE COHNHILL Co., Boston:
Born of the Crucible. By Charles C. Cohan. $1.75 net. The House of Love. By
W. D. Muse. $1.25.
FRIENDS OF UKRAINE, Washington, D. C. :
Inhuman Blockade Strangling a Nation. Ukraine and the Ukrainians. By E.
Revyuk. Pamphlets.
CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE, Washington, D. C. :
American Foreign Policy.
B. HERDER BOOK Co., St. Louis:
The Sacrifice of the Mass. By Rev. J. Henry, C.SS.H. 15 cents. The Brazen
Serpent. By Rev. J. A. McClorey, S.J. $1.50.
LOYOLA UNIVERSITY PRESS, Chicago, 111.:
An Introductory Course in Experimental Psychology. By H. Gruender, S.J.
Vol. I. $1.50 net.
FRANCISCAN HERALD PRF.SS, Chicago:
Franciscans and the Protestant Revolution in England. By F. B. Steck, O.F.M.
$2.00.
THE
VOL. CXI.
AUGUST, 1920
No. 665
NIETZSCHE, TOLSTOY AND THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT.
BY LEWIS WATT, S.J.
have bound up the New Testament along with
the Old Testament into one book as 'the Bible'-
as 'the Book in Itself is perhaps the greatest
audacity and sin against the spirit which literary
Europe has upon its conscience," wrote the Ger-
man philosopher, Nietzsche, some thirty years ago, in Beyond
Good and Evil. For the Old Testament and what he thought
to be its ethics he had the greatest admiration; for the teach-
ing of the New Testament, nothing but contempt. "A slave-
morality" is the label which he savagely affixed to the system
of Christian ethics. It falsifies weakness into merit, impo-
tence which does not retaliate into goodness; not-to-be-able-
to-take-revenge it calls not-to-wish-to-take-revenge, perhaps
even forgiveness. This is the verdict of his Genealogy of
Morals. He would have the world reverse its moral values.
The ideal type of the future the Superman will force the
weak and helpless to go to the wall; he will trample on the
New Testament, which preconizes cowardice. 1 Christianity
teaches a morality fit only for slaves, not for free men, not for
the Superman.
The fact that Nietzsche lost his reason for a time and died
with the shadow of insanity over him, has not prevented his
Copyright. 1920.
VOL. cxi. 37
'See The Antichrist.
THE MISSIONARY SOCIETY OF ST. PAUL THE APOSTLE
IN THE STATE OF NEW YORK.
578 THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT [Aug.,
having many disciples, avowed or unavowed. A doctrine so
consonant as his with some of the strongest instincts of man,
could not fail to prove attractive to many who chafe under the
self-restraint imposed by the Gospel. In fact, all history shows
that there were many Nietzscheans before Nietzsche. For
such anti-Christians the great rock of offence is the Sermon
on the Mount, and especially the teaching of Our Lord as to
our conduct to those who wrong us. They call it imprac-
ticable; they accuse it of setting a premium on moral feeble-
ness; they say it substitutes apathy for energy as the ethical
ideal. In a word, it is slave-morality.
Before proceeding to discuss the value of these criticisms,
it will be well to set out the chief passages incriminated. The
first occurs in the Sermon on the Mount as narrated by St.
Matthew (v. 38-41) :
You have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye
and a tooth for a tooth; but I say to you not to resist evil:
hut if one strike thee on thy right cheek, turn to him also
the other: and if a man will contend with thee in judgment
and take away thy coat, let go thy cloak also unto him.
And whosoever will force thee one mile, go with him
other two.
The second occurs in the Gospel of St. Luke (vi. 27-29), where
the Evangelist may be alluding to the Sermon on the Mount
or may be referring to some other occasion; we may leave this
small point out of discussion, as irrelevant. The passage is as
follows :
Love your enemies, do good to them that hate you.
Bless them that curse you, and pray for them that calum-
niate you. And to him that striketh you on the one cheek,
offer also the other. And him that taketh away from thee
thy cloak, forbid not to take thy coat also.
In these citations there are two points that demand a little
elucidation. Why does Our Lord refer to the possibility of
being forced to go a mile with someone? And why does He
select the particular illustration of coat and cloak? The
reason is that oppression in Palestine not unusually took these
very forms. Palestine had become a Roman province, and the
Romans had taken over from the Persians the custom of
1920.] THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT 579
forcibly impressing the services of civilians for the benefit
of officials, a custom which gave Simon of Gyrene the privilege
of carrying Our Lord's cross. Moreover, the taking of gar-
ments by a creditor in payment of a debt was a traditional
act of oppression among the Jews. 2 Our Lord puts His teach-
ing into the form of concrete examples for the benefit of an
audience unaccustomed to think in abstract propositions, but
we may sum it up by saying that He enjoins not merely non-
resistance to wrong-doers, but also the conferring of actual
benefits upon them. Nietzsche and those who think with him
stigmatize this as slave-morality, exalting cowardice into a
virtue.
Here we may introduce upon the scene the romantic and
earnest figure of Count Tolstoy. He is poles apart from
Nietzsche, no less in character than in attitude to Christianity.
For him the teaching of Our Lord is the ultimate rule of life,
and however mistaken he was in his interpretation of that
teaching, he had at least the courage of his convictions and
pressed them to their logical, if subversive, conclusion. "Christ
says, Resist not evil. These words were the clue which made
all clear to me . . . Christ meant to say, whatever men do to
you, bear, suffer, submit: but never resist evil . . . God has
given us a commandment which He requires us to obey; He
says that only those who keep His commandments shall enter
life eternal." 3 When Tolstoy says, Never resist, he means
exactly what he says never. He has no use for qualifications
introduced in the name of social order or national prepared-
ness. He says distinctly that there ought to be no law courts,
no army, no navy. If one answers, "Impracticable idealism!"
he retorts, "God commanded it; it cannot be impracticable."
At first sight then Nietzsche and Tolstoy seem to be dia-
metrically opposed to each other. The former rejects the
teaching of Christ completely: the latter embraces it to the
point of fanaticism. If either of them be right, the Catholic
Church is wrong, for on the one hand she upholds the Chris-
tian ethic as God-given, and on the other she does not impose
upon her members the unconditional obligation of non-resist-
ance to evil. But how does she find a via media between the
Russian count and the German philosopher? Simply by re-
jecting a fundamental assumption, common to both in spite of
Cp. Exod. xxll. 26; Deut. xxiv. 13; Job xxll. 6. 'What I Relieve.
580 THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT [Aug.,
their apparent diversity, namely that Our Lord's words "Re-
sist not evil" are to be understood as applicable under all cir-
cumstances. She permits her theologians to teach the right of
self-defence; she blesses the banners of Christian armies and
the swords of Christian knights; not only does she approve
of courts of criminal and civil law, she has appointed eccle-
siastical tribunals of her own. Tolstoy bewails this as a fatal
betrayal of her Master; Nietzsche would hail it as a convincing
proof of the error of the Sermon on the Mount. What either
of them would have said if he had read in Catholic ascetical
treatises that it is a point of Christian perfection to love and
even expose oneself to injuries, rebuffs and humiliations, we
can only guess. Both would probably have accused the
Church of inconsistency and of teaching a double standard of
ethics. And, indeed, they would be entitled to some explana-
tion of the apparent paradox.
The Catholic Church, of course, is not alone in her re-
fusal to impose an obligation of non-resistance upon Chris-
tians. The great majority of Protestants concur with her in
this, and find it needful to defend their action in departing
from the plain words of the Gospel text. One line of defence
is that Our Lord's instructions were intended for the disciples
only and not for the multitude : but this cannot be sustained in
view of the teaching of the Epistles of St. Paul and St. Peter,
which were addressed to ordinary Christians. For example,
St. Paul writes to the litigious Corinthians: 4 "Why do you not
rather take wrong? Why do you not rather suffer yourselves
to be defrauded?" and to the Thessalonians, "See that none
render evil for evil." 5 And St. Peter says: "What glory is it
if, committing sin and being buffeted for it, you endure? But
if doing well you suffer patiently, this is thankworthy before
God."
Some writers have defended Christian resistance on the
ground of common sense, but we must be cautious in accepting
some of the forms in which this argument is couched by Prot-
estant exegetes. For instance, Dr. Plummer 8 says: "To inter-
pret [Our Lord's words under discussion] as rules to be kept
literally in the cases specified, is to make Our Lord's teaching
a laughing-stock to the common sense of the world," and Pro-
' 1 Cor. vi. 7. 1 Thess. v. 15.
* An Exegeticul Commentary on St. Matthew, p. 86.
1920.] THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT 581
fcssor Votaw in a discussion of the Sermon on the Mount 7
writes: "Literalism is the perversion of Jesus' method and
intent, and is one of the worst enemies of the Gospel, for it
holds up the teaching of Jesus to the ridicule of all sane,
thinking men." This argument from common sense, which has
only too often a bluff way of dispensing with proof, we should
regard with caution because it is just the sort of argument that
is brought against the Mysteries of our Faith. But this is not
to say that no use can be made of it if it is properly framed.
Cornelius Jansenius of Ghent, in the eighteenth century, prac-
tically employed it when he urged that neither the Divine Wis-
dom nor the Divine Truth allows us to believe that God could
create man a social being, destined to live in civil society, and
at the same time command him to wreck society by allowing
criminals to have a free hand. The Tolstoyan, however, has
his answer ready: he maintains that the best way to convert
criminals and other wrong-doers is not to resist them. We
may believe this to be nonsense, but not unnaturally the Tol-
stoyan considers his opinion as good as ours.
Putting aside these two lines of defence then as unsatis-
factory, let us state the really clinching argument, which is a
commonplace of commentators from the time of St. Augustine
to the present day. It is drawn from the conduct of Our Lord
and of His Apostles. When Christ was brought for trial before
Annas, He was struck upon the cheek by one of the by-
standers. If He had meant us to understand His words, 'Turn
the other cheek," as a precept binding under all circumstances;
-He would certainly have offered His other cheek to be struck;
but, in point of fact, He remonstrated with the bully: "If I
have spoken evil, give testimony of the evil; but if well, why
strikes! thou Me?" 8 Again, if He had intended us never to
resist evil, why do we find Him using violence against the
buyers and sellers who desecrated the Temple? Why does
He administer severe rebukes to His disciples, to the Phari-
sees, and (by the mouth of messengers) to Herod? So obvious
is the inconsistency between Christ's conduct and an uncon-
ditional interpretation of His teaching, that Jewish critics (e. g.,
Friedlander) accuse Him of violating His own precepts, and
the same charge may be brought against the Apostles.
St. Paul instantly protested when he, too, was struck on
'Hunting's Dictionary of the Bible, extra volume, p. 29, note. 'John xviil. 23.
582 THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT [Aug.,
the face in the presence of the High Priest, and although he
quickly corrected himself, this was not on account of his pro-
test, but because he had unwittingly spoken against one of the
princes of the people. 9 His appeal to Csesar 10 and his claim to
Roman citizenship in order to avoid being scourged, are
equally indefensible if Tolstoy be right. And what are we to
say of St. Peter's fatal rebuke of Ananias and Saphira? 11
What are we to think of the Epistles, full as they are of ex-
hortations intended to resist evil in the Christian communities?
Either Christ and the Apostles did not obey the precept of
non-resistance or they understood it in a sense quite different
from that which Tolstoy gives it. The former alternative has
but to be stated to be rejected by a Christian, and it only re-
mains to discuss the true sense of the precept.
There is a clear Catholic tradition upon this question, to
the effect that Our Lord's purpose is primarily to forbid re-
vengefulness. St. Augustine, for instance, 12 says that the pre-
cept of non-resistance is to be understood of prseparatio cordis,
not of ostentatio operis; it forbids the taking of revenge, but
not the administration of correction, which may indeed be
sometimes a duty of charity. St. Thomas agrees with this,
saying that Our Lord desired to make it clear that revenge-
fulness was unlawful, and therefore taught that a man ought
to be prepared to put up with further injuries when needful. 13
Elsewhere he distinguishes what is of precept and what of
counsel in this matter. He repeats that it is of precept to
have one's heart so free from revengefulness that one must
always be ready to repay injuries with benefits and to act in
accordance with this disposition "when necessity requires:"
it is of counsel that we should sometimes so act even when
there is no need to do so. 14
Cornelius Jansenius, cited above, puts the question in an
even clearer light. He says Our Lord's teaching is of precept
in so far as it forbids desire for revenge, and commands the
patient bearing of injuries; it is of counsel in so far as it urges
us not to demand even legitimate reparation for injuries, so
long as there is no danger of thereby giving scandal. 15 Mal-
Acts xxill. 2-5. "Acts xxv. 11. Acts v. 1-10.
"De Sermone Domini in Monte, cap. 19. Cp. Contra Fauslnm, lib. 19.
13 la., 2s., qu.cvUl. a.iii. "2a., 2s., qu.clxxxvl. a.li.
11 Commenlarii in Concordlam, in Joe.: It Is to this work that Knabenbauer refers
in his Commentarius in Matthew, p. 237.
1920.] THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT 583
donatus expresses himself in similar terms. It is of precept,
he says, that we are never to seek revenge, even if this involves
suffering further wrongs, and that we are to be ever ready
to yield our rights whenever the glory of God or the good of
our neighbor require this; and when neither the glory of God
nor the good of our neighbor require it, still it is of counsel
that we should take Our Lord's words as the literal rule of
our action for the sake of mortification. From these extracts
it will be seen that Catholic tradition lays the chief emphasis
on the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount and interprets the
letter in the light of this. That spirit is one of all-embracing
charity, inspiring mercy and forgiveness and prohibiting re-
vengefulness. That many Protestant scholars have arrived at
the same conclusions as the Catholic Church in this matter,
may be seen from the quotations contained in the article by
Professor Votaw, already mentioned, 19 though they lose in
lucidity and definiteness by their implicit rejection of the dis-
tinction between precepts and counsels.
Having thus done justice to the argument from authority
against Tolstoy's views, it may be of interest to see how far it
is confirmed by purely rational arguments. In the first place,
it is of capital importance to notice that the actions mentioned
by Jesus in the passage under consideration have no moral
value in themselves. This is proved by the fact that they may
be good or bad according to the motive which inspires them.
To turn the other cheek may proceed from cowardice; to offer
goods to a thief, from gentle cynicism; to render double serv-
ice may sometimes be an effective revenge, as we should admit
if a small boy, forced to carry our handbag one mile to the
depot, carried it a mile beyond! Now Our Lord does not ex-
plicitly mention what our motive is to be, but it is incredible
that He should intend it to be a bad one, and equally incred-
ible that He should wish us to act without any motive at all.
Consequently, He must have taken it for granted that the con-
duct He prescribes is to be animated by a good motive.
What that motive was in general is clear when we recol-
lect that His whole purpose in teaching was to instruct us in
the supreme law of right-living, "Thou shall love the Lord
thy God with thy whole heart . . . and thy neighbor as thy-
self." To this law all divine precepts can be ultimately re-
" See also Dr. Gore's The Sermon on the Mount.
584 THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT [Aug.,
duced. 17 Hence charity is the general motive which He had in
mind when He enjoined non-resistance. This is an a priori
argument. If one wants an a posteriori one to the same effect,
he has only to recollect that immediately before saying, "Bless
them that curse you," Christ said, "Love your enemies;" and
that the same command occurs five verses after the prohibi-
tion to resist evil. This a posteriori argument proves a little
more than the a priori one: it shows that Our Lord intends
our motive to be charity towards our enemies.
Can we determine this motive still more exactly? Un-
doubtedly we can, by taking into account the fact that Our
Lord is directly concerned with the teaching of the Old Testa-
ment: "An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth." 18 This
phrase is to be found in the Books of Exodus (xxi. 23-25), Le-
viticus (xxiv. 20), and Deuteronomy (xix. 21), as part of what
is called the Lex Talionis. Space does not permit a discussion
of this law here. It is strikingly similar to laws contained in
the Code of Hammurabi (King of Babylon) and in the Roman
Law of the XII. Tables. The object of these laws was to impose
a limit upon the penalties exacted of malefactors, to deter
criminals by the fear of heavy punishment, and to substitute
the rule of law for the blood-feud and private vengeance. 19
The existence of this law does not mean that the Old Testa-
ment approved revengef ulness ; on the contrary, we find incul-
cated a spirit of forgiveness in Leviticus (xix. 18), Proverbs
(xx. 22; xxv. 21), and Lamentations (iii. 30: Revised Ver-
sion). 20 On the other hand, it is incontestable that the Lex
Talionis sanctions retributive action, which is peculiarly liable
to be taken from motives of revenge, and that the law does
not contain any provisions tending to exclude such motives.
Inasmuch as the Lex Talionis, like all other precepts of
the Old Testament and the New, was intended to secure obe-
dience to the supreme precept of love for God and man, it
" Matt. xxti. 40. " Matt. v. 38.
18 An account of the Lex Talionis will be found in de Hummelauer's Exodus, p.
223. The similar passages in the Code of Hammurabi can be seen in The Oldest
Code of Laws In the World, p. 43, and a discussion of the similarity in The Relations
between the Laws of Babylonia, and the Laws of the Hebrew Peoples (Schweich
Lectures, 1912), both these books being by Dr. C. H. W. Johns.
" On the law of love for enemies In the Old Testament, sec Knabenbauer, op. cit.,
p. 242: Dr. Lukyn William's Christian Evidences for Jewish People, vol. ii., pp. 20ff. :
and (from the Jewish point of view) I. Abrahams* Studies in Pharisaism (First
Series), pp. 150ff.
1920.] THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT 585
was good as far as it went, but it did not go the whole way.
It was good as far as it gave effect to the motive of fear in
restraint of criminals, and as far as it checked the private
vengeance of individuals by defining the just penalty for
wrong-doing: it did not go the whole way because it ignored
the possibility of retributive action being taken from motives
of revenge. Like many other provisions of the Old Law, it
was imperfect. Now we have Christ's own authority for say-
ing that He came not to destroy the Old Law, but to perfect
it. 21 How could the Lex Talionis be perfected? Clearly by
making explicit what was only latent in it, i. e., the unlaw-
fulness of purely vengeful retaliation. Consequently, we have
every reason for saying that Our Lord's words, which we have
already shown, were intended to enforce the love of enemies,
are specially directed against revengefulness, the chief obstacle
to that love. And, indeed, what action could run more counter
to revengefulness than to place oneself or one's possessions at
the disposal of another who has already done one wrong?
Certainly it does not infallibly secure the love of enemies, as
we have seen: but it goes as far towards doing so as any
merely external action can do.
Reason confirmed by authority, therefore, convinces us
that the true purpose of Our Lord in bidding us turn the other
cheek, etc., was to insist on the law of charity by forbidding
retributive action taken in a spirit of revenge. But it cannot
be denied that there are many instances of wrong-doing in
which the sufferer either does not feel the desire for revenge,
or suppresses it with the grace of God. This fact contains the
clue to the conduct of Our Lord and the Apostles in protesting
against wrong-doing. With them, as with many Christians
since, there was no question of revengeful rebukes, and their
action had to be guided by other considerations, which must
now be briefly discussed.
In the first place, the law of charity may itself impose
an obligation to punish the offender, and Our Lord Himself
expressly recognizes this. 22 He does not tell us to submit
passively to a brother who offends against us, but to rebuke
him first privately, then before witnesses, then by an appeal
to the Church, and if all this produces no result, "let him be to
thee as the heathen and the publican." Catholic moral theol-
a Matt. v. 17. a Matt, xvill. 15-17.
586 THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT [Aug.,
ogy crystallizes this in the "duty of fraternal correction."
This principle is of wide application, and includes the duty of
safeguarding the moral and social order. It was in the spirit
of charity to God and to men that Christ and the Apostles
occasionally rebuked wrong-doers. But this is not all. It
must always be kept in mind that Our Lord did not destroy
the law of just compensation for injuries. He left us free to
vindicate our rights, provided we do not act revengefully.
Thus we see that resistance may sometimes be obligatory upon
us, sometimes simply lawful without being obligatory, but will
always be unlawful if it proceeds from motives of revenge,
the determining factor being in every case the law of charity.
There is still a further point to be taken into considera-
tion. Human nature being what it is, revengefulness, as a
possible danger in the way of our obeying the precept to love
God and man, is ever present with us, and he who has the
spirit of charity will be anxious to forearm himself against
that which is opposed to it. What better way of doing so can
there be than that of rendering benefits to those who wrong
him whenever charity itself does not forbid? Such conduct is
not of precept, but the law of charity, taught by Christ, coun-
sels it. This gives us the key to the teaching of ascetical
writers on the love of suffering and humiliation, though, of
course, they strengthen and deepen it by appealing to the ex-
ample of our suffering Lord Himself. It also explains why
Maldonatus tells us we should return good for evil out of love
for mortification, since mortification is only a means to an end,
viz., the more perfect fulfillment of the law of charity.
To recapitulate briefly these arguments from reason : Our
Lord is teaching the love of enemies : in this connection He per-
fects (but does not abrogate) the Lex Talionis. This law per-
mits an injured person to demand just retribution from the
wrong-doer, a course of action likely to be followed from
motives of revenge: in order to perfect this law, Our Lord
commands a line of conduct which is as irreconcilable with
revenge as any conduct can be. Since the raison d'etre of this
command is simply to prevent revengeful action, the com-
mand was not intended to bind an injured person who desires
reparation from motives other than revenge (and not other-
wise bad, of course) : but the conduct Our Lord prescribes is
of counsel whenever the law of charity does not impose a
1920.] THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT 587
contrary course of action, since it tends to mortify the human
instinct for revenge, an ever-present danger to charity.
It is clear that these principles are as applicable to groups
or communities as to individuals. Nations and their rulers
may act revengefully just as much as private citizens. Conse-
quently, it is easy to see how untrue are assertions that "Gov-
ernments cannot be carried on along the lines of the Sermon
on the Mount," or that Christ's teaching is impracticable in
courts of law. The exact contrary is the truth: for no one
has greater need to beware of a revengeful spirit or a clearer
duty to vindicate justice than one who is in a position of
authority (which is necessarily a position of trusteeship). 23
Tolstoy misunderstood the meaning and purpose of Our
Lord's teaching as has been proved. Nietzsche not only mis-
understood the true spirit of Christianity as embodied in the
Sermon on the Mount, but also misunderstood the spirit of the
Old Testament. He thought it sanctioned revenge and vio-
lence, whereas it taught forgiveness and charity, though less
perfectly than does the Christian law. Whether we are to
consider the true Christian doctrine of non-resistance as a
slave-morality or not, will depend on the wider question of
our views as to the nature of man and his relation to his fel-
lows and to his God. If we believe that the lower appetites
of man tend constantly to revolt against the rule of reason, we
are compelled to admit the necessity of overcoming many of
the instincts which surge within us. Not the least powerful of
these instincts is the spontaneous fierce desire to be revenged
on those who injure us. The lesson of the Sermon on the
Mount is that such a desire must be mastered by behavior
directly contrary to its promptings. Nietzsche, on the other
hand, would have us obey our impulse in the name of Self-
development. Between these ideals of conduct there can be as
little compromise as between Government and Anarchy. The
question at issue is an ultimate one, inextricably bound up
with our whole philosophy of lif e.
* On the applicability of the Sermon on the Mount to States, see St. Augustine's
Epistola 13S (al. 5) ad Marcellinum.
A NOBLE URSULINE.
BY DUDLEY G. WOOTEN.
HEN St. Angela de Merici first gathered the young
girls of the village of Desenzano for the purpose
of instructing them in the rudiments of Chris-
tianity, she little thought that it was the starting
point of an organized educational movement
destined to bring to so many thousands of her sex the benefits
and blessings of Christian piety founded upon Catholic cul-
ture. Still less could she have imagined that the great teaching
Order of the Ursulines would ultimately rival, in its romantic
adventures and heroic sacrifices amid the pioneer hardships
of an unknown continent beyond the western ocean, the
legendary trials and triumphs of St. Ursula and the Eleven
Thousand Virgins.
It is a far cry from the sixteenth to the twentieth century
and a wide journey from the sunny plains of Lombardy to the
rugged ranges of Montana and the icy shores of Bering Sea;
but the spirit of self-consecration to religious education first
evinced at Desenzano and Brescia, four hundred years ago, has
bridged the centuries and traversed strange seas and distant
lands, suffering much and daring greatly to spread the knowl-
edge of the Truth in remote regions and among savage races,
perpetuating, with ever-increasing success, at once the cult of
St. Ursula's traditional courage and the practical piety of St.
Angela's mediaeval mission.
These reflections are prompted and emphasized by the
recent death in Seattle of one of the noblest and most notable
leaders of the Ursulines in America. Sarah Theresa Dunne, in
religion Sister Mary Amadeus, was of Irish parentage, born at
NOTE. The historical facts contained in this article were gleaned from the
writings and records of the Jesuit missionaries of Montana. Many of the personal
incidents were furnished the writer by Sister Angela (Lincoln), the constant com-
panion and private secretary of Mother Amadeus for many years. He has a personal
familiarity with the Mother's Alaskan work, having first met her in the North,
and for several years he enjoyed the privilege of her friendship and confidence.
The loss of her papers and records by the burning of the Ursuline Convent at St.
Michael's in December, 1918, destroyed forever the invaluable data for an adequate
life of this great woman and true religious.
1920.] A NOBLE URSULINE 589
Akron, Ohio, July 2, 1846. Very early she became a boarding
pupil in the Ursuline Convent at Cleveland, whence she grad-
uated and entered the novitiate of the Order at Toledo. Here
she pronounced her holy vows on August 23, 1864. Like all
religious who have attained phenomenal success in their vo-
cation, Sister Amadeus exhibited from childhood an ardent
and imaginative vision of her future career. When at school
in Cleveland she used to declare to her incredulous playmates
that she would one day be a missionary in Alaska, then an
unknown and almost mythical outpost of Russian settlement.
Her life in the convent was singularly happy and her advance-
ment so marked that upon the death of the foundress she was
elected Superior, and was reflected unanimously, serving with
great distinction and usefulness. During her term of office at
Toledo she reestablished the convent at Youngstown and lifted
Toledo to the first rank. It was a period of flourishing growth
for the Ursulines under her control.
In 1883 there was an urgent call for missionary and edu-
cational work among the Indian tribes in the far West. The
strife and slaughter of the border wars in Wyoming, Montana,
and the Dakotas had desolated and disordered the frontier
for a series of years, leaving the Indians sullen and hostile,
intractable to the discipline of the Government and unrespon-
sive to the appeals of the missionary priests ordinarily so
successful.
In this crisis Bishop Brondel, then Vicar Apostolic of
Montana and soon to be Bishop of the diocese of Helena, ap-
pealed to his brother bishops in the East for aid and especially
for some Sisters to establish schools among the Indians.
Bishop Gilmour of Cleveland responded to the Macedonian
cry from the Far West by dispatching six Ursuline Sisters of
Toledo, who cheerfully accepted the task. Mother Amadeus
was in charge of this little company. "I am offering you a
Christmas gift of six Ursulines, with the Flower of my Flock
at their head," was Bishop Gilmour's message to Bishop
Brondel. Father Joseph Eyler volunteered to act as their
escort, and they left Toledo early in January, 1884, arriving at
Miles City, Montana, on the seventeenth, where they were wel-
comed by the Bishop and Father Lindensmith, amid the roist-
ering plaudits of a typical crowd of cowboys, cattle kings,
gamblers and border ruffians, Indian and white. It was a
590 A NOBLE URSULINE [Aug.,
friendly greeting, and a hearty one, for the "Lady Blackrobes"
were hailed with respect and reverence even by this motley
group of frontiersmen.
Mother Amadeus at once took up residence with her nuns
in a small cottage, where she founded her first house and
school in the West, now a handsome and flourishing Convent.
She opened a boarding school for white girls and assumed
charge of the parish school, but her destiny and her ardent
desires were soon to lead her into the bosom of the wilderness
to face the real trials of labor for the redemption of savagery
and sloth. The previous year Father Barcelo, S.J., had begun
the foundation of a Mission among the Cheyenne on the Tongue,
River, having built there a rude log shack of three rooms, with
dirt floors and the most limited conveniences. Thither went
Mother Amadeus with ,two of her nuns, Rev. Dr. Quigley, and
a few soldiers to drive the teams and care for the party.
Father Eyler had gone in advance to prepare for their coming.
It was a four days' journey through the rugged country, camp-
ing at night and blazing their own trail, having to cross the
river nine times and with grave risk of disaster. They reached
their destination April 2, 1884.
The Sisters found shelter in one room of the log cabin,
whose ceiling was so low that they could scarcely enter with-
out stooping, but these heroic women knelt and kissed the
threshold, thanking God for the privilege of their apostolate.
Then they wrapped themselves in buffalo robes and slept on
the ground, while Chief White Bull and his warriors, on the
hill across the river, danced the thank-offering to the moon,
praising the goddess of the night that she had sent them
Make-Makehona Wikona the "Great Holy White Chief
Woman," and by that name Mother Amadeus was ever after-
wards called among the Cheyenne. This was the beginning
of St. Labre's Mission, near the present town of Ashland. The
Cheyenne in that region had never seen a Catholic priest until
1883, except the very oldest of them who remembered Father
DeSmet's coming in 1856. They were an absolutely untamed
tribe, among the bravest and most ruthless of all the western
Indians, but withal true and steadfast in then* loyalty when
once they gave allegiance or extended confidence. From the
first Mother Amadeus gained their affection and respect.
It was a heart-breaking struggle, that first year on the
1920.] A NOBLE URSULINE 591
Tongue River. Aside from the actual privations and cruelties
of the primitive surroundings, there was a reign of violence
and blood along the whole of that frontier, with frequent out-
bursts of savage vengeance and brutal reprisal. Even the
priests succumbed to the ordeal and quit the Mission. But
Mother Amadeus never wavered or lost hope. For months at
a time she and her two nuns were alone at St. Labre's, without
the consolation of the Blessed Sacrament and the Mass, en-
compassed by the strange and sullen warriors of the tribe and
the more terrifying proximity of outlaws of their own race.
But no harm came to them, and gradually the wonderful mag-
netism and winning firmness of the Mother established for her
a supremacy over the chiefs and leaders of the Cheyenne that
was never lost nor abated. She learned the language and
habits of the tribe, familiarized herself with their tempera-
ment and racial traits, conciliated their friendship and won
their affection, and by a daring challenge to their evil passions
and crafty methods she asserted and maintained an almost
unbelievable control over their sinister but simple natures.
Her extraordinary sympathy and understanding was the
secret of her success among the Indians during her twenty-
three years in Montana, and later among the remote and dif-
ferently conditioned natives of northern Alaska. The Indian
women trusted her and relied upon her counsel, the little ones
idolized her, the chiefs both feared and reverenced her, and
the tribesmen looked upon her with confidence and friendship.
She radiated kindness and a bounty of sympathy and succor,
born of no merely human impulse, but on occasion she could
be as unyielding and imperious as the haughty chieftains
whose wicked tempers she often had to combat. A wealth of
practical common sense and a phenomenal capacity for lead-
ership, with an abounding vitality and physical endurance
added to the endowments of this astonishing woman.
When Bishop Gilmour sent Mother Amadeus and her five
Ursulines to Montana in 1884 he named her Superior of all the
houses and schools she might found in the West, which title
was confirmed by Bishop Brondel and, at his instance, by the
Propaganda at Rome. This imposed upon her a larger duty
and responsibility than could be discharged by ministering to
the wants of a single tribe. The Cheyenne were her first
Indian proselytes and she was fondly attached to them ever
592 A NOBLE URSUL1NE [Aug.,
afterwards, as they were to her, but she soon extended her
work to the other destitute tribes scattered over the wild and
difficult country lying west to the borders of Idaho. That
same year she established the Montana novitiate at St. Peter's
Mission, with a school for the Blackfeet Indians, who were
gathered there. That place was located beyond the centre of
the State, west of Great Falls, and at the eastern foot of the
Continental Divide. During the years following, up to 1896,
she founded no less than twelve flourishing missions, among
them : in 1887, a mission near the old Ouster Battlefield for the
Crow Indians; another the same year for the Grosventres and
Assiniboin tribes, in the Little Rockies; in 1890 a kinder-
garten at St. Ignatius Mission for the four allied tribes the
Flatheads, Pend d'Oreille, Nez Perces and Kootenay; the same
year a mission and school for the Piegan, on the Two Medi-
cine River, just east of what is now Glacier National Park;
and in 1894, for the benefit of the loyal old Chief Chariot and
his people who refused to go over to St. Ignatius, she opened
a Mission at Arlee.
St. Ignatius Mission had been established about 1855 in
what became the Flatheads' or Jocko Reserve, and it had
flourished wonderfully under the ministrations of Fathers
Hoecken, Menetrey, Ravalli, and D'Aste. There, too, Mother
Amadeus and the Ursulines, as well as other religious, had
founded splendid schools with fine buildings and efficient
equipment. In his old age Chariot was forcibly removed by
the Government to the new Reservation and for a time he was
delighted with what he saw at St. Ignatius, for he was ever a
fervent Catholic. But the old warrior soon tired of the alien
surroundings. It was all too new and the white intruders
were crowding into the country too fast. With his band of
faithful retainers he drifted back to the banks of the Little
Bitter Root and refused to come again to St. Ignatius. It was
then that Mother Amadeus, with her quick sense of justice and
sympathy and her idealistic concern for the woes and wrongs
of this last hero of an ancient, loyal, and God-fearing race,
gladdened his heavy heart and brightened his closing years by
establishing the mission at Arlee. Here he and his followers
could worship in the Faith they had learned from the Black-
robes in their youth. It was little deeds like this that endeared
her to the Indians wherever she went. This was in 1894, and
1920.] A NOBLE URSULINE 593
Chariot lived until 1910. To the end of his life he was the
devoted and unfailing friend of the Mother and her nuns, as
his tribe proved themselves to be when she, too, was laid to
rest among the mountains they both loved so well.
In 1894 she opened a second mission for the Crow at St.
Charles. But in 1896, owing to the malignant influence of the
anti-Catholic propaganda as embodied in the A. P. A. and
like organizations, the Government withdrew all aid from the
Indian mission schools, so that thenceforth Mother Amadous
was compelled to rely solely upon voluntary private contri-
butions of the faithful and of such liberal spirits as appre-
ciated the great work in which she was enlisted. She was not
a whit discouraged, but continued to support and expand her
foundations for the reclamation and education of those
"Wards of the Nation." In 1898 she opened a boarding and
parochial school at Anaconda, and throughout the remaining
nine years of her apostolate in Montana maintained at full
vigor and efficiency all of the Missions and institutions she
had built up since coming to the West in 1884.
At the outbreak of the war with Spain, a delegation of
Cheyenne chiefs came to the Mission and asked to see her.
One of the Sisters sought to learn their purpose, but the
spokesman utterly refused to talk to her and made it clear
that they wanted to see Make-Makehona Wikona; so the
Mother was forced to meet them in person. At once the big
chief asked of her three things: Would the Spaniards attack
the Cheyenne? Would the Mother have' an irrigation ditch
dug for their lands? Would she give them a big feast or pot-
latch? Promptly and with dignity befitting the importance of
these demands, and in the lofty language of the Indian orator,
she responded : No, the fame of the brave and unconquerable
Cheyenne had spread over the whole world, and no such weak
and cowardly race as the Spaniard would dare to challenge
them to battle. As for the irrigation ditch, she explained that
she had no money or men to do that work for them, but they
must appeal to the Great White Father in Washington, who
would no doubt comply with such a reasonable request. But
she would gladly give them a potlatch, and she thereupon
ordered that a beef be slaughtered for them, which they ate
with relish and joy, celebrating loudly the generosity and
wisdom of the "Great Holy White Chief Woman." Again.
VOL. cxi. 38
594 A NOBLE URSULINE [Aug.,
when a bloody uprising was imminent among the braves who
surrounded one of the Missions, and priests and soldiers alike
were unable to avert a threatened tragedy, some one suggested
that the Mother should go out and speak to the enraged
Indians. She went among them fearlessly and quietly, saying
little, but exerting that nameless magnetism of winning kind-
ness and no less winning firmness that was her chief charm,
and in a few minutes the turbulent savages were calmed and
the danger passed almost before the bewildered missioners
knew what had happened. This was a reminder of her first
introduction to the Flatheads at St. Ignatius.
When she made her first appearance on the Reservation
and prepared to open a school for the Indians, the Jesuits had
grave doubts whether the tribe would permit their children to
come to the Sisters. The Indians were called in, and several
priests addressed them in their own tongue and in English,
explaining who the Ursulines were and what they had come
to do for the education and betterment of the young boys and
girls. Mother Amadeus was then presented to the chiefs and
warriors, who were surrounded by the women and children.
She advanced into the silent and expectant crowd. She knew
no word of their language and she spoke no word of her own.
She simply smiled and shook hands with the older ones and
stooped to caress the little ones. It was a tense and extra-
ordinary exhibition of the power of personality. When she
had passed among them thus for a few minutes, suddenly the
deep but fervent tones of the big chief exclaimed : "The White
Mother has spoken better than the Blackrobes." Immediately
the women crowded around to put their babies in her arms,
while the older boys and maidens clung to her gown. That
was it she had spoken to them in a language that they under-
stood better than any words, for it went to their hearts and
won their confidence on the moment.
The vast and difficult task which Mother Amadeus es-
sayed in Mo'ntana was in itself sufficient to have absorbed and
satisfied the energy and enthusiasm of an ordinary lifetime,
but it seemed only to nourish in her bosom a wider and more
daring .zeal to spread the Truth to even wilder and more
desolate regions of her jurisdiction. In 1902 she suffered a
serious injury in a railroad accident and was ever afterwards
compelled to walk with a cane, enduring constantly great pain
1920.] A NOBLE URSULINE 595
and discomfort, but that in no wise diminished her activities
or lessened her ardor. The first Chapter General of the Ursu-
lines in 1900 elected her to be Provincial Superior for all the
northern portion of the United States from the Atlantic to the
Pacific. In that year she had visited Rome at the request of
Leo XIII., assisting as a leading member of the first General
Chapter, and her election followed immediately after. She
was five times a delegate to the General Chapter and attended
its sessions in Rome, enjoying the personal esteem and appro-
bation of Leo XIII., Pius X., and Benedict XV.
But she was ever looking and longing for a period of
service in the Great White North. Its glistening snows, silent
spaces, alluring mysticism and primeval vastness had peopled
with day-dreams her girlhood in the convent at Cleveland,
and the cry of its famishing children, from their prison of ice-
bound rivers and lonely wastes of forest and mountain rang
ever in her heart. So to Alaska she must eventually go, to
complete the programme her dauntless courage and prophetic
soul had mapped out from the beginning.
When she was elected Superior of the Northern Province
of the United States, in 1900, Mother Amadeus had not been
able to gratify her ardent desire to go to the Far North, but in
1905 she secured permission to send three Ursulines to Alaska,
their destination being the mouth of the Yukon and adjacent
regions. Among them was Sister Dossithee, whose untiring
zeal and lovable disposition won the hearts of the Eskimo
or Innuits. The three fearless nuns landed at St. Michael's,
sailed down the Yukon to Old Fort Hamilton, and thence down
the Akulurak to near Nar-ra-ra-mak, which in Innuit means
"the End of the World." Here, in 1905, they opened the first
Ursuline Mission in Alaska, the location being in the Yukon
delta, west of the United States Bird Reserve, near to Nunivak
Island. This Mission has grown so rapidly and its popularity
is now so great that new buildings are needed to house the
children who flock to the school.
In 1907 Mother Amadeus realized her long cherished am-
bition and joined her nuns, bringing with her an additional
force., to establish a Mission at or near St. Michael's. She ar-
rived early in the season, before the long Arctic winter had
loosened its grasp upon the Alaskan lands and waters. The
tundras were still frozen and treacherous, the trails were soft
596 A NOBLE URSULINE [Aug.,
and impassable, the ice-gorges had not cleared from the swol-
len streams, and the tossing, stormy seas around the mouth
of the mighty Yukon were piled high with grinding floes and
glittering bergs. It was a scene of terrible but fascinating
tumult. With characteristic determination and fearlessness
Mother Amadeus was for going at once to her little colony on
the Akulurak, but not the bravest guide among the Eskimo
would venture to take her there, so she turned to the founding
of the new Mission at St. Michael, which was only imperfectly
accomplished by 1908. It should be remembered that all this
arduous and expensive missionary effort depended solely on
the voluntary contributions of generous lovers of the Church
and her heroic Sisterhoods, and it was not the least of Mother
Amadeus' gifts that she was able, without importunity, to se-
cure the necessary means for her Alaskan work.
In 1910 the Mother went to Rome to attend the Chapter
General of the Ursulines. Her return journey illustrates the
forceful, fearless, and indomitable energy with which she pur-
sued her purposes, and the obstacles she had to overcome.
In a little more than two months and without an hour's delay or
respite she traversed Europe, the Atlantic Ocean, the Amer-
ican continent, the North Pacific around the Aleutian Islands,
through Bering Sea to the estuary of the Yukon over eight
thousand miles. This was but an epitome of many similar
experiences during her twelve years' effort in the North, varied
often by greater perils and sufferings. While navigation from
Seattle to southeastern and southwestern Alaska remains un-
interrupted the year round, ships cannot penetrate into the
districts lying on Bering Sea and at the mouth of the Yukon
except during the short summer season. Usually the sailings
for Nome and that section begin in May and end in November,
and the remainder of the year there is no way to reach that
country but by dog-sleds from the coast below or from posts
on the Yukon and Tanana, over many hundreds of miles of
snow trails through an absolute wilderness. The voyage to
this region is always far out in the North Pacific, the stormiest
water on the globe in the early and late months of the year,
through uncharted depths of treacherous seas, around the
western islands of the Aleutian archipelago, by Dutch Harbor
and "Unalaska's lonely shore," then into the wind-swept
reaches of Bering Sea and Norton and Kotzebue Sounds, where
1920.] A NOBLE URSULINE 597
the stoutest ships arc often battered to near destruction by
tremendous waves or locked in the deadly jam of floating ice.
At any season it is one of the most interesting and inspiring
journeys the world affords, but in the fickle months of early
summer and late autumn it is a fearsome enterprise. This was
the trip Mother Amadeus took, after a European tour of no
mean exertion.
When she reached St. Michael's in November she found no
preparation had been made for herself and her companions. A
deadly epidemic of measles was raging among the natives,
carrying off the little ones like flies. She sent some of her
nuns at once to a desolate cabin beyond Fort St. Michael for
residence, where they were directed to gather and care for
the sick and dying. She took up her own abode with one nun
at the small frame hotel and began preparations for building
the little convent St. Ursula's by the Sea which was con-
structed out of rough boards and tar paper in twenty days.
Into it she moved immediately. As one of her companions said
to the writer: "It was the sweetest religious home we had ever
known, and there was not a cloud on the Mother's counte-
nance, although she had not a cent in her pocket and the
bitter cold of a six months' winter had already set in."
By Christmas the natives, young and old, poured into the
Mission for education, counsel, nursing and; encourage-
ment. It was sixty degrees below zero, the green lumber
of the building shrank so that the wind ninety miles an hour
by the anemometer until it blew away whistled through the
walls and tore off the weather paper; several cabins were
blown into the sea, and the nuns prayed before the Blessed
Sacrament nightly, and frequently all night, that their convent
house might not be swept away. The Mother had chosen the
coldest corner of the room for her bed, and one night her feet
were frozen. They all arose at five o'clock in the morning,
and she usually got up earlier, lame and suffering, to make the
fires, which afforded scant comfort against the penetrating
blasts and paralyzing gloom of the sunless days. They could
keep no fires at night, with coal at forty dollars a ton and hard
to get at that, besides the winds were so violent it was not
safe. Often it was so cold that their benumbed hands could
not hold the clothing with which they strove to dress them-
selves.
598 A NOBLE URSULINE [Aug.,
When navigation opened in the spring, the Mission boat,
St. Joseph, came down the Yukon with Father Crimont
(now Bishop of Alaska), Fathers Lucchesi and Treca and one
other Jesuit. When they reached St. Michael's and visited the
little Convent by the Sea, tears came into their eyes as they
looked upon the place where Mother Amadcus and her nuns
has passed the winter. The Fathers at once insisted that the
Mother should go with her companions to the Mission on the
Akulurak for the rest of the year, while they would repair the
building at St. Michael's and make it habitable for another
winter. So they went to join the small company of Sisters
who had established the first Ursuline Mission near "the
World's End" in 1905.
One of the striking and beautiful talents of Mother Ama-
deus was her charming literary style. During the last year of
her life she issued from the mother house at Seattle a little
publication for private distribution, called Kahlekat, the In-
nuit word for Letter, being a monthly collection of notes and
news of her Alaskan work. From that we quote the following
extract, both for its intrinsic charm and wonderfully accurate
description of familiar phenomena in the Far North:
Again our stay at St. Ursula's-by-the-Sea was too short.
I wrote you on December 9th (1918) how it became the
prey of flames. We were not settled down to our long
winter rest, when the dreadful influenza rudely awakened
us. It fastened its deadly grip on the Eskimo, and the
Yukon became a charnel house. The people were sick,
starving, for a cruel quarantine cut them off from St.
Michael's from December 3d to February 10th. Not even
the dogs were allowed to run lest they should carry the
germs of infection. Our poor people died in great numbers,
especially the young mothers, many of them wandering
out of their cabins to die in the snow when the hand of
charity was stretched out to rescue them. But even this
dark hour was God's hour. The children flocked in num-
bers to the Mission, where they will drink in Catholicity
from the cradle, free from the superstition every Eskimo
baby sucks with the mother milk. And so the winter wore
on. Nuns and children, by God's mercy, were spared, and
the summer came again. The birds began to "tsip! tsip!"
long before the mercury rose or the ice went out, and we
1920.] A NOBLE URSULINE 599
listened, enchanted, to the gurgle of running water. This
seems the sweetest of all earthly music to the ear weary
of the long silence of snow and ice. You wonder at first
what the joyous whisper of Nature is, and then suddenly
you know you know that the second chapter of the
Alaskan year, the thaw, is at hand. It is inebriating with
delight. The birds come North in uncounted millions and
the sweet chirp of the white-crowned sparrow, the Alaskan
nightingale, begins to pour gladness into the lengthening
day, and into the heart of the Northlander. The ptarmigan
that has spent the winter with us in robes of snowy while,
streaks itself in brown, as the tundra peeps up from be-
neath the snow and furrows the sides of stately St. Michael.
Then do we turn our eyes skyward and wager for the
coming of the first goose. Its clanging seems to us the
burst of martial music, and all of St. Michael's is out of
doors. "The goose! The goose!" as the children follow
the band about our city streets. For the goose is the un-
paid, the unerring weather prophet. She cannot be mis-
taken. She is heaven's "First Boat," and oh! Alaskans
know what the "first boat" means. How welcome the
revenue cutter Bear, the dauntless Victoria! How grace-
fully they dip and ride the opening water! Yes, all St.
Michael's looks at the goose, rubbing its eyes as one who
awakens from a long, hard dream. Behold the auklets on
the cliffs, the smile of the barren rocks, the ptarmigan clad
in brown, the swans. The cranes circle high in air, the
curlew lifts its long legs, the phalarope swings back and
forth on its own strange ugly business, and the ducks at-
tract the unerring aim of the Eskimo. As are the dogs in
winter, so are the birds in summer, our great delight. Our
life is marked by two epochs: the freeze-up with the dogs,
the thaw with the migratory birds. Nor spring, nor fall
comes to us. The mountains of snow are suddenly swal-
lowed by the thousand mouths of the porous soil, and we
begin to listen for the whistle of the boats.
One night at Akulurak, while a storm raged outside and
the snow lay deep, an Eskimo messenger arrived with a dis-
patch from Father Crimont, saying that Mother Amadeus
should go as soon as possible to found a house at Valdez.
To reach Valdez, on the coast of southwestern Alaska, was a
journey of four thousand miles by water, although by air line
it was only about seven hundred and fifty miles distant.
600 A NOBLE URSULINE [Aug.,
Father Crimont's message reached the Akulurak Mission
just at the beginning of the Arctic winter, and it was idle to
think of complying with his request until the opening of navi-
gation the following season. Mother Amadeus could not start
for Valdez until June 6, 1912, and even then the men were
afraid to attempt the trip to St. Michael's, owing to the weather.
But she was determined to go. The Mother and her Ursulinc
companion, with a Jesuit brother for engineer and native girl
as cook, boarded the little Mission launch St. Mary. Father
Treca accompanied them, for the Mother would never miss
Mass a single day if it could be helped. Following the mean-
derings of the Akulurak, the tiny gasoline launch reached the
Kwispak an arm of the Yukon where the waves were too
high for safe passage, and they were compelled to turn back.
On June 10th they started again and reached Old Fort Hamil-
ton on the Yukon. For a week they lived in the little school-
house, the Father and Brother in the church, while the faithful
Eskimo kept watch day and night on the roof to signal the
boat, which might pass unnoticed, as that was only a flag sta-
tion for the regular river boats. Finally the boat came, took
them to St. Michael's, where they caught the southbound
steamer for Seattle, thence the first vessel for Valdez, where
they landed on July 22d, eight months after Father Crimont's
peremptory request to come "as soon as possible." All things
considered, it was a quick trip for Alaska, and his first greet-
ing to Mother Amadeus was: "Already!"
Valdez was a town of considerable importance, being the
seat of the Federal Court and of the Alaska Road Commission,
with a population of mixed character, but including many re-
fined and genial people. Here Mother Amadeus found an en-
vironment more adapted to comfort and ease than she had
known in the Akulurak or at St. Michael's, but it is doubtful
if she really felt as contented as among her Eskimo wards.
She soon established a school, with a large and comfortable
building, and the inhabitants of the town welcomed the Sisters
as a desirable addition to their institutions of social and edu-
cational advancement.
But she still clung to her Innuits in the Bering Sea district
and made the long journey to be with them every year. In
1918 she made the trip to St. Michael's for the last time. A
storm threw her out of her berth, bruising her severely, and
1920.] A NOBLE URSUL1NE 601
upon landing she was carried to the military hospital at Fort
St. Michael, from which she was taken later by the Sisters to
the Convent. On December 9th, when she was confined to bed
and the thermometer registered forty degrees below zero, the
little building she had erected under such difficulties and loved,
perhaps, better than any spot on earth, took fire and in twenty
minutes was burned to the ground. There was no water and,
of course, the snow was utterly useless for extinguishing the
flames. There was no time to save any of the contents and
barely time to carry the Mother to the Fathers' house, whence
the priest was sent to save the Blessed Sacrament. She never
recovered from the shock of these repeated ordeals. On June
22, 1919, she was placed aboard the Victoria, a ship in which
she had weathered so many storms, and brought to the beauti-
ful home of the Ursulines at Mt. St. Helen's Place in the City
of Seattle. Her work in the North was ended, but its infinite
and illimitable blessing and benefit will, indeed, never end.
On her last voyage back to Seattle she communicated to
Sister Angela her wishes for the future, and she never spoke
again except the necessary and casual words of daily inter-
course. Each morning she heard Mass and received Holy
Communion, and on November 10th she passed to her eternal
rest and reward. Gazing upon her countenance, serene in the
noble calm of death, one could but recall the tribute of a
Protestant stranger, who met her on the way to Alaska: "The
Lady whose smile is a benediction, whose benign face mirrors
the eternal spirit of the Living God."
Mother Amadeus had always expressed a wish to be buried
among her dear Indians in Montana, and as the opening of the
Mission at St. Ignatius in 1890 was one of her greatest achieve-
ments, it seemed the most fitting place for her tomb. It was
there that the noble Salish had first hailed her as "The
Mother," and she had gathered their children in her arms.
The remains reached St. Augustine the night of November 12th
and were carried at once to the Convent chapel. All the next
day the Indians came, young and old, and prayed aloud. On
the fourteenth, after Low Mass, six stalwart Salish braves lifted
the casket and carried it reverently to the Mission church. Re-
quiem High Mass was sung, and then the priests spoke to the
Indians in their own tongue and in English. "Come," they
said, "Come, Mother, and rest amid the Jesuit missionaries
602 A NOBLE URSULINE [Aug.,
who revere you; come and rest amid your children who love
you; come and rest amid the Flatheads, who are proud to have
you." Then the swarthy pall-bearers raised the body once
more, while the whole assembled tribe broke out into that
most heart-rending, impressive and melancholy strain that can
fall on human ears the Indian warrior's death chant for his
fallen comrades. The swelling tones of grief and despair
smote the wintry hills and echoed from the icy shores of Lake
St. Mary's and reverberated from the snowy ramparts of the
Rockies, as they laid her down at the foot of the Mission
Cross. It was a funeral befitting her life and labors, and so
she sleeps where the noblest religious of Mother Church have
slept so often and so long in this western world in the
shadow of the eternal mountains.
A favorite Scriptural passage with Mother Amadeus was
contained in the prophet Isaias. She used it in the last number
of the little Kahlekat, and it furnished the high motive of her
life, as it seems the fit epitaph for her tomb:
"Deal thy bread to the hungry, and bring the needy and
the harborless into thy house; when thou shall see one naked,
cover him, and despise not thy own flesh. Then shall thy light
break forth as the morning, and thy health shall speedily
arise, and thy justice shall go before thy face, and the glory
of the Lord shall gather thee up. Then shalt thou call, and
the Lord shall hear: thou shalt cry and He shall say, Here
I am."
THE ASSUMPTION.
BY ELEANOR ROGERS COX.
ARISE, O Blest One, to the skies that claim thee!
Arise, while to the waiting seraph-host
God's herald-angels Queen of Heaven proclaim thee,
Of earth, and all the night's star-jeweled coast.
Arise, O Flower Supreme of all creation !
Within thine eyes, again, undimmed of woe,
The rapture that at Gabriel's salutation
Illumined them in that April long ago.
More fragrant than all April lilies blowing
In Judah's fields the air about thee now,
As deathless gladness in the act bestowing,
Thy Jesus' lips are pressed upon thy brow.
While on thine ears, divine beyond all other
Words framed by mortal tongue, again there falls
The old earth-loving sweetness of "My Mother!"
Whose echoed transport shakes high Heaven's walls.
Now Light the Light of Lights all thought transcending-
Enveils thee in its uncreated flame,
As from His throned height the Father bending,
Hails thee His Daughter while with awed acclaim
The wingdd host arrayed in shining legion
Along Heaven's hills, take up the wonder-word,
Until in all that bright, celestial region
No other music save its sound is heard.
And Earth through all her mountains and her waters
Repeats that paean of triumphant love
That hymns thee blest forever 'mongst her daughters,
The Spouse predestined of the Mystic Dove.
All roads of God, all ways of men are ringing
For joy of this thy blossom-day of days,
While prophet, poet, saint and sage are bringing
To thee the blended tribute of their praise.
THE LYRIC-POLITICO.
BY MARGARET B. DOWNING.
AY minstrelsy be assigned a role in the exciting
drama staged quadrennially when the American
people exercise their constitutional right of elect-
ing their Chief Executive? Persuasive writers
have made clear that, under all forms of popular
government, the imaginative element must be given a speaking
part. There are instances in American political history when
the intangible has swept the stage with the fury of the Kansas
wind, scattering the leaders with their scenic effects of plat-
forms and principles. Did not three alliterative words, seem-
ingly unrelated to the issues, send the White Plumed Knight
crashing to defeat? Was not a lilting tune for William Henry
Harrison, standard-bearer of the Whigs, as the smooth round
pebbles which David gathered from the brook? In the game
of politics as the American people play it, does the lyric aid
in shaping results? What is the national interpretation of
the subtle phrase, "I care not who makes the laws of the
people, if I may sing its songs?"
Writers of history and of those events which are mani-
festly the handmaidens of Clio, are profuse about battles,
sieges, revolutions, rebellions, the march of progress along
every avenue, but they wipe their pens with an air of finality
when it comes to recording purely emotional events. It must
be conceded that this is the safer and wiser procedure, for
while it is possible to ascribe victory or defeat to this song or
that, to this speech or that, it is exceedingly difficult to produce
concrete proof. Dry bones of results speak for themselves
when clothed in personal anecdote which is always abundantly
used by campaign scribes. However, serious historians, as
well as partisan writers, so far unbend as to style the exciting
summer of 1840, when the Whigs sang "Old Tippecanoe and
Tyler, too," from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico,
the "singing campaign." But that inner history which reveals
the soul of the nation, the emotions which stir the people in
great crises, the humor displayed in satire and caricature, the
feeling which breaks forth in song, rarely has a chronicler.
1920.] THE LYRIC-POLITICO 605
The late Ainsworth Rand Spofford, for many useful years
the Librarian of Congress, could extract meanings from the
phrase concerning the makers of laws and singers of songs
not visible to the naked eye. He held that Americans were
fond of using it, especially at Burns and Longfellow celebra-
tions, but they invariably quoted incorrectly and ascribed the
sentiment to the Teutons, whereas it originated in a
Scotch mind. Citing profound authorities on literature, Mr.
Spofford contended that the aphorism first appeared in
print about 1737 in the works of Andrew Fletcher, a political
economist of Edinburgh and, correctly written, it should run :
"I know a very wise man who was so much of Sir Christo-
pher's (Musgrave) mind that he believed if a man were per-
mitted to write all the ballads, he need not care who should
make the laws." And pointing to Camille Desmoulins and
"La Marseillaise," it would seem that Sir Christopher means,
that if a man were cunning enough to compose ballads which
would inflame the passions of the people, he held their
political destinies in the hollow of his hand. Amphion of old
reared the walls of Thebes by the magic music of his lute.
Any sort of political structure is possible by an adroit use of
song.
In the aspect of its recent glorious rennaisance, it is a bit
painful to reflect what meagre reward the author of the "Star
Spangled Banner" received, whilst he could appreciate it. As
a literary production, the anthem received high praise, but
as material for a national song, its critics were numerous and
their plaints are still heard; the words are too involved, the
incident recorded is too local, and, supreme objection of -all,
as a chorus it is all but impossible for a multitude to chant in
harmony with the accompaniment. The Democrats made the
most of the ode and the Whigs, while admitting that Mr. Key
had achieved something original, inspiring and overflowing
with elevated patriotic sentiment, complained that if the polit-
ical party to which the poet belonged had not shown such a
niggardly public spirit, the "Star Spangled Banner" would not
have been in jeopardy at Fort McHenry or any other place.
Mr. Key was politically ambitious and he aided Jackson ma-
terially in the Maryland campaign, yet his reward was a lowly
one that of United States Attorney for the District of Colum-
bia. That upstanding figure in Maryland's contribution to
606 THE LYRIC-POLITICO [Aug.,
worthy public servants, Chief Justice Roger Taney of the Su-
preme Court, was the brother-in-law of the poet and his
sympathetic councilor. He gathered all the earlier efforts of
the author of the "Star Spangled Banner" into book form and
offered them for sale. Yet so slight was the interest of the
American people in this singer of their most illustrious song,
that financially the venture was disastrous and the book is now
out of print. He has received posthumous honors, however,
and the graceful memorial bridge which spans the Potomac
from Georgetown to Arlington bears his name.
In campaign minstrelsy the singers are great unknowns.
No one pretends to know anything of the bard who composed
the words and music of "Old Tippecanoe," though he may
have been poor and improvident and deserved well of the
Whigs whom he so greatly aided. Nearly all ballad makers
were of this type then, but he won no public office or the fact
would be recorded. No doubt exaggerated eloquence and
song added to the sum total of human error in the years pre-
ceding the Harrison-Tyler campaign, but few traces of them
remain. Those which still adorn the song books make one
reflect on the care-free, happy days before the libel laws were
enacted. In the struggle of Jefferson against the Federalists,
party organs published songs with words variant, but substan-
tially telling Thomas or his henchmen "To lie on and lie and
lie for pay" and, that combined, they could not invent more
against truth than truth could not prove against them. To
which Jefferson's caustic editor, Duane, replied, furnishing the
keynote of many highly inflammable speeches, that Alexander
Hamilton's remarks were always dull and stale, but possibly
not, for him, unprofitable. William Billings, one of the first
native born American song makers, rushed to the defence of
John Adams during this same lively campaign with the ode,
which was well known for years afterwards, beginning :
Let tyrants shake their iron rod, and slavery clank her galling
chains,
We fear them not, we trust in God New England's God forever
reigns.
Every war, in which the country was engaged, brought
forth a burst of patriotic songs, and many of them were taken
over into the ensuing campaigns. James Monroe was sung
1920.] THE LYRIC-POLITICO 607
into victory under quatrains set to the air of "Yankee Doodle."
Some of them, occasionally heard when enthusiastic naval men
have class reunions, are reminiscent of Lake Erie:
John Bull, who for ten years past,
Has been daily growing prouder,
Has got another taste at last
Of Yankee ball and powder.
Yankee sailors have a knack,
Haul away! yeo ho, boys,
Of hauling down the Union Jack
'Gainst any odds you know, boys.
A whole volume of verse was published as a result of the
Mexican war, and the whirlwind campaign of 1848 with old
"Zach" Taylor against General Cass. Many of these songs and
lyric satires, tossed off in moments of intense public excite-
ment, possessed certain poetic merits, which, joined to melody
and the needs of the hour, were caught up and sung with
rousing enthusiasm. But though we may reverently acknowl-
edge that the voice of the people is the voice of God, no one will
grant the people an infallible judgment when it relates to
campaign minstrelsy. Many of the lyrics, which wrought un-
looked-for political turmoil, were inherently worthless and,
having served their purpose, went down to limbo, if not to a
lower place in the fate of song. Following presidential elec-
tions in chonological sequence from 1860, campaign minstrelsy
declines in power. The roaring of stump-speakers had after-
wards to be reenforced by the strength of logic and definite
promise of political largess. On the whole, it cannot be ob-
served that the lyric has been more than an occasional factor
of success in recent years. Bands and strenuous songs figure
more conspicuously as mediums to draw a crowd to the meet-
ing, than as a means to confirm party allegiance. Few crowds
take the trouble now-a-days to learn new songs, not even
when zealous bosses scatter thousands of copies and some-
times are at pains to send vocal instructors in advance. Cam-
paign songs become lighter in texture and sentiment and rarely
figure except in anthologies. All the ditties of the last two
presidential upheavals may be described as more defunct than
the best selling novels of the same period.
608 THE LYRIC-POLITICO [Aug.,
Search history in all its forms, and not an instance may be
discovered of the American people bestowing any sort of
honor on the writer of a song. It may be that song making
today is such a remunerative profession, the public would be
loath to attract its votaries from the sure and frequent recep-
tion of copyright fees to the uncertain and insecure returns
from office holding. Song-making has become definitely asso-
ciated in the American mind with song publishing, and the
homeless bard represented in the Stephen J. Foster type has
been succeeded by the clever scribe, who dashes off the words
and the music all in a breath and has both printed in the rear
of his studio. Song writers have been accorded posthumous
honors, as poets have been. John Howard Payne was given a
stately tomb in the Capital of the land of his birth, though he
endured much hardship in making a living in the same beau-
tiful city. Americans purchase liberally of songs and poems
which appeal to their philosophy, and that is an argument not
to be lightly waived aside. Fifty years ago it would be incon-
ceivable that a man could support life by the writing of poetry.
Longfellow, who is supernally the singer of the people, clung
to a professor's chair as a firm basis of an income. Emerson
never realized more than one thousand dollars a year on the
writings which have won him a high place in literature. But
in this generation James Whitcomb Riley left a sizeable for-
tune, yet he followed no other vocation than that of weaver of
poetic dreams.
But the singer of a song has occasionally appeared among
the national lawmakers and always with exhilarating results.
Men who seek honors in the political arena seem to shun
association with Pegasus. Richard Henry Wilde, a member
of Congress from Atlanta, Georgia, took his seat in 1833. He
is among the very few national law-makers who has written
a ballad in the strict dictionary meaning a simple set
of verses which, set to music, have been universally sung by
the people. Not that Mr. Wilde boasted of this achievement
during the eight years he wrote M.C. after his name. Far from
it. He kept the fact of his authorship of the dainty ditty, "My
Life is Like a Summer Rose," as carefully concealed as though
it were a term or two spent in the penitentiary. Only a for-
tuitous circumstance betrayed his dual life as law-maker and
song-maker.
1920.] THE LYRIC-POLITICO 609
Mr. Wilde came of the race and nation which has given
much erratic and poetic genius to the world. The son of a
Dublin merchant, he came to this country poor and friendless
and, by his own unaided efforts, conquered fate. He secured a
fine classical education and, after studying law, entered at once
into a lucrative practice. He had the dreamy nature of the
Celt and, in his youth, he frankly yielded to poetic tendencies,
singing lightsome lays and fervid bits of sentiment. He tried
his hand at the great American epic, as fashionable with the
bards of that era as the great American novel is at present
with the fictionists. His theme, the tragic story of Narveaz
Pamfilo, who sailed gayly out of Cadiz with his galleons only
to be engulfed in the waters about Florida, centred about the
sole survivor of that adventure, one Juan Ortiz, who chanted
the lay, "My Life is Like the Summer Rose." Wilde, embittered
because his efforts brought no financial return, did not com-
plete the epic, but he evidently thought highly of his lyric,
for he sent it to his brother, Captain James Wilde, an officer
of the army, who served with Jackson in the Seminole wars.
The Captain showed the verses to the lady of his heart and
she gave them over to a piratical musician, who seized upon
them and, setting them to a tuneful score, soon reaped a fine
harvest. Though Wilde's name was given in full as author of
the words, he stated later he had not received a copper from
the musician, one Charles Thibault of New York. Nor was he
pleased at the outcome of his brother's enthusiasm and the
intervention of the lady. He wrote Captain Wilde that he
"was suffering no small embarrassment from the fact." He
had foresworn the Muses and, grimly accepting the material,
had chosen a political career and was even then serving in
Congress as the champion of the Jacksonian element. He
argued reasonably that many miles separated Atlanta from
New York and that, in Washington, no one could conceivably
associate the fiery and vituperative Southron with the author
of a sentimental ditty, sung so effectively by swains and writ-
ten so frequently in the albums of languishing maids of the
period.
But one morning, the New York Mirror let fly a stinging
quip about a scholarly M.C. from Atlanta who posed as the
author of certain popular verses when, in reality, he had pur-
loined the same from a minor Greek poet. For proof the
VOL. cxi. 39
610 THE LYRIC-POLITICO [Aug.,
verses in Greek were appended, an astonishing evidence that
literary journals of Gotham, in 1835, printed poems in the
graceful tongue of the Hellenes. A furious controversy re-
sulted in which Wilde claimed his discarded child with melo-
dramatic fervor and, at the same time, explained to the editor
of the Mirror that he had been guilty of the offence of writing
verse in his callow youth before he could realize the menace it
would prove to his usefulness. Out of the tumult came the
confession of Anthony Barclay, a friend of Wilde's, who ex-
plained the matter as a practical joke. He had transformed
the graceful lyric into good Greek, affixed the minor poet as
author, and thus made all the mischief another amazing
revelation of literary ways in the eighteen hundred and
thirties. Wilde became so embittered and grew so violent and
aggressive that he alienated his supporters, and was finally
defeated for nomination in his congressional bailiwick. In
several diverting accounts of his political extermination, he
places all the blame on the mild and innocent lyric. But con-
temporaries do not accept this explanation. They show that
the Atlanta constituents seemed not to care in the least whether
Wilde wrote good or bad poetry, whether he stole it or pro-
duced it from his own fertile brain. He had been elected to
Congress as a Jackson Democrat, he had quarreled with the
Executive, with all the leaders of the party, and was openly
hobnobbing with the Whigs.
The author of "My Life is Like a Summer Rose," still to
be found in all editions of popular songs, scornfully departed
from his adopted country and henceforth lived in Europe. He
stands unique in the annals of our national legislature not
that he wrote poetry, for many must plead guilty of similar
offences, but that he composed acceptable verse in several
languages. Selecting the lovely capital of Tuscany as his
home, he indulged in an orgy of song, translating Petrarch
and some lovelorn versifiers of the Spanish, Portuguese and
French. To these efforts he added some original adaptations.
His work which endures and is discussed frequently in the
authoritative editions of American sources of literature, is a
lengthy and profound study of the poetry, madness and im-
prisonment of Torquato Tasso and some critical sketches on
vanished paintings on the walls of the Bargello in Florence.
There was another lyric, soft, roseate, and airy as the
1920.] THE LYRIC-POLITICO 611
petals of apple blossoms floating in the zephyr, yet it proved
a merciless instrument of destruction for a man who had at-
tained national fame as an orator and a statesman, John
Mellen Thurston, Senator from Nebraska from 1895 until 1901.
This dainty bit of verse, "I Said to the Rose, O Red, Red Rose,"
does not appear in albums of song, though a publisher offered
the legislative bard a good sized fortune for the privilege of
setting it to music. But Thurston exhibited almost Berserker
rage when some political rivals, who opposed his second term
in the United States Senate, produced damning evidence that
he was a poet, that he had published several books of verse
but, realizing the effect of these facts on the public when he
asked for votes, had secretly withdrawn his effusions. Such
a revel of parodies on the "Red, Red Rose" followed these reve-
lations, that the Nebraskan, like the excitable member from
Georgia, became unbearably irritable, suspected his best
friends of conspiracy against him and wrecked his own career
when it seemed most promising. As in the case of Richard
Henry Wilde, there were other related causes, but that sweet
and soothing song to the rose must be assigned as the dominat-
ing agency of disaster.
Yet another time a lyric enters into the legislative chamber,
and this in a song which became nationally and internation-
ally famous, and is perhaps better known than any ballad of
American origin, with the single exception of "Home, Sweet
Home." In the Congress which convened in 1891, a new mem-
ber from New Jersey was Dr. Thomas Dunn English, the
author of "Ben Bolt." Denizens of the National Capital are
tuft-hunters ever, and pleasant anticipations filled their minds
of a time when the bard would reveal the promptings of the
poetic soul. But it was soon whispered that "Ben Bolt" must
be suppressed in the presence of Dr. English, as carefully as
though it were a physical infirmity, a wart on the nose, a cast
in the eye, an impediment of speech. In course of time, the
true, sad story was confided to sympathetic tears.
In 1843, while echoes of the Wilde-Barclay-Thibault ex-
citement lingered on the air, young English, given to dashing
off verses, was commissioned by a friend in the music publish-
ing business to write a nautical song. Not unnaturally, however,
the publisher refused his lay of Sweet Alice, where not a hint
of the briny appears except in the last line of the last verse,
612 THE LYRIC-POLITICO [Aug.,
"Ben Bolt of the salt-sea gale." English, determined to profit
by his efforts, composed music and assumed the expense of the
printing. But "Ben Bolt" languished in seclusion until one
Nelson Kneass, an itinerant genius, of which this period con-
tained many, saw its possibilities. Like Thibault, he felt no
scruples in seizing the words, though he changed them at will
to his measure and, possessing a sure and saleable knowledge
of what the public desired in a ballad, the result was a whirl-
wind of fame. No one has ever explained why it should be so,
but "Sweet Alice" sails the seas of popularity untroubled by
the changes which affect the lyric in the general sense. She
has been violently denounced as a type of her sex, but her
vogue remains. "Ben Bolt" has become a subsidiary title,
while "Sweet Alice," especially since its revival by Du Maurier,
continues on her shining way. Dr. English never received a
penny of the immense royalties gathered from the song. That
perhaps might have engendered some of the bitterness which
its memories evoked. It was never a safe topic to mention in
his presence, and he became virtually a hermit when Trilby
started the whistlers, organ grinders and the musical house-
maids with a new fervor.
The distinguished Secretary of State, John Hay, might be
cited as an eminent example in public life of a man who, in
his youth, wrote popular ballads and exhibited, in later years,
symptoms of regret for such indiscretion. Mr. Hay's literary
fame will be secured for posterity by the Pike County Ballads,
yet he openly resented allusion to them when he occupied the
post of American premier. Literary men, in the broad sense,
and not as writers of the songs of the people, have been hon-
ored in multiplied instances by the American public. The
one aspect of the people which Charles Dickens finds to
praise in his American Notes, is that levee at the White
House, when the guests turn coldly from John Tyler and com-
placent politicians, to lay their homage at the feet of Wash-
ington Irving.
As a study of the changing phases of government by
party, the lyric presents fascinating and illuminating ex-
planations. Lively songs, pleasing speakers, band music all
have their value. But, as no theatrical manager relies on his
orchestra, no matter how excellent, to attract continuous
crowds to a poor play, so definite promises, reenforced with
1920.] THE VISITOR 613
sonic security, are requisite to add to the total of votes. It may
be that song no longer dominates the political field as when
Harrison led his rollicking followers in 1840, or during the
equally vocal campaign of "Old Rough and Ready" Taylor,
because the voter is no longer the free agent he was. When
a man is organized and bound over securely for this measure
and none other, what is the use of his getting worked up over
songs or other creatures of the fancy? Minstrelsy is merely a
part of the chorus unless, indeed, the woman voter grasps this
opportunity to make politics like they were in the fine old days
of the "roaring forties."
THE VISITOR.
BY CAROLINE GILTINAN.
DECOROUSLY I followed
When they led me past your door;
A closed door on a hallway
That, and nothing more.
But my heart was beating wildly
(Though I knew you were away)
At thought of that dear other time
When you had bade me stay.
Love flashed into my finger tips;
I lingered in the hall
And, passing, touched the heavy door-
I touched it that was all.
But had I dared to open it,
Or dared to breathe your name,
I would have gone within, Beloved,
And waited till you came!
FRANCOIS COPPEE ONCE MORE.
BY JOSEPH J. REILLY, PH.D.
NE might well wish the delight of having known
Francois Coppee. It would have been a privilege
to stroll with him through the poorer quarters of
his beloved Paris or to visit him in his modest
home as he sat amid his cats and cigarettes, ar-
rayed in his red smoking jacket, chatting vivaciously, eloquent
of gesture and of speech. Like Stevenson, always ailing, yet
always brave, he lived for years in humble fashion in southern
Paris at the end of the poverty-stricken art quarter, never
marrying, but owing much to the tender ministrations of his
sister. He was a familiar figure on the streets, stoop-shoul-
dered, absorbed in thought, his hands behind his back, and the
students who came to know his fame and his ways lovingly
nicknamed him "The Master."
Gentle, emotional, winning, he was a welcome figure in
society, frojn which, however, he withdrew more and more as
age came on, reluctant to give it even a meagre portion of the
few years which remained and in which he hoped to accom-
plish so much. Born in Paris in 1842 and elected to the French
Academy in 1884 in recognition of his work in drama, poetry,
and fiction, he lived the quiet life of the born student, a kind
of literary anchorite even in the midst of the bustle and whirl
of the brilliant cosmopolis. Not that he was oblivious of its
powerful appeal; quite the contrary.
The Provencal Daudet came to love Paris and, like the
Norman Maupassant, found something irresistible in its spell.
But with Coppee, the love of Paris was not an acquirement,
however perfect, but a gift like that of the fairies which had
been granted at his birth. He knew Paris as Dickens knew
London, and to him it was a world in itself, rich in color,
thrilling with energy, swarming with life, where eternally
virtue threw down the gauntlet to vice, poverty to riches, the
things of the spirit to the things of the flesh.
Coppee's concern was with neither the houses of kings in
exile nor the haunts of sin and despair. His chief interest was
1920.] FRANCOIS COPPER ONCE MORE 615
with the middle class and with the poor, who struggled cour-
ageously against the hardships of their lot. Being a poet, he
saw more in poverty than the harrowing, more among the
bourgeoisie than the commonplace, and he treats both with
that "instinctive delicacy" of which he claims for himself the
privilege of boasting. Born of a race whose blood was partly
bourgeois and partly artistocratic, it is, he says, "owing to his
ancestors that he is complex, yet pleased with simple folk; an
aristocrat, though one who loves the people." He was no mere
provincial to whom the horizon of the universe lies just with-
out the confines of the city. For while he could say : "For me,
Paris is my only love," he was blessed with that sympathetic
spirit which beholds the brotherhood of all the children of
Eve with the vision of an exquisite humanity.
For upward of sixty years before Coppee's star began to
blaze upon the horizon, the bourgeoisie had been the object of
jibe and insult on the part of nearly every litterateur in France.
But with the advent of Coppee came a change. For he gave
new and refreshing glimpses of French life, not of the kind
which French novelists have persuaded the world to accept as
typical, but of a life sane and unsullied, which cherishes the
old-fashioned virtue of pure love, devotion, generosity, and
duty, in which faith is vital and prayer forever sanctified. A
life which puts iron into the blood of France.
It was among the despised bourgeoisie that Coppee found
the setting for his Romance of Youth, a work of particular
interest since, upon his own admission, it was more than
casually autobiographical. Both Amedee Violette and his
creator belonged to the middle class. Both began to earn their
bread in the narrow field of government employment; both
studied at the Library of St. Genevieve when their less studious
comrades were enjoying convivial leisure. Both were senti-
mentalists, in whom a sunset, a pretty girl tripping through the
park, or the first violets of April awakened strange feelings
of joy. Again, Amedee and Coppee were idealists, and for
that were compelled to pay the inevitable price. Both
achieved fame in a day, but found it only ashes of roses.
Finally, both were poets, which is to say that they felt at their
hearts the stir of a fancy too divine to be darkened utterly,
even though disillusionment cast its shadows when youth,
with its romance, had passed forever.
616 FRANCOIS COPPEE ONCE MORE [Aug.,
A Romance of Youth does not depend upon dramatic
situations, bizarre incidents, or multitudinous characters.
Rather it is comparatively brief, its leading characters are few,
and it is told with a simplicity of plot and of tone, which is
distinctive of Coppee. Amedee Violette, whose pretty mother
died of tuberculosis when he was a child and whose father
became from grief the victim of absinthe, obtains a meagre
livelihood and loves the pretty Maria Gerard in vain. Now
listen to Coppee on Amedee and himself:
One single consolation remained for him literary work.
He threw himself into it blindly, deadening his sorrow with
the fruitful and wonderful opiate of poetry and dreams.
He had long ago thrown into the fire his first poems,
awkward imitations of favorite authors ... He returned
to truth and simplicity by the longest way, the schoolboy's
road. Taste and inclination both induced him to express
simply and honestly what he saw before him ... In those
days he lived the most beautiful and perfect hours of his
life those in which the artist, already master of his instru-
ment, having still the abundance and vivacity of youthful
sensations, writes the first words that he knows to be good,
and writes them with entire disinterestedness, not even
thinking that others will see them; working for himself
alone and for the sole joy of putting in visible form and
spreading abroad his ideas, his thoughts all his heart.
These words admit us to the secret of Coppee's literary method.
Amedee was not to toil so devotedly without his reward.
An actor acquaintance, named Jocquelet, volunteers to recite
one of his ballads at a public function, and thus he achieves
his first success. It proves to be intoxicatingly sweet. A news-
paper editor features him; all Paris talks of the advent of the
new poetic star; he becomes a social and a literary lion at a
bound. But though fame comes, and subsequently fortune,
love is denied. The woman he adores weds a man, who is to
Amedee as Hyperion to a satyr. Death leaves her a widow
and Amedee marries her, only to find that her tender sympathy
is not love and that its richest flower has withered on the
grave of her first husband. In the autumn, at dusk, he thinks
wistfully of the bright dreams of youth while "over the dark-
ened landscape in the vast pearl-colored sky spreads the
melancholy chill which follows the farewell of day."
1920.] FRANCOIS COPPEE ONCE MORE 617
Coppee's note in this novel is not that of despair.
This Amcdee, who watches the falling leaves while all is
autumn in his heart, will yield to no base despair, but will
find "in the intoxication of poetry and dreams" some faint
aroma of the lost joy of youth.
In Henriettc Coppee has handled a difficult theme with
delicacy and feeling too much feeling, indeed, since it ap-
proaches perilously near that sentimentalism which was
always to be his "beast in the jungle."
Both novels have unquestioned merit. A Romance of
Youth was crowned by the Academy, and Henriette was ac-
cepted by its author's admirers as new proof that to his gifts
as poet, dramatist, and short-story writer, must be added those
of the novelist as well. A Romance of Youth is incomparably
the better work, and its striking portraits and telling scenes
cling to one's memory. Who can easily forget the Gerards
mamma, fat and good-natured; papa with his eternal pipe and
his well-paid etchings of the Emperor, whom he hated; Louise,
plain and prim, but with a saint's soul; Maria, charming,
dainty, made for men's worship. Or poor Madame Violette
with the hectic color in her cheeks, fading like a flower each
day; her broken-hearted husband, for whom absinthe creates
anew the joy of the dead past; the hard-fisted M. Gaufre, the
foolish Gustave, the debonair Maurice Roger, the grandilo-
quent Jocquelet. What a gallery! And, as for scenes, one
recalls the presentation of little Amedee at the school of M.
Batifol, whose head had such a voluminous bald spot that the
child, in terror, compared it to the globe on the top of the desk !
Then there is the Cafe de Seville, with its noisy circle of poli-
ticians and litterateurs, who greeted Amedee's first verses with
a storm of applause as their glasses rang upon the wine-
stained tables. There are unforgetable scenes in the Franco-
Prussian war as when the ambulances, crowded with mangled
forms, clatter day and night through the streets of the capital.
And always there are those touches which mark the keen
observer, the sympathetic brother, the ardent poet.
These gifts of Coppee were not confined to his novels.
They led him to write some of the finest of French contes,
in which his gifts as man and writer appear : his sympathy for
the poor, his tenderness toward the helpless, his hatred of
selfishness and hypocrisy, his poetic fancy, his mastery of his
618 FRANCOIS COPPEE ONCE MORE [Aug.,
art. In his eyes the poor were ennobled by a tenderness which
survived even amid their misery and showed itself in their
love of children, their respect for purity, their attempts at
helpfulness, however impotent, toward those more unfortunate
than themselves. When the banker, M. Jean Baptiste Gode-
froy, selfish and money-mad, to whom the poor are less than
the dust, distractedly seeks his lost child, he linds him in the
hut of a poor fruit vender, who has put him to bed with his
own little son. He points out the children to the millionaire,
asleep in each other's arms. "I shut up shop," he explains,
"and came here with the babies. They had a bite together
like friends and then they went to sleep. They look nice,
don't they?" Strange emotions stir in M. Godefroy's soul at
the sight of the child of luxury and the child of poverty locked
in each other's embrace. "Before his eyes was raised a corner
of the curtain which hides the life of the poor, so brave in
their poverty, so generous among themselves . . . The bank
president then made the best stroke of his life he discovered
the heart of an honest man. Yes, Mr. President, you planned
to offer a reward to these poor people, and behold! they make
you a magnificent present, that of the sweetest, noblest of all
feelings pity."
Desire Muguet, who ekes out a living for his old mother
and himself by engraving the human organs laid bare in dis-
secting rooms most disgusting of tasks falls in love with
Mademoiselle Clara, whom he finds copying masterpieces at
the Louvre. One day he makes her accept a little engagement
ring; but the thought of marriage has soon to be abandoned,
for disasters throng upon him: his father dies; his mother is
threatened with blindness, and the lovers "have to acknowl-
edge that they are too poor and have too many burdens to
marry. So they say farewell like good children, each trying
not to see the tears in the other's eyes." Maupassant was a
great writer. How incomparably greater he would have been
could he have written that last line!
Desire and Clara do not see each other for ten years.
Meanwhile he has had moderate success and can provide his
mother with a few comforts. One Christmas Eve, on return-
ing home from midnight Mass at Saint-Severin, he finds Clara
weeping in his mother's arms. She has lost her father two
years before, poor child, and has struggled vainly to earn her
1920.] FRANCOIS COPPEE ONCE MORE 619
bread ever since and now, desperate, remembering "that this
is Christmas, the day the God of Charity was born," she comes
to ask help from the mother of her former sweetheart. And
Coppee is not too coldly the artist to forbid them to be happy.
To the man who wrote this tale the cynical realism of
Maupassant is impossible, for in his eyes the world can never
be a chaos in which a malign Fate plays havoc with the chil-
dren of men. It is worth noting, indeed, that the Norman
gives us no pictures of children, except such as are as lifeless
as dolls. To him, obsessed as he was by the brutal ironies of
life, to whom love was nothing but physical passion, child-
hood with its tender grace, naive, confiding, helpless, was as
remote as the stars. Coppee, even more than Daudet, loved
childhood, and felt for it the reverence which innocence in-
spires in every unsullied heart. Only a lover of children could
have written The Louis d'Or, in which the gambler, Lucien
d'Hem, penniless, dreams that he finds a child sleeping in the
snow with a gold coin in its hand, that he steals it and wins a
fortune at the gaming table. Then, torn with remorse at the
thought of the little one still sleeping in the snow, he rushes
out in search of her, only to find her tiny body cold in death.
The anguish of that dream wins him forever from gambling,
and makes him always tender and charitable toward poor
children. Then there is Captain Mercadier, "twenty-six years
of service, twenty-two campaigns, and three wounds," who had
just retired on a pension which, if frugally managed, will
permit him to play the hero at the village inn for life. One
day he discovers little Pierette, who has only one sound leg
and who slaves for his landlady. He adopts her, for you see
he must have someone to mend his linen and sweep his
quarters and perhaps shed a tear one of these days when taps
sound for him. Of course, he must give up his visits to the
inn, curtail his wine and tobacco and economize to the last
sou. But then, what will you? Little Pierette must have some-
thing to live on when he is dead.
Who can forget, in A Cure for Discontent, the fiery Mata-
boul, half socialist and half anarchist, "with wild eyes and the
face of a brigand of the Abruzzi," who is always launching
into tirades against the government, but who becomes trans-
formed from lion to lamb when the death of a sister leaves
him sole guardian of an eight-year-old niece? Huge, uncouth
620 FRANCOIS COPPEE ONCE MORE [Aug.,
bachelor, he has a tender heart despite his rough ways, and
the little orphan awakens it to strange emotions never felt
before. He leaves the door of his room half open at night so
that little Mariette may not be afraid. He takes her to school
to the good Sisters each morning, though all his life he has
railed against religion. He no longer haunts the cafes in the
evening to foregather with tattered malcontents and storm
against the government. He did for a time, taking Mariette
with him, but she used to fall asleep, pauvre petite, so he gave
it up, saying simply: "It is my duty." He is eager to get the
latest news about the Eastern question, fears trouble in the
Balkans, scents a scandal on the Bourse but he no longer has
time to bother with such matters, for he must see to it that
Mariette "looks over the rules for the participles."
Here is humor for you and, mingled with it, a tenderness
which cannot be too strongly insisted on as one of the abiding
qualities of Francois Coppee. You can almost see the light
in his eyes and the smile on his lips as he draws such pictures
as these. It is not the smile of superiority, but that of one
who thrills to the kiss of a child, who grows wistful as the
October winds denude the trees, who is haunted amid the glow
and beauty of a dinner party by the weary fingers and tired
eyes and broken hearts that have made this luxury possible.
This tender sympathy does not stand alone. With it is a
delicate fancy which irradiates such tales as the Louis d'Or,
Restitution, and The Sabots of Little Wolff. Little Wolff,
returning from midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, gives one of
his sabots to a barefoot Child, Whom he sees asleep at the
portal of the church. Morning comes to find only little Wolff,
of all the children in the village, laden with gifts, and the Cure
declares that he beheld a circlet of gold encrusted with gems
on the spot where the head of the beggar Child had rested.
What can be more tenderly fanciful than this tale of a child's
compassion? And who could have written it but one whose
heart was unspoiled?
In Restitution appears another side of Coppee's fancy.
Again it is Christmas Eve and the hard-working Abbe Moulin
is summoned into his shabby little parlor to meet an ex-
banker and peculator, Renaudel, who had fled to America,
made a fortune, and has now returned, his identity unguessed,
to intrust the good Abbe with the task of repaying his cred-
1920.] FRANCOIS COPPEE ONCE MORE 621
itors. The old priest, in a hired cab, sets out on his rounds.
He first seeks Louis Duble, the poet, and finds him, not as
he anticipated, lying upon a straw bed in a garret, but in a
comfortable studio lined with books. The banker's defalca-
tion, Duble confesses, had stripped him of his fortune, but it
stirred his latent courage till he fought his way into the pos-
session of fame and a competence. "I shall, of course," he
says, "accept what is mine, but this fortune makes me no
happier except, perhaps, that it gives me the opportunity to
help some needy friends."
Mademoiselle La Tournure, a spinster whom Renaudel
reduced to penury, has set up a school for little girls, among
whom the Abbe finds her, rich in the blessedness of content-
ment. "Tell Renaudel," she says, "that, thanks to him, I have
now a purpose in life and am no longer an old mad woman
afflicted with imaginary ailments."
With lightened heart, the Abbe next seeks the architect,
Henri Burtal, a blond-haired Hercules, whom the loss of his
fortune awoke to the seriousness of life and to the need of
making a living at his profession. He is happily married and
full of joy at the advent of his first-born child. "You shall have
a thousand francs," he cries, "for your poor parishioners."
The Abbe's heart answers with Laus Deo, for now the man who
cuts peat may marry the girl who works in imitation pearls.
The Abbe had one more visit, this time to the Marquis
de Capdecamp, a leader in the beau monde. He finds the
Marquis' stately residence glittering with lights, and the rooms
thronged with be-jeweled women and men of fashion, who
listen with dull faces to the stupid jests of a professional
vaudeville actor. Reflecting on the shamelessness with which
the rich are wasting money, the Abbe cannot but feel indig-
nant, thinking of the miseries of his poor. Suddenly he is
confronted by the Marquis himself, with grayish beard, and
puffy face, his shirt front a Siberia crossed by the black string
of an eye glass. Upon learning of Renaudel's restitution, the
Marquis bursts into a storm of abuse against the banker. "He
compensates his victims," he cries in a fury; "he gives me
a million francs. What does he wish me to do with them?
Can they help me to redeem my honor?" The man of the
world has vanished; he is beating his breast with his trembling
hands. Renaudel, he confesses, left him impoverished at a
622 FRANCOIS COPPEE ONCE MORE [Aug.,
time when he was beset with creditors; for .the sake of money
he entered upon a loveless marriage. He has been accepted
by the world of fashion, but not by his heroic old soldier
cousin, Louis, who starves alone in a garret on his income of
three thousand francs, and cooks his meals himself in order
to give some money to deserving poverty.
"My dear Abbe," adds the Marquis in a broken voice,
"the only thing that would be agreeable to me, which all the
millions cannot give me back, is a clasp of the hand from my
cousin, Louis." In silence the old priest leaves the house and
returns to his little rectory with the receipts for Renaudel.
Then, left alone, he dreams a few minutes in his old armchair.
"He was no pessimist he was certain now that glory, health,
love, honor were not to be got with money. And he intended
to thank God for them when saying his midnight Mass."
Few stories are more typical of Coppee than this, in which
the conception and its working out are delightfully blended
of the real and the fanciful. Who has not wished that the
scales of the blind goddess might weigh out such rewards and
punishments in things mundane as the exquisite adequacy of
heaven can accomplish? Coppee has let his imagination play
about the thought, and made his theme the blessedness of
poverty when accepted with courage. When Opportunity, in
the guise of Poverty ennobled, knocked upon the door of the
Marquis de Capdecamp and found him too mean to play his
part, she overwhelmed him at Renaudel's restitution with the
irony of having bartered his soul for naught.
The moral element, which is conspicuous in this story, is
not unusual with Coppee. It appears again in A Cure for Dis-
content, in which Alberic Mesnard, a poor government clerk,
who wins five hundred thousand francs as a lottery prize,
learns that the panacea may not be found in wealth. The
fast living, which has followed in the wake of his sudden
wealth, leaves him dispirited from fatigue and disgust, and
he learns at last that doing and living for others are the only
true means of escaping ennui. There was, as you see, some-
thing of the preacher in this poet, Coppee. But the part was
not unbecoming. For, in Matthew Arnold's fine phrase, he
saw life steadily and saw it whole, knowing its temptations,
its failures, its moments of exultation, its hours of sadness, its
grim struggles for spiritual triumph.
1920.] FRANCOIS COPPEE ONCE MORE 623
It must be conceded that Coppee's point of view is not
always as sound as in those tales which we have discussed.
He strikes a false note in A Voluntary Death, in which Louis
Miraz hastens his end by daily imprudences that he may escape
the invalid years which will consume his meagre estate and
leave his wife and daughter penniless. Equally false is The
Commendable Crime, in which a man accedes to a friend's
pleading and takes his life in order that his insurance may
save his family from want. Again, in An Accident, Coppee
flutters to the alluring candle only to singe his wings anew.
A mason confesses that he has pushed a fellow workman from
a high scaffolding to his death, advancing the defence that the
murdered man was squandering on drink the money which
belonged to his wife and son. These tales are not to be laid to
a distorted ethical sense, for Coppee was essentially sound.
Rather they are due to his prime defect, sentimentalism, whose
path is always beset with danger, for bathos is ever ready to
destroy its finest effects, and common sense threatens them
with a burst of laughter. It is true that the confirmed senti-
mentalist (Coppee, thank heaven, was not that) achieves an
occasional masterpiece, but more often he begets those paper-
covered horrors which formerly crowded the newsstands at
railroad stations. Coppee runs close to the danger line in
Henriette and The Foster Sister; in An Accident, A Volun-
tary Death, and A Commendable Crime, he crosses it.
It would be unfair, however, to Coppee to lay too much
stress upon this weakness. His lapses are not frequent, nor
do they occur in those works in which he displayed his most
brilliant gifts. Sentimentalism could never claim him wholly
because he was endowed with the potent correctives of humor
and irony. Where can one discover a humor more delectable
than in My Friend Meurtrier? Outside of Daudet's Tartaron
no more pure-blooded descendant of the miles gloriosus can
be found in modern French literature than this blond giant,
Meurtrier, with his loud voice, his loud manner, his loud
clothes, who recounts each Monday morning his Homeric ex-
ploits of the preceding day! The humor of the story is none
the less delightful because seasoned with Gallic irony. Who
but Coppee would have presented as Meurtrier's foil, not an-
other man, a wife, or a mistress, but that dearest and most
tender of beings, an old mother? One may fail to recall many
624 FRANCOIS COPPEE ONCE MORE [Aug.,
of Coppee's tales, slight and delicate as they are, but the figure
of Meurtrier, with his huge form and bristling beard, swathed
in an apron and serving coffee to "Mamma" is unforgetable.
When he chooses to be ironic, Coppee can stab with the
swift certainty of Maupassant. But between the aims of the
two men is a world of difference. Coppee's irony was directed
against the selfish and the vicious, who turn life's modicum of
happiness into poison. Maupassant struck at the very roots of
life, which, a purposeless and long disease, filled him with
cynical disgust. Such an attitude was impossible to Coppee.
Brought up in a Catholic household as he was, he never en-
tirely lost a serene trust in an omnipotent Love which rules
the world. In the disillusionment, which he pictures life as
bringing to Amedee Violette, there is no bitterness, but only
a wistful regret, and Coppee, standing with his hero in the
autumn twilight, seeks forgetfulness in poetry and dreams.
Maupaussant, on that autumn evening, would have sought re-
lease from the "momentous ennui of living," either in the in-
dulgence of the senses, or, if that should fail, in suicide. In
him vision and sentiment had no touch of the divine, and the
cry of the carnal sounded ever in his ears. Small wonder
that the years brought him neither peace nor contentment,
but only shipwreck of mind and body, while to Coppee they
gave safe harborage in the faith of his childhood and, with a
knowledge of the blessing of suffering, a peace beyond price.
But Coppee's irony is not always gentle, any more than the
wrath of One Who drove the money-changers from the
Temple. In The Two Clowns his indignation is visited upon
those parasites of political life who batten on the blind con-
fidence of the multitude. Against such barterers of truth and
honor he plies the lash, his face tense and his eyes flashing.
The tale recounts the antics of a circus clown with whitened
cheeks and silly grin, whose slap-stick farce "seemed a
drunken echo of the laughter of Moliere." This vulgar scene,
staged to evoke a guffaw from the groundlings, brings only
tears to a tremulous old woman, who has come by chance to
the circus tent, and with shame beholds her own son in the
toothless clown. Can this be he, who was once the beautiful
baby of whom she was so proud, and whom she "made the
neighbors admire when he was so small that he rolled naked
on her knee, holding his little foot in his hand?" Coppee, who
1920.] FRANCOIS COPPEE ONCE MORE 625
has a heart for sentiment, reflects on all this. "The adven-
ture," he says, "made a lively impression on me. I thought
often of it, and after that, when I saw before my eyes some
wretched and degraded creature ... in the flare of a gas jet,
some drunken idler leaning on the bar of a cafe and bending
his bloated face over his glass of absinthe, I have thought,
'Is it possible that this being can ever have been a little child?' '
Some time later, there occurs a sensational sitting of the
Chamber of Deputies, at which "a ministerial candidate, for-
merly in the opposition, proposed to strike a blow at some
liberty, which he had formerly demanded with virulence and
force." He is going to play the traitor but, in parliamentary
language, "to accomplish a change of face." The great
moment arrives and the orator arises in his place with bold
eye and protruding lips, as if enlarged by the abuse of words.
He overwhelms the assembly with his important air and his
megaphonic rhetoric, while affecting a majestic indifference
to the outburst of denunciation from his former colleagues.
The memory of the indignant Coppee reverts to the circus
clown his meaningless patter, his indifference to blows. The
speech is done; there is a roar of applause; the politician, like
the other mountebank, has won the groundlings. On making
his way disgustedly from the chamber, Coppee catches sight
of an elderly lady with a radiant face; she is the mother of the
orator and smiles her pride. Alas! had she reflected, "she
would have felt regret, she too, for the time when her boy
was very small, and rolled naked on her knee, holding his
little foot in his hand."
It is Coppee, the dramatist, who sets off mountebank and
politician, audience and audience, mother and mother, in such
effective contrast, and it is Coppee, the poet, who beholds
their deadly similarity. The tale leaves in the mind none of
the bitterness which Maupassant, or even Daudet, would have
given it, but rather a sense of regret that relative values in
life should be so shamelessly misconceived.
Bitterness and pessimism, indeed, had no place in
Coppee's attitude towards life. Men are not all sordid of soul,
and indeed even among the wretched and unfortunate the
spark of a generous heroism often flames into life. It was
with this truth in mind that Coppee wrote his masterpiece,
The Substitute. Every reader will recall poor Jean Francois
VOL. CXI. 40
626 FRANCOIS COPPEE ONCE MORE [Aug.,
Leturc, the little, ragged street arab, with the mop of yellow
hair, who is sent to the reform school at ten and whose crim-
inal record lengthens with appalling swiftness as he grows to
manhood ! Under a new name, he fights his way to honorable
employment, but takes upon himself the guilt of his comrade,
the weak Savinien, rather than see him driven for a first
offence into the inferno, which had seared his own soul.
In this brief tale we have at their best the salient qualities
of Coppee, artist and man of heart. Here are his sympathy
for the poor and wretched; his belief, as firm as that of Bret
Harte, in the ultimate nobility of the world's very derelicts;
a vision to which life's cruelties arise from no vileness of
humanity but from the injustice or cowardice or wrong-doing
of individuals; the moral touch which made him see in men
and women something more than material for his art; his con-
fidence in the regenerating power of childhood's innocence;
his sentiment, glowing and invincible, before which cynicism
withers and pessimism has no place. And always his art is
sure, from the incisive first sentence till the final pathetic one.
It holds the mirror of reality up to a world in which, despite
its cruelty, the spirit of sacrifice achieves ever new and tran-
scendent victories. And, as for the falsehood by which Jean
Francois assumed his comrade's guilt, haply a brother angel
to him whose tears effaced the oath of Uncle Toby, withheld
an accusing pen from the name Leturc.
Eleven years have passed since Francois Coppee died.
But the charm of the man is still a fragrant memory, and his
best work retains its power of appeal undiminished. Paul
Bourget's pronouncement made at his death deserves to be
recalled: "French by birth, he was more profoundly French,
more closely and intimately French by the quality of his art.
His work was natural, just, precise, perfectly finished." With
equal truth, he might have added that his soul was the soul
of a poet, his heart that of a lover of humanity, to whose
serene -and unspoiled fancy more truth is often vouchsafed
than to the Goncourts, the Zolas, and the Maupassants.
THE QUAKING ASPEN TREE.
BY HARRIETTE WILBUR.
Why tremble so, broad Aspen tree?
Why shake thy leaves ne'er ceasing?
At rest thou never seem'st to be,
For when the air is still and clear,
Or when the nipping gale, increasing,
Shakes from thy boughs soft twilight's tear,
Thou tremblest still, broad Aspen tree,
And never tranquil seem'st to be. Anon.
HE botanist has a simple explanation for the ex-
treme sensitiveness of the aspen's "rainy-sound-
ing silver leaves;" he says it is due to the flat-
tened leaf stalk, which is set contra-wise to the
surface of the leaf, making a combination which
renders the foliage so susceptible to the slightest movement
of air that the very name aspen has become a synonym for
quaking, shivering, tremulous. It has been so used by Keats in
Hyperion: "While his beard shook horrid with such aspen-
malady."
But to poet and peasant alike, this peculiarity has seemed
a challenge to the constructive imagination, until Populus
tremula has become a popular subject of literary comment and
legendary lore. In poetical lines will be found such descrip-
tions as "rustling aspens heard from side to side" (Words-
worth) ; "the many- twinkling leaves of aspen tall" (James
Thomson) ; "a restless, rustling canopy" (Scott) ; "the aspen's
scattered leaves gray-glittering on the moveless twig"
(Southey) ; "aspen leaves that wave without a wind" (John
Leyden) ; "the aspen which flutters all its dangling leaves as
though beating with myriad pulses" (A. B. Street) ; "timorous
aspens which tremble when all else is still" (Bliss Carman) ;
"the aspen's fluttering frivolous twitter" (Henry Taylor), and
Only the pattering aspen
Made a sound of growing rain,
That fell ever faster and faster,
Then faltered to silence again.
Lowell, "The Singing Leaves."
628 THE QUAKING ASPEN TREE [Aug.,
On the other hand, when the poets wish to imply perfect
peace, they find a most fitting way of expressing it by saying :
"The aspen's leaves are scarce astir" (Lowell) ; "and e'en the
aspen's hoary leaf makes no unusual stir" (Hood) ; or, "there
doth the twinkling aspen's foliage sleep" (Wordsworth).
William Tennant, in describing a bagpipe competition,
tells how "his every finger to its place assigned, moved quiv'r-
ing like the leaf of aspen tree," which is a paraphrase, perhaps,
of Shakespeare's reference to lily hands, which "tremble, like
aspen leaves, upon a lute" (Titus Andronicus) . James Hogg
has used the figure with good effect when he has the recipient
of a letter say: "My mind's the aspen of the vale, in ceaseless
waving motion." Ernest McGaffey, that enthusiastic poet
angler, fondly describes a favorite rod "with pliant tip that
wavers like some shivering aspen slim and strong." Thomas
Campbell well understands the nature of the tree, if not of
affection, when he sings: "Bind the aspen ne'er to quiver,
then bind love to last forever," which is rivaled by the well-
known lines in Marmion:
O woman! in our hours of ease,
Uncertain, coy, and hard to please,
And variable as the shade
By the light quivering aspen made.
Naturally, the aspen has been made symbolical of fear, or
of lamentation. Still another meaning assigned to it in
floral language is scandal, from an old saying which affirmed
that its leaves were made from the tongues of malicious gos-
sippers, a thought put into rhyme in 1622 :
The quaking aspen, light and thin,
To the air quick passage gives;
Resembling still
The trembling ill
Of tongues of womankind;
Which never rest,
But still are prest
To wave with every wind. P. Hannay.
In the Faerie Queen, Spencer refers to one use of the tree :
"The aspine, good for staves;" it once had a place in medicine,
because from its constant trembling, it was considered a sure
cure for the ague, palsy, and other such restless affections.
1920.] THE QUAKING ASPEN TREE 629
In Russia, aspen twigs are laid on a supposed witch's grave,
to keep the restless sorcerer from wandering abroad. As a
weather prophet, it is valued, according to Alice Gary's "The
leaves of the aspen are blowing down a sign of fair weather,
they say."
As to the origin of this tremulous motion, poets and
peasants do not agree with science. Bayard Taylor says in
Kilimanjaro:
There in the wondering airs of the Tropics
Shivers the aspen, still dreaming of the cold.
William Browne, in Britannia's Pastorals, ascribes it to the
tree's having witnessed the pursuit of a nymph by a wolf:
An asp, who thought him stout, could not dissemble,
But showed his- fear, and yet is seen to tremble.
But folk-lore ascribes this habit to the tree's association with
the life of Christ:
Once as our Saviour walked with men below,
His path of mercy through a forest lay,
And mark how all the drooping branches show
What homage best a silent tree may pay.
Only the aspen stood erect and free,
Scorning to join the voiceless worship pure,
But see! He casts one look upon the tree,
Struck to the heart, she trembles forevermore.
Anon.
One legend informs us that as the Holy Family took their
flight, they came into a thickly wooded forest, when, on their
approach, all the trees, with the exception of the aspen, paid
reverential homage. The disrespectful arrogance of the tree
did not escape the notice of the Holy Child, but at His glance
its leaves began to tremble and have done so ever since. An-
other version places the event on the evening of the betrayal :
By Kedron I stood, and the bright beaming eye
I viewed of the pitying Power;
Each tree bowed its head, as the Saviour passed by,
But I deigned not my proud head to lower.
Then sounded a sigh from the Saviour's breast,
And I quaked, for that sigh through me darted :
"Quake so till I come!" said the voice of the Blest;
My repose then forever departed.
Bernhard Severin Ingemann, "The Aspen."
630 THE QUAKING ASPEN TREE [Aug.,
The Russian peasants state that the tree trembles with
horror and wrath because Judas hanged himself from its
branches. They say: "The aspen is an accursed tree, which
trembles without even a breath of wind."
The folk-lore of many different peoples agree that the
aspen is the tree from which the Cross was made, which ex-
plains its gloomy shivering recollections:
Ah, tremble, tremble, Aspen tree,
I need not ask thee why thou shakest,
For if, as holy legend saith,
On thee the Saviour bled to death,
No wonder, Aspen, that thou quakest,
And till the judgment all assemble,
Thy leaves, accursed, shall wail and tremble.
Anon, "The Legend of the Aspen."
In Syria, this tree is called Khashafa, meaning "to be
agitated," and in Lithuania it is Drebulle, a word intimately
connected with our word "tremble," and which it means.
The people of these two countries concur with the general be-
lief that the Cross was made of aspen, and that the trembling
of the leaves is a proof that the tree was so employed :
On the morrow stood she trembling,
At the awful weight she bore,
When the sun in midnight blackness
Darkened on Judea's shore.
Anon, "The Legend of the Aspen."
Far off in highland wilds 'tis said,
(But truth now laughs at fancy's lore),
That of this tree the Cross was made,
Which erst the Lord of glory bore,
And of that deed its leaves confess,
E'er since a troubled consciousness.
Anon, "The Aspen."
A MAGICIAN OF GLOBES.
BY LESLIE MOORE.
Paul he was a Magician. To those not pos-
sessed of the magic spectacles of childhood he
was merely a rather dirty old man. At the
moment, he was sitting on his machine in the
market square, a machine somewhat reminiscent
of that of a knife grinder. The square, flanked on three sides
by old-fashioned houses and a few shops, and on the fourth
by a new red brick church, was bathed in June sunshine.
Paul stood in the sunshine watching the Magician. While
the Magician worked he sang, in a cracked old voice, a song
of his own composition :
Air balloons pink, air balloons blue,
Air balloons yellow and gold,
Air balloons light as thistledown,
How many d'ye think I have sold?
Millions presented itself to Paul's mind as a possible reply
to the query, since every summer, his brief life could recollect,
had seen the old Magician in the square.
Fascinating it was to watch the making of the shining
globes. First, some small piece of substance, almost indis-
tinguishable in color, was attached to the nozzle of the bel-
lows, which were worked by a foot treadle. Slowly the bel-
lows sighed and expanded and sighed again, breathing life,
it would seem, into the queer little piece of stuff on its nozzle.
And slowly, slowly the great shining globe grew, pink, blue,
and yellow, or gold if you preferred to call it so. Paul always
called it gold. Then came a conjuring trick with a bit of
string round the nozzle of the bellows, a veritable Magician's
trick, and the shining globe was detached. Another and
longer piece of string was fastened to the first piece, and there
was the great light ball ready for the eager purchaser.
Only Paul never was a purchaser, and that for the simple
reason that he never possessed a penny. Possibly, it never
dawned upon his grave student father to look upon pennies
632 A MAGICIAN OF GLOBES [Aug.,
and small boys in conjunction one with the other. Anyhow
he never gave Paul one. Therefore, Paul remained a mere
fascinated on-looker, entirely unenvious. He took the fact of
his own penury as a matter of course, as he took other not
altogether agreeable incidents of his short life.
At the moment there were no purchasers at hand. The
square was deserted save for two or three idling grown-ups,
and a busy young curate, who had just emerged from the red
brick church, to all of whom air balloons were matters of no
faintest interest.
The latest creation, a great gold ball, had just had a long
piece of string attached.
"What do you think of it?" the Magician was making
abrupt address to Paul.
"It is wonderful." Paul's heart was in his voice and eyes.
"Yet a prick and it's done for, like our dreams, eh?"
"Oh, but no one would prick it." Paul was intensely
earnest.
"Humph," grunted the Magician. "You wouldn't and,
maybe, I wouldn't, but there's others as'll do it for ye. That's
what the world's for. Cheery place, the world."
"I'd not let anybody prick mine." Paul was emphatic.
"Wouldn't ye? Well, do you know what would happen if
you didn't?"
"No."
"It would shrivel. You'd see it shrivel slowly and die. 7
know that, but youth doesn't and cries when the bubble is
pricked. Happy for those for whom it is pricked. They be-
lieve that but for that they could have kept it always. Prick-
ing's kinder than shriveling."
Paul shivered a little in the sunshine.
"Must they always shrivel?" he demanded. There was a
quaver in the query.
"Mine have," said the Magician briefly.
"Oh, but," Paul saw a radiant light ahead, "you can
always make new ones."
The Magician laughed, a short laugh like a dog's bark.
"This kind, not the kind I used to make, not the kind
youth makes. So an old man makes these, and sells 'em to the
children. And when they're pricked, the children cry, and, if
they've got a penny, come running back for new ones, new
1920.] A MAGICIAN OF GLOBES 633
ones the dirty old man has made. I know what folk call me."
He shrugged his shoulders.
"I don't call you that," said Paul stoutly. And then he
got very red.
"What do yon call me then?" queried the old man
curiously.
But Paul had turned shy.
'Tell me," persisted the old man.
Paul shook his head.
The old man balanced the golden globe in the palm of his
horny hand. "Tell me, and I'll give you this."
"Oh !" Paul was breathless.
"But you must tell me first."
"I'll I'll whisper," said Paul. He came close.
"Ho, ho, ho." It was a long drawn out chuckle. "And so
I'm a magician, am I? Well, there's your ball. Maybe, it'll
bring magic to you. Who knows, who knows. But don't see
it shrivel, mind."
"Mine won't," Paul was confident.
"Then someone will prick it."
"I shan't let them." Paul's lips were folded in a firm line.
The Magician looked at him.
"You won't be able to help it," he said. "Someone always
pricks your ball. That's fate."
Paul looked at the Magician. A cloud had fallen in the
clear eyes.
"Or the ball will shrivel and die. Die, don't forget that.
Die like our dreams, our hopes, our beliefs."
Paul sighed. He turned slowly from the Magician, walk-
ing across the square, a thin, dark-eyed little boy with a golden
ball floating from a piece of string.
Paul turned into the highroad, the ball floating gently
before him on its string. His eyes were fixed upon it. The
sunlight shining through its transparency made it wonderful
to behold.
He did not sec the hedges on either side of the road, nor
the wild roses swaying in the soft breeze, nor even notice the
song birds in the branches, or the larks caroling in the blue
dome overhead. His whole soul was absorbed in his posses-
sion. Now and again market women passed him with baskets
634 A MAGICIAN OF GLOBES [Aug.,
on their arms. They all smiled at the small absorbed boy.
A man passed with a great wagon and a cart horse. He
grinned at Paul, but Paul did not see him either, and presently
the road was deserted, a long straight white ribbon of a road,
running on between the hedges.
Paul began singing softly to himself as he had heard the
Magician sing. Like the Magician, he made up his own words,
but he fitted the words to a little tune he had once heard :
Golden ball in the sunshine,
Golden ball in the light,
Where are you going to take me,
Oh, golden ball so bright.
Will you take to the fairies,
Will you take me to the streams,
The little streams, whose music
Comes to me in my dreams?
Will you float with me in the water,
The wonderful water brown,
The wonderful magic water
Flowing away from the town,
Away from the town and the people,
Among the fields and the trees,
Where wonderful things can happen?
Oh, golden ball, take me, please.
Paul sang his little song over and over again as he walked
along the road. He did not know he was singing it, nor that
he was making up the words. He was merely giving uncon-
scious voice to the thoughts that were in his mind. His heart
was singing far louder than his voice, which was so soft a
little croon that it did not in the least disturb the feathered
songsters in the hedges. He was so lost in his own blissful
thoughts that he did not realize that his hold upon the string
had slackened. A capricious little puff of wind springing
suddenly up took it unresisting from his fingers, too late for
him to tighten his grasp.
Dismayed, Paul came back to the present to see the golden
ball floating on ahead of him, the string dangling just out of
reach. He set off to run, but the wind was having a frolic on
its own account. Having gained possession of Paul's treasure
it had no mind to let it out of its keeping. A stronger and
more tantalizing little puff lifted the ball higher, and carried
1920.] A MAGICIAN OF GLOBES 635
it over the hedge. Paul stared. Tears were fast rising to the
surface. A wicket gate in the hedge brought renewed hope,
however. He ran through it to see the ball floating over the
daisy covered grass. On the other side of the field a small
field was a gray stone building. The ball was floating
rapidly towards it.
And still Paul ran, hot and panting, and still the breeze
carried the golden ball ahead at its capricious will. Once he
was within an ace of seizing the dangling string, he all but had
it in his grasp, when, hey presto, "Not this time," laughed the
breeze, and puffed a little harder. The ball was close to the
gray building now, within a yard or so of an open doorway.
Let it once float inside and it was captured. Another and still
stronger puff of wind caught the ball, not to drive it through
the doorway as Paul had fondly hoped, but to send it forcibly
against a thorn tree growing by the door.
Where was the ball? It had vanished.
Dismayed, Paul stared at the tree. There was the string
dangling, but no ball was to be seen. Paul seized the string.
A gentle tug, and it was his own property. Fastened to one
end of it was a small piece of dark skin-like substance. Not
"someone," but the thorn tree had pricked the ball. With the
realization came the tears, scalding drops coursing down
Paul's cheeks.
"And when they're pricked the children cry." Paul heard
again the Magician's mocking voice.
He shouldn't see Paul cry. Choking back his tears, he
plunged into the shelter of the shadowed porch.
Dazzled by the light he had left, for the first moment or
so he could see little in the half sombre light within. Only
the stained glass windows, brilliant by reason of the sunshine
without, told him that he was in a church. Someone was
playing on an organ. Too overcome by the loss of his ball to
have heard the music before, the full soft strains now came
clearly to Paul's ears.
He looked around. His eyes losing the dazzled sensation,
he saw an altar in front of him, an altar decorated with white
flowers. High up on it he saw the gleam of a brass Crucifix.
A lighted red lamp hung from the rafters of the roof. Here
and there statues stood against the walls, flowers at their base.
Paul stared. Here was a church very different from the dull,
636 A MAGICIAN OF GLOBES [Aug.,
prosaic building which saw his reluctant presence on Sunday
mornings. It was a pleasure even to be inside this church.
It held the most delightful sense of peace and friendliness.
Paul found himself again looking at the altar. Something
about it and that hanging red lamp attracted him strangely,
though he did not in the least know why.
And still the music of the organ throbbed and pulsed
through the building, though there was no sign of the hidden
musician.
Paul set off on a tour of inspection. Turning towards the
door by which he had entered, he saw a gallery above it, and
in the gallery he caught the gleam of organ pipes. There was
the organ, and there, in consequence, the hidden musician.
But how to reach him? That was the question. Nothing for
it but to reconnoitre. A little door and a winding stair soon
brought the solution of his query. A moment later Paul was
clambering breathlessly up the stairs. The long string, with
the fragments of his ball attached, was still clasped in his
small, hot hand.
A man was sitting at the organ. He had his back to Paul.
He was dressed in the oddest fashion. He wore a queer
brown dress with a curious kind of hood at the back, and a
thick white cord was tied round his waist. No matter the
dress at the moment, however; it was the music which was
absorbing Paul's mind. Softly he crept closer to listen. If the
player at the organ heard the soft footfall, he certainly never
dreamed that it denoted the presence of a stranger, and an odd
little stranger at that. But quite possibly he was too lost in his
music to have heard anything.
For ten minutes Paul was an entranced and unperceived
listener. Then the musician took his hands from the keys.
"Oh, please don't stop," said Paul.
Father Antony turned round.
"And where did you come from?" he asked amazed.
Paul pointed towards the stairs.
"From down there," he said, and seemed to consider it an
all sufficient answer.
Father Antony looked at him. His eyes were twinkling.
And then those same twinkling eyes saw the unmistakable
traces of recent tears. Now when tears are seen on the cheeks
of a person of about seven years old, and that person is un-
1920.] A MAGICIAN OF GLOBES 637
questionably in an amiable mood, it is fairly safe to conjecture
that some bodily injury has caused their appearance.
"Had you hurt yourself?" asked Father Antony sympathet-
ically. Paul colored. He had forgotten his tell-tale eyes.
"N No," he stammered.
Father Antony regretted the query. It had evidently
caused embarrassment. Paul did not regret it, however. He
read understanding in the kindly eyes looking at him.
"It was the ball," he said. He held out the piece of string
for inspection.
Father Antony looked at it. All the same his compre-
hension of the matter was not much farther advanced.
Paul proceeded to explain. He explained from the begin-
ning, an explanation which embraced a remarkably accurate
account of his conversation with the Magician.
"Tisn't 'xaclly only the broken ball," said Paul as he
ended, his voice wavering a little, "it's knowing they always
will get broken or shrivel, like what he said."
Father Antony understood. It was not merely the indi-
vidual misfortune, but the parable underlying it which had de-
pressed the child's soul. Unable to explain how or why, the
Magician's philosophy, in its pessimistic garb, had come home
to him with his own loss.
Father Antony looked curiously at him.
"Shall I play to you again?" he asked.
"Oh, please," said Paul.
And so for half an hour and more Father Antony played.
Paul, wide-eyed, on a bench near him. Now and again Father
Antony sang in a low mellow baritone, Latin and English
verses, the former incomprehensible to Paul. One little Eng-
lish verse, however, haunted him. It was the refrain of a
Christmas carol. It was odd to sing it with the June sunshine
ablaze without. But Father Antony thought that Paul would
like it. He was right. Paul did like it. The four lines kept
repeating themselves in his head. He couldn't remember the
others.
Come, come, come to the Manger,
Children come to the children's King,
Sing, sing chorus of Angels,
Songs of glory to Bethlehem's King.
It was the gayest, happiest little song.
638 A MAGICIAN OF GLOBES [Aug.,
Father Antony turned round from the organ. Paul's eyes
were shining, and his cheeks very hot.
"Do you like it?" asked Father Antony.
"Most 'normously," said Paul, his heart in his voice.
"Which do you like best, the music or the golden ball?"
"Oh, the music!" Paul was in no two minds about that.
"Well then, see," Father Antony was smiling, for all that
his voice was earnest, "the ball brought you to the music.
You wouldn't have found it if the ball hadn't broken. It will
always be like that. When something we love breaks we will
always find something better, if only we keep our eyes open
to see it, our ears open to hear it."
Paul nodded. That at least was perfectly comprehensible
in the light of recent events.
"And now," said Father Antony, "I must go to my work,
and you must go home."
Together they went down the little winding stair. For a
moment Father Antony knelt in the aisle, his hand on the
child's shoulder. Then he led the way into the sunshine.
"You know your way home?" he asked.
" 'Course I do," smiled Paul. Then he looked down at his
own hand. "I left the broken ball up there."
Years afterwards Father Antony remembered the words.
At the moment he merely said :
"Do you want it?"
"No, thank you," said Paul, "it was quite smashed."
And those words, too, Father Antony remembered.
"Good-bye, then," he said.
"Good-bye," echoed Paul. And then he bethought him
of his manners. "And thank you. I've enjoyed myself very
much, thank you, and I'll come again soon."
Father Antony laughed.
"If your people will let you," he said.
"Oh," said Paul, "there's only father and 'Liza,' and they
don't mind a bit s' long as I aren't in the way." He was totally
unconscious that there was anything pathetic about the state-
ment.
Father Antony watched him walking off across the grass.
The words of the carol were still ringing in Paul's head.
The Magician had not left the square. He saw Paul com-
ing towards him. No golden ball was floating from the string.
1920.] A MAGICIAN OF GLOBES 639
"So it got pricked," said the Magician.
"But I found the music instead," said Paul.
"Humph," said the Magician.
"When something we love breaks \ve always find some-
thing better. He said so," announced Paul.
"Humph," said the Magician again.
"The organ can't break," nodded Paul, "and I am going
to hear him play on it again very soon.
"Humph," said the Magician a third time.
But, unfortunately, Paul did not hear the organ again very
soon. He arrived home to find boxes packed up. A change to
another town, necessitated by the offer of a new post to his
student father, came about the following day. It had been ar-
ranged for over a month; only Paul, naturally, had not been
consulted on the matter.
Paul Carmichael was sitting in front of the fire. He was
still dark eyed and thin, but the small boy had grown into a
tall young man.
Paul was radiantly happy. Now when a young man of
four and twenty is radiantly happy, in fact superbly happy,
it is usually pretty safe to conjecture that he is in love. Paul
was no exception to this rule. Moreover, she loved him. There
was the wonderful knowledge, which had been singing in his
heart for the last three months, glorifying the golden days of
autumn, tingling through his veins with the December frosts.
Of course, she was unutterably too good for him. What dear,
wholesome boy does not believe that fact with regard to his
beloved? Nevertheless from the pedestal, upon which he had
placed her, she had condescended to bend to him, kneeling
a suppliant at her feet.
There had been a sharp pang of disappointment some few
days previously when he learnt that she was spending Christ-
mas with a sister in Norfolk, instead of at her home in London.
But then she had said :
"I think sisters ought to be together at this season, Paul
dear; and orphans, as Hester and I are, make a special bond
between us. Aunt Lydia will not miss me, because she has so
many old friends."
"But I shall miss you," Paul had said, unable to keep the
disappointment out of his voice.
640 A MAGICIAN OF GLOBES [Aug.,
"Isn't it just a little selfish to emphasize that fact, when
when I am doing my duty, Paul?" she had asked gently, with
the far-away look in her eyes which always made Paul feel
that he was in the presence of a saint.
Paul had been instantly remorseful, crying "mea culpa"
from a very genuine heart. He was a selfish beast, he always
was a selfish beast, thinking of no one but himself. A state-
ment which his friends would have greeted with tender deri-
sion, but then, of course, his friends did not know him one-
half nor yet one-quarter so well as his beloved knew him.
"Besides, Paul dear," had come the further gentle re-
minder, "it is not as though I could tell her why I would like
to stay in town. We have agreed, haven't we, that it is far
wiser not to make our engagement public till we see some real
prospect of getting married?"
They had so agreed, or rather, Paul had so agreed after
the desirability of the matter had been pointed out to him by
Mildred in one of her grave, tender speeches, the far-away
look deepening in her eyes as she spoke. He had even felt,
the selfish beast he was so ready to call himself, that disap-
pointment had here again fought hard against her tender
wisdom. Of course it was wisdom. A young man, who had
inherited but a slender income of eighty pounds a year from
his father, must certainly not dream of matrimony till he had
at least quadrupled that sum, a matter not too swiftly done in
the writer's profession, despite the fact that his first book had
raised him to the initial rung in that ladder called fame.
At all events she had returned that morning, and the last
evening of the old year would see them meeting at her aunt's
house in Chelsea. Small wonder that the hours which must
elapse till that meeting, found Paul radiantly happy.
He looked at a photograph on his mantelpiece, a large
photograph of a girl in a white frock, and with beautifully
arranged hair. A psychologist might have found food for
thought in the pictured face, but Paul was not a psychologist.
He accepted his fellowmen and women at their own value.
It was only when that value fell a little bit below his precon-
ceived notions of what it ought to be, that he began to search
for the jewels he was certain they were hiding from him. A vase
of flowers stood on either side of the photograph. Daily fresh
flowers at the shrine of his beloved was part of Paul's ritual.
1920.] A MAGICIAN OF GLOBES 641
Somewhere down the street he heard the sound of the
postman's knock. Today the sound did not set his heart a-
beating. No need to think of letters with tonight's meeting in
prospect. All the same there was a letter for him. Five
minutes later the landlady entered with the missive on a tray.
The sight of the handwriting caused a quick throb at
Paul's heart. The letter was utterly unexpected. It couldn't
herald a postponement of their meeting? Of course not. It
would only hold a brief fore-welcome of that evening's joy.
Paul broke the seal and drew out the contents. For a
few moments he sat staring at the delicately written lines.
His mind was entirely unable to grasp their meaning. From
them he stared at the photograph on the mantelpiece, and
then back at the letter in his hand.
She couldn't mean it! Those written words swimming
and dancing before his eyes could not be true! Plain enough
English, all the same.
My dear Paul: I am afraid that this letter will come as
somewhat of a shock to you, but I feel sure that you will
understand that I am acting for the best. It was partly
the feeling that I must have a few days for quiet thought
that sent me to Hester's this Christmas.
You see, Paul, I feel we have been too precipitate. You
know how I hate to give pain. If it had not been for that
I would have told you my misgivings earlier, I would have
shown you how imprudent it was of us to have become
secretly engaged. Long engagements are so unwise. They
invariably lead to a little of the freshness of love dying,
that fresh love which should be the chief beauty in the
life of a newly married couple.
I could not bear to appear to doubt your love, knowing
the steadfastness of my own nature. But, Paul, men are
different from women. The very ardor by which you
carried me off my feet has warned me that a fiercely burn-
ing flame soon dies down.
Don't hurt me, suffering too much at what I say. If you
had been a little less persistent, a little more thoughtful
in your love for me, you should have seen the unwisdom
of the step we took. I saw it, but dreaded to give pain.
Now I see, that for your sake, I ought to have given that
pain, that I must give it now, though the pain is more
mine than yours, since it is I who am the executioner.
VOL. CXI. 41
642 A MAGICIAN OF GLOBES [Aug.,
Paul, we must break our engagement. We must both be
free. I say this lest you should still feel yourself quix-
otically bound to me. I will not let you feel yourself tied.
Free, you will do infinitely better work. Your art, rather
than the thought of making money, must be the driving
power to your pen. Therefore, you are absolutely free.
This, Paul, is my irrevocable decision.
Your sincere friend and well-wisher,
MILDRED BRENNING.
Of course, I shall not expect you this evening. I will
explain to my aunt.
Paul stared at the written lines. His face had gone as
white and almost as immobile as a dead face. Only his dark
eyes burnt, living, in the white mask. What had he done?
What had he said to have called forth such a letter? Of
course, the whole thing was a monstrous misunderstanding,
one which a few words, a brief explanation, could set right.
He got to his feet, flinging the letter into the fire. It must
be destroyed at once. The whole incident must be forgotten,
buried in oblivion after ten minutes talk together. A moment
later saw Paul in the street, walking rapidly in the direction
of the Chelsea Embankment. Later he could return and dress
for the Old Year dinner of ceremony.
Coming to the house in Cheyne Walk, he was just about to
mount the steps when a big man let himself out of the front
door, slamming it behind him.
"Hullo, Carmichael," he said cheerfully.
Paul knew him a wealthy man of leisure, and a frequent
visitor at the house.
"Just going back to dress," explained Laurence Fenton.
"Congratulate me, old man, I'm the happiest fellow on earth.
Miss Brcnning and I are engaged."
Paul stared at him.
"Miss Brenning and you are engaged," echoed Paul tone-
lessly.
"Oh, Lord!" Laurence's cheerful face was a study. "She
told me to keep it quiet for three months. Girls are so odd
about these things. Don't repeat what I've said to anyone,
will you, old man?"
"Oh, no," said Paul quietly.
"I fancied once that you were going to try your chance
1920.] A MAGICIAN OF GLOBES 643
in that direction," said Laurence, "and as you had been first
in the field I stood aside for you. But Mildred told me that
you were only excellent friends and nothing more. She men-
tioned the fact quite casually. We've both been spending
Christmas at her sister's house in Norfolk. When she said
that, I thought I might try my luck, and here I am the happiest
man on earth. She's miles too good for me and all that sort
of thing, you know." The honest fellow's face was beaming.
Paul smiled oddly.
"Good luck to you," he said.
"Thanks. Going in there now?"
"No," said Paul. "It's too late."
"Lost sight of the time same as I have, eh? Well, I must
make a rush for it if I am to get back punctually in my war
paint for the dinner tonight. Can't be late for that, you know.
So long."
"So long," echoed Paul mechanically.
He turned on to the Embankment like a man in a dream.
He hadn't the faintest notion where he walked, nor how long
he walked. In reality, it was little more than an hour. He
had struck into the streets after the first ten minutes. Cabs,
motors and buses passed him, the two former with evening
decked occupants bright and cheerful, all ready for the coming
welcome to the New Year.
"The Old Year is dying," said Paul to himself. "Every-
thing dies."
It was the first connected sentence his brain had formed
since he had turned away from the house in Cheyne Walk.
Somehow it brought reality home to him. He came to a halt,
looking up to see to what street his mechanical walking had
brought him.
He had paused outside a big building. The sound of an
organ playing came to him from within. The air struck some
old cord of memory, and then came the words to the music.
Paul heard them clearly:
Come, come, come to the Manger,
Children come to the children's King,
Sing, sing, chorus of Angels
Songs of glory to Bethlehem's King.
Age-old memories, long forgotten, clutched at Paul's heart.
644 A MAGICIAN OF GLOBES [Aug.,
"And when they're pricked, the children cry."
The mocking voice seemed to be speaking the words in his
ear. Mechanically Paul turned into the building. Benedic-
tion had just been given, though that fact was unrealized by
Paul. He saw only that a service of some kind had come to an
end.
Little groups of people were moving up to a cave-like
structure on the right of the high altar, while still the gay,
happy music of carol sounded through the church.
The long forgotten words fell again and again on Paul's
ears.
He followed in the wake of two or three people to see
what the odd cave-like structure denoted.
Father Antony was playing on his beloved organ. He had
forgotten his surroundings. A not unusual occurrence with
Father Antony when music had him under its spell.
The sound of a step on the stairs brought him back to the
present. For a moment or so he did not turn round, but con-
tinued to the end of the passage he was playing. The last
chords struck, he looked up to see a tall, dark young man
standing near him.
"The golden air ball has been broken," said Paul
quietly.
For one moment, and perhaps not unnaturally, Father
Antony thought that the young man before him was suffering
from slight mental derangement. And then suddenly,
memory leaping the intervening years, he was back at a June
morning, seeing a small boy standing where the man now
stood.
"Did you come to leave the fragments up here?" asked
Father Antony.
"Then you remember me?" queried Paul.
"I remember you," said Father Antony.
"The music compensated the child for the shattered toy,"
said Paul quietly. "Is there any compensation for a shattered
faith?"
Father Antony rested his hands softly on the ivory keys.
"Suppose I hear the story," he said.
So up in that quiet place, with only Father Antony and the
silent organ for audience, Paul told his tale. He told it very
1920.] A MAGICIAN OF GLOBES 645
simply, laying no blame at any door, mentioning no names.
Somehow there seemed no breach of confidence, no disloyalty,
in telling the story to this calm-faced Friar. His very remote-
ness from the busy world without, the very remoteness of the
quiet church itself, seemed to enshroud the telling in a cloak of
confidence.
"And in that other church," ended Paul, "your words
came back to me: 'When something we love breaks we will
always find something better, if only we keep our eyes open
to see it, our ears open to hear it.' I could see and hear
nothing, and so I came back to find you."
Father Antony had faced right round now. He was not
looking at Paul, but at the curtained Tabernacle on the altar
at the far end of the church.
"I think," he said thoughtfully, "-that you came back to
find Someone Else."
An old man was crossing a daisy covered field. He had
no notion what had taken him through the wicket gate which
led into the field, unless it was to find some shelter from the
rays of the August sun, which was beating pitilessly down
upon the white roadway beyond the field.
The old man was very tired. In his left hand he grasped
a string which held a great bunch of colored air balloons, blue,
pink, and yellow. In his right hand he grasped a stick, which
supported his feeble steps.
At the further side of the field there was a big building.
A thorn tree near the doorway threw a cool inviting shadow
upon the grass. Here at least was shade where he might sit
down and rest.
Coming near the building he saw a young Friar just about
to enter the porch. The Friar turned and looked at the old
man.
"Air balloons," said the Friar smiling, an odd whimsical
smile.
"Fragile as our dreams," said the old man.
"Then you still make them?" asked Father Francis.
"I am too old to make either now," said the old man, flash-
ing a look at his questioner from under his shaggy eyebrows.
"I gave up the dreams long ago. Now the balloons have given
046 A MAGICIAN OF GLOBES [Aug.,
up me. Too rheumatic to work the treadle of the machine.
Another younger fellow makes them, and I carry them around
to sell."
"Ah," said Father Francis.
"And the children buy 'em because they're pretty," laughed
the old man, a hoarse laugh like the croaking of a frog. "And
when they're pricked the children cry."
Father Francis smiled.
"But when something you love breaks, you always find
something better," he said.
The old man peered at him, half startled.
"The child said that," he muttered. "I've never forgotten,
though I wanted to."
"Come into the church and rest," said Father Francis.
"It is cool in there."
"I've not been inside a church for fifty years, for all that
I'm a Catholic, or ought to be," said the old man.
"I know that," said Father Francis.
"How do you know that?" asked the old man, peering at
him again.
"Maybe I know more than you think," was the smiling
response. "But come into the church now."
"It's too late," said the old man.
"It is never too late," replied Father Francis.
Mechanically the old man dropped his bundle of air bal-
loons in the porch, and followed the young Friar into the quiet
coolness of the building. Awkwardly, unaccustomedly, his
finger sought the holy water stoup near the door. Fifty years
since he had made the Sign of the Cross, fifty years since he
had bent his knee to Christ in the Tabernacle. He did both
now.
"Rest a while," said Father Francis. "I will come back
later."
For half an hour and more the old man sat in the shadowed
church. There was no one to see the working of his throat,
there was no one to see the clenching of his gnarled old hands.
At last he got up, and went haltingly to the Sanctuary rail.
Stiffly he knelt down.
Father Francis saw him there when he returned. The old
man heard his footstep in the doorway, and rising, came to
join him.
1920.] A MAGICIAN OF GLOBES 647
"It's too late," said the old man, but there was the faintest
hint of query in the words.
"It is never too late," said Father Francis once again.
The old man bent to take up his colored balls. Then he
sat down suddenly on the stone seat in the porch. Father
Francis sat down beside him.
"It's odd," said the old man, "that of all the bad things
I've done in my life one tiling should come back to me more
clearly than all. And yet most people would say it wasn't
much of a wrong what I said."
"Perhaps it was not," said Father Francis.
"It haunts me," said the old man. " 'He that shall scan-
dalize one of these little ones,' you know the rest. I wanted to
kill the faith that looked at me out of a child's eyes. Maybe
I didn't kill it, but I wanted to. I can see him now walking
away with his air balloon and his dreams. The balloon broke,
but his faith didn't, at least not then. He came back, and
said to me what you said a while agone."
Father Francis was looking through the doorway of the
church.
"You didn't destroy that child's faith," he said. "What-
ever faith that child had then, it was led on to something far
better, far greater. He was led by the golden ball you gave
him."
The old man stared at him.
"I was the child," said Father Francis.
Two great tears welled up in the old man's eyes, and
rolled down his cheeks.
For a few moments neither spoke. Then
"It's the millstone gone from my neck," said the old man.
"Maybe it was foolishness, but I always felt it hanging there."
"And now it has gone, you know it is not too late," said
Father Francis.
"For what?" said the old man half gruffly.
"To restore the shattered dreams of youth," said Father
Francis smiling.
The old man was silent. At last he looked up, an odd
humorous twinkle in his bleared old eyes.
"So the little boy whose golden ball got pricked is a priest,
Father?"
"He is," smiled Father Francis.
648 A MAGICIAN OF GLOBES [Aug.,
"And the man who once dreamed dreams, who once
fancied he was going to set the Thames on fire, fell down the
ladder of his ambitions till he came to making air balloons."
"A Magician of Globes," said the young Friar.
The old man chuckled.
"I remember, I remember," he said. "And you got the
golden ball for giving away the name. It's better magic you
could work for me, eh, Father?"
Father Francis smiled. The old man looked at him.
"Are you ready to work that magic for me, Father? To
bring back the dreams of youth to a soiled old soul?"
"I am," said Father Francis.
"Now?" asked the old man.
"At once, if you will," was the quiet response.
The old man got up stiffly from the stone bench. He
looked at the great bunch of colored balls towards which a
little shaft of sunlight was creeping.
"Afterwards I'll give 'em to the children," he said, "and
maybe your philosophy with them."
And so the old man and the young Friar passed again
into the cool shadows of the quiet church, while the sunlight,
shifting yet more into the stone porch, fell full upon the
colored globes blue, pink, and shining gold.
HANDS ACROSS ST. GEORGE'S CHANNEL.
BY JOHN BARNES.
RELAND and England have been called the Sister
Islands. Nature, it seems, intended them to be
such. It is no stretch of fancy to believe that
Providence designed that the bonds should be
closer still in the order of grace. The first link
of the chain the largest, the strongest, and of the purest
metal is the great Apostle of Ireland, St. Patrick himself.
Roman by extraction, as befits one that was to spread the faith
that knows no distinction of Jew or Gentile, Celt or Saxon, he
was Briton, as appears from the best account, by the accident
of birth, and Irish by election. However great the debt of
Hibernia to Britannia for her great Apostle, it was soon repaid
with usury in the swarm of missionaries that crossed the
channel and made the faith in England blossom like the rose.
Then came the long centuries of a common faith, fol-
lowed by the centuries, fewer in number but more striking to
the eye of an historian, of a common share in martyrdom, pil-
lage, imprisonment and exile. How it has fared since then, it
is not for us, nor is this the place, to balance the accounts in
the ledger between the Church in England and the Church in
Ireland. And after all, it is poor work to be higgling and hag-
gling about who has been more generous with a few paltry
pence out of the thousand pounds, which they both have re-
ceived gratis from the Giver of every good gift. But surely no
one that loves the faith, which once made England Merry Eng-
land, can look back to the "eve of Catholic emancipation" or
the "dawn of the Catholic revival," or, to take something more
recent, ponder upon the present condition of the English
Catholic schools, without a feeling of gratitude for what Irish
Catholics have done for the Church in England.
In a previous article in THE CATHOLIC WORLD we pointed
out that there is an abundance of literature to show there
are Englishmen capable of doing justice to Ireland, and able
to express their views in a manner which compels the atten-
tion of the world. Here we aim to show the harmony of
650 HANDS ACROSS ST. GEORGE'S CHANNEL [Aug.,
thought between two men dear to Catholics all the world over
the great Cardinal Newman, an ardent Englishman, and the
amiable Aubrey De Vere, an Irishman by birth and predilec-
tion.
The seven years just after the turn of the century, during
which Newman held the Rectorship of the Irish University,
gave him an opportunity of forming, at first hand, some opin-
ions about England's troublesome neighbor an opportunity
which would not be lost upon one of his active intelligence
and shrewd powers of observation. We do not find him,
however, betraying any of the impatience with which some of
his countrymen have rushed home from a foreign land
Dickens, for instance, from America or Italy, or Thackeray
from Ireland itself to amuse or irritate better instructed
readers with their superficially formed impressions. The year
1866 furnishes us with a letter of his to R. W. Church, which
contains a remark about Ireland as strong as any that has
come down to us, but he drops it only incidentally and as
illustrating other matters, particularly the ignorance in which
the English are kept by their newspapers, above all by the
Times. But it is not until the early eighties, when Gladstone's
Home Rule Rills were agitating all England, that we find him
inclined to express himself, and then only in some confidential
letters. For Newman was, as he says himself, "no politician."
He did, indeed, on one occasion, write a political tract, which is
a proof of what he could do if he chose, on a matter of pub-
lic interest; but it was a fixed habit of his to hold aloof from
the game of politics.
How far he carried this is seen in the well-known instance
of the shock he caused by his reply to some question about
Cardinal Manning's temperance agitation, "that he did not
know whether there were too many saloons in England or not,"
which, properly interpreted, was no sign of flippancy, but
rather of what has just been mentioned, his reluctance to
express an opinion on a subject which he had not carefully
considered. So the few remarks which he lets fall on the sub-
ject of Ireland are not to be regarded as the off-hand sayings
of one who is ready to express his views on anything and
everything. On the contrary they drop from him as the ripe
fruit of experience and reflection. Rrief as they are, they are
enough to make us regret that the great Cardinal did not give
1920. J HANDS ACROSS ST. GEORGE'S CHANNEL 651
us a formal treatise. For they show that then Ireland would
have received the benefit of his rare gift of going to the heart
of a matter in controversy.
Writing at a time when the land was filled with noisy
clamor, he displays the philosophic temper by standing still to
distinguish between the ardor civium prava jubentium and
the voice of reason. And all the more weight is given to his
words when he shows himself here, as elsewhere, English to
the core, and manifests a consciousness that the course which
justice dictates is not the one to which his feelings incline him.
This is only what was to be expected of one who raised his
voice in protest against the frivolous repetition of Cowper's
line : "England, with all thy faults, I love thee still." Thus, in
a letter to his nephew, Mr. J. R. Mozley, bearing the date of
October 24, 1881, he says: "I am no politician. I have long
thought that the Irish would gain Home Rule in some shape.
. . . But I am no advocate for such issue, rather it seems to
me a blow on the power of England as serious as it is
retributive." 1
Only a few days before he had written to the same cor-
respondent in a strain which, while it lets us see something of
the ground on which he judged the political separation of
the two islands to be a matter of time, likewise shows him far
more enlightened than those politicians who, even in our own
v day, succeed in blinding themselves to the real issues at stake.
Blind, indeed, must be that politician who thinks to appease
Ireland's hunger for her national ideals with the promise of a
full dinner pail.
"Cromwell, and others," he says, "have by their conduct
to the Irish, burned into the national heart a deep hatred of
England, and, if the population perseveres, the sentiment of
patriotism and the latent sense of historical wrongs will hinder
even the more rational, and calm judging, the most friendly
to England, from separating themselves from their country-
men." A truly illuminating gloss on the conduct of those,
thanks to whose bungling the Irish people are united as they
never were united before. He then adds a trait as familiar to
all that have had Irish neighbors as it is to the Irish them-
selves: "They are abundantly warmhearted and friendly to
individual Englishmen, of that I have clear experience in my
1 Ward's Newman, li., p. 518.
652 HANDS ACROSS ST. GEORGE'S CHANNEL [Aug.,
own case, but what I believe, though I have no large expe-
rience to appeal to, is, that there is not one Anglophilist in
the nation." 3
When Newman says that he doubts the existence of "one
Anglophilist in the nation," he leads us to believe that his
shadow must never have darkened the purlieus of Dublin
Castle. Most of us with less favorable opportunities for study
have met Irishmen more Anglophile than the English them-
selves. The Ireland that would be satisfactory to the ruling
classes is one that has absorbed the spirit of Dublin Castle.
The attempt to bring this about to make an Englishman out
of an Irishman has been productive of untold misery in the
past, and it will continue to produce vexation of spirit until
England either gives over the attempt, or, as Cardinal New-
man seems to think not impossible, has at last exterminated
the native race.
On this subject some remarks made during the War
before an Oxford audience are worth quoting. Though the
lecturer makes no mention of Ireland, it is hard to see how
either he or his hearers could fail to think of her at a time
when the eyes of the world were upon her. What he says is
none the less apposite, because it would have been neither
uttered nor listened to in reference to Ireland. "Speaking for
my own side, I should be surprised to learn that as a race the
Scots are less proud of their nationality and its heroes, or less e
attached to their historical memories, than they ever were at
any period in the past. I believe they are only more intensely
Scottish, as a rule, than they formerly were. The truth is this.
The more intense is the spirit of nationalism in its highest and
best form, the more powerful is the appreciation of the wider
Imperial patriotism. In the fostering of that Imperial patriot-
ism the worst possible course would be to discourage and try
to extirpate the national idiosyncracies, and to aim at a dead
level of universal similarity to one general type. The truest
Scotsman, the most characteristic and typical Englishman, is
the best and most patriotic citizen of the Empire. Each may
find it difficult to appreciate the other."*
What looks like an important omission, even in the few
desultory remarks thrown out by Newman, is his failure to
> Ibid., p. 517.
' Sir W. M. Ramsay, Romanes lecture, The Imperial Peace. (Dante's Ideal), p. 20.
1920.] HANDS ACROSS ST. GEORGE'S CHANNEL 653
touch upon the religious aspects of the problem. In this, how-
ever, he shows himself the experienced master of fence, too
wary to be thrown off his guard. There was a time when the
religious question was cast upon the flames of political strife
and made them leap up with intenser fury. But that day has
passed. The original cause of the strife, as Newman dis-
cerned, is to be found in the Union. "As to Ireland, judging
by what I saw in Ireland twenty years ago, the question be-
tween the countries is not one of land or property, but of
union."* It was during the centuries between the Second and
the Eighth Henry, when, not only in England and Ireland, but
throughout all Europe, there was a common faith, that the two
most deadly strokes at the nationality of Ireland were aimed
the Statutes of Kilkenny and the Poynings Act the former
devised for the express purpose of erecting an artificial bar-
rier between the invaders and the native population ("a war
on babes," as it is called by Ireland's poet), the latter, the
means by which Ireland was stripped of autonomy. This was
restored for a short space during a moment of panic, only to
be snatched away again when she was perfidiously robbed of
her Parliament.
And so during Newman's stay in Ireland he had his eyes
opened to a point of view which is itself a sufficient refutation
of the fallacy that lies in the analogy (first proposed, I believe,
by ex-President Taf t, whom some of his friends are grieved to
see in such company) between Ireland in the Empire and the
Confederate States in the Union. Newman's words, in the
letter to his nephew, already quoted, are these :
"Observe, Gladstone the other day at Leeds complained
of the little support given him by the middle class and gentry
in Ireland. I think it was at the time of the Fenian rising that
the Times had an article to the same effect. Gladstone seemed
to think them cowards : no, they are patriots. I knew, when in
Ireland, one of the leaders of the Smith O'Brien movement in
1848; his boast was that from Henry II.'s time the people had
never (italics Newman's) condoned the English occupation.
They had by a succession of risings, from then till now, pro-
tested against it." 5
In a letter to Father Hopkins of six years later date, he
comes back to the same idea in stronger language: "There is
4 Italics Newman's, loc. ctt.. p. 517. Loc. ctt. II., p. 517.
654 HANDS ACROSS ST. GEORGE'S CHANNEL [Aug.,
one consideration, however, which you omit. The Irish Pa-
triots hold that'they never have yielded themselves to the sway
of England, and therefore never have been under her laws,
and never have been rebels. This does not diminish the force
of your picture, but it suggests that there is no help, no remedy.
If I were an Irishman, I should be (in heart) a rebel. More-
over, to clench the difficulty the Irish character and tastes are
very different from the English." 6
On such grounds as these extracts furnish, it may fairly
be claimed for Newman that he shows himself ready to live
up to an ideal that looks more beautiful in a literary theory
than in the practice of English politicians the ideal of fair
play. Had he, at the turning point of his life, embarked with
Gladstone upon a career of politics, we should probably know
him now as one of those few of her great statesmen who have
realized this ideal in a world of imperfections by taking as the
motto of their lives fiat justitia mat coelum.
When justice is at last done to Ireland, as surely some day
it must be, it will not be through the good offices of those who
are pouring armored cars into Inisfail and darkening her skies
with Fokers and exploding bombs in the cottages of her
peasants; but because events have made it "politic to be just."
For it holds of justice as of truth "the eternal years of God
are hers." About the politicians Newman once expressed his
opinion in a sermon of his Protestant days. It comes to the
lines of Wordsworth:
Earth is sick,
And Heaven is weary, of the hollow words
Which States and Kingdoms utter when they talk
Of truth and justice. 7
Let us turn now to the representative of another view, to
Newman's close friend and ardent admirer, Aubrey De Vere.
The two men, much as they had in common, were cast in dif-
ferent molds. Love is not the word to express Newman's feel-
ings towards Ireland. Rather we have seen him triumphing
over his feelings to render Ireland her due. But Aubrey De
Vere loved Ireland passionately. After the Church, into whose
fold he was led by following the bent of his noble nature,
Ireland forms the staple of his poetry. Those who reflect that
Loc. cit. 11., p. 527. Excursion v. 378-382.
1920.] HANDS ACROSS ST. GEORGE'S CHANNEL 655
poets sometimes drop their shield upon the battlefield and run
home to write patriotic odes, and that lover's vows are often
only sighs of wind may think lightly of this. But Aubrey's
hand went with his heart, and his purse was in his hand. Had
he never written a verse, every one that loves Ireland and
knows the story of his beautiful life, would love Aubrey De
Vere. It was not his poetry that won for him the attachment
of the peasantry, among whom he passed his days. They loved
him as the Irish heart knows how to love in return for affec-
tion and generosity.
Beneath the repulsive exterior where the rags and squalor
were all that Carlyle could see through the scales of his in-
sular prejudice, the poet's eye discerned a spiritual beauty that
charmed him to admiration. Thus he writes, in 1846, in a
letter to a friend during the famine period: "In this part of
the country there is little except want to contend with; but
some of the scenes which I have witnessed in the wilder parts
of the country are desolate indeed. In one day I have sat
within nearly eighty mud hovels, without windows or chim-
neys the roof so low that you could not (in some cases) stand
upright, and within and around a mass of squalidness and
filth. Many a trait of native goodness, or even refinement, I
have noticed in such an abode many a countenance I have
marked traced with the characters of goodness, long endur-
ance, and piety, though seen dimly through a veil not only
of pallor and smoke, but one worn by the blasts and rain of
many an adverse year. And in the midst of these horrors I
have seen such strange gleams of humor, and heard many a
sad tale told with gay indifference. I told you just now that
life seems to me a lighter and more fleeting thing than ever;
and yet no less true is it, that I have never before been half
so deeply impressed with the duty of doing what in us lies to
lighten its load to the thousands who surround us, and whom,
directly or indirectly, we may benefit, if only we take the
trouble of going among them, sympathizing with them, and
understanding them. I am sure that the poor are on the whole
the best. In all those homes of misery I never heard an im-
patient murmur." 8
The daily scenes before his eyes of virtue in the midst
of squalor, and contentment in the midst of cruel suffering,
Letter to Mrs. Vllliers, In Ward's Aubrey De Vere, A Memoir, p. 121.
656 HANDS ACROSS ST. GEORGE'S CHANNEL [Aug.,
melted into the image of a glorified Erin, before which he fell
on his knees in worship. What though the world looked on
with indifference or scorn, the angels were admiring unseen,
and the judgments of men are not the judgments of God. In
his Recollections there is a striking passage which brings this
out well : "I often call to mind a sermon preached in Limerick
by Father Faber of the Oratory, who had been passing some
days at Tervoe, one in which he dwelt much on the past of
Ireland, and much on her future. 'Do not imagine,' he said,
'that Ireland will ever be a nation with a splendid political
or a prosperous commercial career, like those of Genoa or
Venice of old. It is no material obstacle, no historical acci-
dent that stands in her way. It is a holier greatness, a more
exalted destiny, that forbids a lower one. Ireland's vocation
is, as it has ever been, an Apostolic one. She may be true to it,
or she may be false to it; but if she forgets it or discards it,
she will meet with success in no other forever. As at the time of
her only real greatness her missionary greatness the heathen
are her inheritance: let her remember that first, and then
all she needs besides will be "added unto her." ' I remember
the looks, some of amusement, and s >me of displeasure, which
were exchanged by many persons in that church as he spoke;
but I remember also that when the preacher was taking his
departure, many of the humbler class rushed forward and
kissed the hem of his garment. They, at least, made no mis-
take as to his meaning, though they had never heard him say,
Those who travel in Ireland have one great joy. They cannot
but see that the great majority of the poor are living in the
grace of God.'" 9
Again in those prefaces which he had the un-Browning-
like habit of prefixing to his works to tell their poetic purpose,
he takes the same view with a wider horizon of space and
time. For instance in the preface to Inisfail: "The chief aim
of Inisfail was to indicate that sole point of view from which
Irish history possesses a meaning. One great vocation has
been guaranteed to Ireland by many great qualifications, and
by many great disqualifications. When Religion and Mis-
sionary Enterprise ruled the Irish Heart and Hand, Ireland
reached the chief greatness she has known within historic
times, and the only greatness which has lasted. When the
Page 354.
1920.] HANDS ACROSS ST. GEORGE'S CHANNEL 657
same Heart and Hand return to the same task, Ireland will
reap the full harvest of her sorrowful centuries. She will then
also inherit both a Greatness and a Happiness, perhaps such as
is tendered to her along among the Nations." 10
Nevertheless all his admiration for Ireland's courage in
bearing the Cross, did not make him forget the injustice of
those by whose cruelty a field was offered for the exercise of
Irish virtue. Indeed, on one occasion, his zeal carried him
so far that he took up his pen for the task, alien to his nature,
of writing a political tract. This pamphlet would repay a
glance on its own account, did space allow. To show that
it was not written in vain, a brief citation or two from the ex-
pressions of opinion, which it elicited, will be the best proof.
"No one can sympathize more than I do," wrote John
Stuart Mill, "in the feeling that pervades your book, that Eng-
land is not entitled to throw the first stone at Ireland, being,
so far as that expression can be used of a nation, guilty of all
the guilt as well as all the suffering and folly of Ireland. I
have always strenuously urged the same doctrine in all I have
ever written or said about Irish affairs, which is not a little in
quantity at least." 11 "I see no solution now but self-govern-
ment for Ireland, imperial matters being reserved," was the
comment of Matthew Arnold. 12 But no one expressed himself
more strongly than Sir James Stephens, who wrote as follows :
"The real cause of the calamities of Ireland is the want, not
the excess, of the belligerent character and qualities among the
Celtic race ... If the Irish had resisted your ancestors half
as gallantly as my ancestors, the Scotch, wrestled against Plan-
tagenets, Tudors, and Stuarts, England would have become
just, humane, and liberal, in the only way in which nations
ever acquire these virtues that is by being well beaten into
them. . . . May God guide, sustain, and help you in the
strenuous use of those opportunities for mitigating the very
wretchedest condition into which any nation, within the pre-
cincts of the civilized world, has ever yet been brought, since
the subversion of the Roman Empire." 13 One jarring note was
caused by Carlyle, who answered with a sneer, and improved
the opportunity to preach his favorite doctrine of the right
of might. 14
10 Page xxxii. " l.oc. cit., p. 132. " Ibid., p. 350.
"Ibid., p. 135. "Ibid., p. 134.
VOL. cxi. 43
658 HANDS ACROSS ST. GEORGE'S CHANNEL [Aug.,
These two writers have been chosen as the spokesmen, to
whom Catholics the world over will be most ready to listen,
of two views, both of which express the truth, neither of which
can leave the other out of account, and in the harmonious com-
bination of which must rest, under Providence, the hopes af
Ireland's future.
In the tenor of Aubrey De Vcre's remarks we hear a voice
coming from the warm magnanimous heart of the Catholic
poet; and he has with him the heart of every Catholic in say-
ing that Erin has chosen well between the world and Christ,
and that consequently she has produced something more ven-
erable in her hedge-schoolmasters than an Oxford or a Cam-
bridge Don, and nobler types of heroism in a Plunkett and a
Sarsfield and an O'Connell than a Cecil or a Marlborough or a
Disraeli. And so it is impossible to condemn Aubrey De Vere's
view outright, because it has in it so much truth of history and
so much of the spirit of Irish faith. But if pushed too far it
refutes itself by a rednctio ad absurdum. That patience is a
virtue is no reason why a statesman should seek for a people
opportunities of suffering. Thus the first Christians would
have stayed in their catacombs, the Crusaders would have left
the Sepulchre in the hands of the infidel, Catholics today
would be handing over the weak things of the world to be the
sport of the Superman. The anomaly has been stated by no
one more clearly or strongly than by Aubrey himself, in a
letter of 1868 to Charles Spring Rice: "Now he (Gladstone)
knows that twenty years ago all the Liberals in England main-
tained with Macaulay and Arnold that all the civilized world
could show nothing more absurdly unjust, and nothing more
unwise and un-Christian, than the religious supremacy of a
small and modern minority, in the midst of an ancient Cath-
olic nation like Ireland." 15
No higher blessing can be wished for Ireland than that she
should suffer as long as such is the will of Heaven; but she
would be working against, not with, Providence, if she refused
to raise an arm to shelter herself from injustice and cruelty.
15 In Ward, loc. cit., p. 289.
BY A WESTERN SHORE.
BY J. F. SCOFIELD.
T is not easy to believe that this still, almost land-
locked, expanse of sea is indeed the rolling At-
lantic. Over the one glimpse of open water the
sun is dipping down in a splendor of gold and
crimson that fades towards the zenith into prim-
rose and palest green. Westward rise the great peaks of Rum,
and the high line of Eigg, ending in its curved and pointed
"Seuir." Far beyond them, and invisible, lies the mighty
breakwater of the Long Islands the chain of isles from Barra
to the Butt of Lewis against which even on the calmest sum-
mer day the surge breaks with a roar as it meets the rocks.
There is nothing but three thousand miles of restless sea be-
tween those rocks and the barren coast of Northern Labrador.
Away to the north stretches the Sound of Sleat and the massed
peaks of the "Coolins" in Skye.
There is a strange magic about every western shore, as if
some spell, all beneficent but with a touch of sadness, were
laid upon it; and nowhere can this be more strongly felt than
among these Highland locks and sounds. Given an unclouded
horizon, the sunset is a daily ritual of unutterable splendor.
And when the winding shore, clothed here and there to its
very edge in oak and rowan, hazel and fir, lies at last in
shadow, the huge peaks of Moidart, away to the southeast, are
still glowing with intensest purple, still splendid with the
glory of the departed day. The breeze from the northwest,
laden with the mingled sweetness of sea and heather, is like a
draught of wine, and bears upon it the secular joy of mere
existence the sense of how good it is simply to be, and to
drink in all these enchanted wonders.
Until comparatively recent years but few strangers had
discovered this western coastline of Inverness-shire. Even the
West Highland Railway has not entirely removed its blessed
isolation. The changes, small as they are, which have been
brought about by the "opening up" of the country, do not com-
mend themselves to all the inhabitants. It is no doubt of some
660 BY A WESTERN SHORE [Aug.,
advantage to be within a few hours of the turmoil of Glasgow,
and to be able to send your fish to Billingsgate in one day.
But an old Highlander expressed the judgment of a good many
besides himself when he said: "Oh, aye, it wass a fine coun-
try before the railway came."
They are a fine race, these Western Highlanders, and per-
haps nowhere is the Celtic stock seen to more advantage than
in the strip of country that includes Glenfinnan, Moidart, Ari-
saig, and Morar. Every crofter gives you the impression of
being a gentleman in his own right; independence of character,
self-respect, unfailing courtesy, and a gentleness that has no
touch of weakness, make him a delightful companion.
Stranger and Sassenach though you may be, these good people
will give you the most warm and disinterested welcome when
once they realize that you esteem and care for them. And
when you have become their friend, even of a few weeks'
standing, they will open out to you delightfully. There is
nothing "dour" about them. The true Highlander has no
"side" or bluster, though he has plenty of his own sort of
pride. With an inborn keen humor, not apparent at first
acquaintance, perhaps, he can take down the conceit of the
loud-voiced and self-satisfied Anglo-Saxon. An unsuccessful
(and unskillful) sportsman once complained loudly of his bad
luck to a keeper not a hundred miles from Moidart and as-
signed it, quite unwarrantably, to the absence of deer in a
certain forest. Donald complacently rejoined: "Oh, there was
certainly a deer here a year ago, and a chentleman from
London, he would stalk it every day; but no doubt the beast
iss tired and hass gone away."
Historically and traditionally, the Jacobite has it all his
own way here. The whole countryside is full of memories of
the Prince who, but for the ill-advised retreat from Derby,
might well have reigned in after years as King Charles III. of
Great Britain and Ireland. On the shore of Loch-nan-Uamh
(the Lock of the Caves), three miles from Arisaig, he landed
on June 25, 1745, and hence, in the following year, he sailed
again for France. At Borrodale House, hard by, he is said to
have lain both in the first flush of his hope and when he was
wandering, a fugitive with a price upon his head, after the
butchery of Culloden. At Kinlochmoidart the avenue is
pointed out where he paced for hours meditating his cam-
1920.] BY A WESTERN SHORE 661
paign that was to bring back his countrymen to their old
loyalty. The monument by Loch Shiel marks the spot where
he unfurled the Royal Standard. Glen Bleasdale, by Arisaig,
was the scene of part of his broken-hearted wanderings; and
by the beach of Loch-nan-Uamh is a cave where he lay hid
waiting for the French frigate to bear him back to exile.
Wheeling my cycle one day up a stiff hill in company
with a member of His Majesty's Postal Service, the talk turned
on Prince Charlie and the '45. "It wass a pity," he said, "the
Stuarts did not seem to make very good rulers maybe it
might not have been so good for the country if he had won.
But," he added with a ring of unalterable conviction, "King
James wass the King for all that oh aye, he wass the King."
The conversion of thousands of square miles of country
into "valuable sporting estates" has caused distress unspeak-
able, and has drained the Highlands of much of its best asset.
Men are really more valuable than stags; and men like these
Highlanders are worth indefinitely more than some land-
owners and their millionaire shooting tenants. It is only fair
to remember, at the same time, that much forest land consists
of mountain-tops totally incapable of cultivation. But no one
can deny that the Highlands did and could still support a far
larger population than at present exists, and that the depopula-
tion has been almost entirely the result of selfish avarice.
There is no poverty, as we understand the word in cities,
in this particular stretch of country, except such as is purely
accidental, such as the result of long-continued sickness. The
little crofts appear to provide a fair livelihood to their tenants
who, in many cases, hold them from generation to genera-
tion. In one parish an excellent association, of which the
parish priest is a chief organizer, provides a distributing centre
for poultry, eggs, etc. The crofters certainly are the right men
for a generous scheme of peasant ownership.
In the first half of the last century this, like many other
Highland districts, was noted for the manufacture, in defiance
of the Excise Laws, of the national liquor. Many an illicit
still flourished in remote farmhouses and among the hillside
heather. The wet and stormy climate during a good part of
the year does not tend to produce teetotalers, but there is little
evidence of any excess. The story is told of a farmer who,
in the early years of the nineteenth century, suddenly found
662 BY A WESTERN SHORE [Aug.,
his distilling operations interrupted by a small posse of pre-
ventive men; he was a man of immense physical strength,
and being convinced that he was morally innocent of all evil-
doing, he put the excise officers to flight with a few well-
directed swings of his brawny arms. It was evident that the
disturbers of his peace would shortly return in overwhelming
force, so he effectually concealed his "worm" and other ap-
pliances, and in a few hours was on his way to France, where
he lived for long and eventually embraced the ecclesiastical
state. He finally returned to his own country, and by many
years of devoted work on the Highland Mission proved him-
self as capable in the shepherding of souls as he had been in
the rearing of cattle and the distilling of the national beverage.
Centuries of persecution of the most relentless, and at the
same time of the meanest, kind have not availed to change the
religion of these Highland folk. The apostasy never came the
length of "Blessed Morar," where, until provision was made
for outsiders brought by the railway, there was not a place of
worship that was not of the Ancient Faith. The occasional
insignificant-looking Presbyterian church has about as much
to do with the life of the people as a whole, as an Anglican
Church in Connemara or a Methodist temple in Rome. The
small Protestant minority live in all friendliness with their
Catholic neighbors.
The handful of "Wee Frees" (the cult is limited to a few
families) seem to have succeeded by their theological, and
occasionally personal, violence in throwing the sympathies of
the ministers and people of the Established Church far more
on the Catholic side than might otherwise have been the case.
These "Wee Frees" the remnant of the Free Church of 1843,
which indignantly refused to follow the majority in the fusion
between their denomination and that of the United Presby-
terians in 1900 are a quaint handful. In spite of their wild
ways there is something almost heroic in the persistence with
which they held on to a lost and dismally uninteresting cause.
In one village, where the minister had "gone into the Union,"
his small flock, on the following Sunday, assaulted the poor
man, stripped him of his gown and I know not what else, and
made a bonfire of his apparel, of the church harmonium and
hymn books, thus relieving their overcharged feelings. I had
the fact from the neighboring Established minister.
1920.] BY A WESTERN SHORE 663
The practical Catholicity of the Highland faithful is mag-
nificent in its stability. It is intensely conservative, and such
efforts as that of our late Holy Father, Pius X., to lead Catho-
lics to frequent and daily Communion, require a long time
before they become effectual. This is, however, partly due
to the vast extent of the parishes. Besides, the luxuries, as
distinct from the necessities, of Catholic worship are not, as
yet, greatly in evidence. But the essential Catholic loyalty
and devotion of the people is beyond mistake, and commands
deepest admiration and reverence. For generations the lack
of native clergy was supplied as far as possible by priests from
Ireland, who came over from the Sister Isle and, disguised as
shepherds with plaid across their shoulders and a faithful
sheep-dog at their heels, went from village to village, over
pathless moors and often perilous seas, to give the Sacraments
of Life, and sustain and console the scattered flocks of the
Divine Shepherd.
This is one of the innumerable and unforgettable bless-
ings that we, in Great Britain, owe to the Church across the
Irish Channel. We, by our Government, have done all we
could to hurt and harm; and our brothers from Erin have, in
sweetest revenge, heaped upon our undeserving heads the
coals of the fire of Divine Charity. So they held the fort for
the Highland priests who, at the earliest possible moment,
resumed the charge of their faithful children. Then- names
form a roll splendid with heroism and devotion.
Distances have no terror for the Highlander. The people
come miles on foot to church and to lay in their week's pro-
visions (whatever their own crofts do not provide), at the one
"store" in the clachan. Schoolboys and schoolgirls think
nothing of two or three miles to and from school, barefooted,
except in the depth of winter. To go barefoot is, of course, no
sign of poverty with these Highland folk, but of due regard
to comfort, health, and economy. Although shy as young colts
at first, these lads and lassies make charming friends. It is
impossible not to recognize in their innocence and kindliness
the fruit of the Faith their fathers would not barter. In its
strength they are growing up to witness, in their turn, to the
Truth by loyalty to Church and Country.
One trifling recollection is a symbol of their whole char-
acter. A few minutes' talk on a sea-girt road, brought about
664 THE SOURCE [Aug.,
by a request for information as to the local geography, led to
an acquaintance with two children, about fourteen and twelve
years old. When we said good-bye, one of the girls silently,
and with a shy smile, put a piece of white heather in my hand.
From end to end of the Highlands that gift has one meaning:
"Good luck!" From these "Children of the Mist" the greeting
is almost a benediction.
THE SOURCE.
BY CAPTAIN HARRY LEE,
Of the Red Cross.
MY faith in you
Is like my faith in God,
For well I know
That God in you abides.
How can I fear
But that you will be strong
Whatever chance or change
Your life betides.
When I have seen
Your calm eyes melt and fill,
I've known He whispered words
I could not hear,
And when you spoke,
I knew the Sacred Source.
God dwells in you,
Then never need I fear.
I've seen the stars
From God's blue heaven shine,
I've seen the daisies
Shining from His sod.
And then I've thought of you.
My faith in you
Is like my faith in God.
THE LOYALIST.
BY JAMES FRANCIS BARRETT.
CHAPTER VII.
N the front of the meeting hall stood a small plat-
form, surmounted by a table surrounded by chairs.
Several men were seated there, interested in a con-
versation, somewhat subdued in its tone and man-
ner. The chairs, settees, and benches throughout
the room were being filled by the so-called volun-
teers, who entered and took their places with an air of wonder
and indecision. Already two-thirds of the seats were taken and
every face turned and re-turned to the door at every footstep.
The small door to the side was of course barred; but in re-
sponse to the slightest knock, it was opened by an attendant, as-
signed for that purpose. Names were asked, and the cards of
admission were collected with a certain formality before the
aspirant gained admittance. There was no introduction, no
hurry, no excitement.
"What's your name?" the man at the door was heard to say
to one who had tapped for admittance.
"Cadwalader," was the reply. "James Cadwalader."
"Got your card?"
There was no response, only the production of a small white
card.
A strong, athletic individual, clad in a checked shirt and a
red flannel jacket, a leathern apron, and a pair of yellow buckskin
breeches, entered and stood for a moment looking about the hall.
His eyes fell upon the group gathered around the table at the for-
ward end of the room. Two of them he recognized, Colonel
Clifton and John Anderson, the latter with his back to the audi-
ence. There were many familiar faces in the chairs throughout
the room, some of whom he knew had expected him, and accord-
ingly had given him a slight recognition. Slowly, and in a mani-
festly indifferent manner, he made his way to the front row of
chairs, where he seated himself, and listened sharply to the little
group conversing upon the platform until he had satisfied him-
self that there was nothing of importance under discussion.
The room was filling rapidly. Some wore the appearance of
contentment and composure; some laughed and talked in a purely
disinterested and indifferent manner; others looked the picture
666 THE LOYALIST ;Aug.,
of unrest and dissatisfaction, and wore a scowl of disappointment
and defeat. These latter Stephen recognized at once and hur-
riedly made an estimate of their number. Not a voice was raised
above a whisper. Drama was in the air.
The guard at the door advanced to the front of the hall to
announce to Mr. Anderson that the full quota was present.
Whereupon the latter arose from his chair and swept with his
gaze the entire room which the dim light of the torches only
partly revealed. Satisfied with his scrutiny, however, he turned
and again conferred with his associates, who nodded their heads in
acceptance of his suggestion. They then sat back in their chairs,
while he came to the centre of the platform and awaited the ces-
sation of the hum which had now become audible.
"Let me begin by taking further assurance of your number,"
he said, "for which purpose I shall call the roll of names to which
1 respectfully ask you to respond."
Then followed the reading of the roll-call to which each man,
at the mention of his name, signified his presence in the room.
Stephen's heart fluttered as he replied boldly to the name of
"James Cadwalader."
There were eight names to which no reply was given. These
very likely would come later, or perhaps they had reconsidered
their action and had decided not to come at all. Those present
numbered eighty-six, Stephen learned from the count.
"I shall take this opportunity of distributing among you the
papers of enlistment that you may read the terms of agreement,
and these I shall ask you to sign at the close of this meeting."
As Anderson finished this sentence, he passed to several aids,
a bundle of papers which they promptly dealt out to the mem-
bers of the proposed company. He then proceeded :
"You have assembled this evening, my dear friends and co-
religionists, to translate into definite action the convictions by
which you have been impelled to undertake this important busi-
ness. Our presence means that \e are ready to put into deeds
the inspirations which have always dominated our minds. It
means that we are about to make a final thrust for our religious
convictions, and prove that we are worthy descendants of the men
who established in this land freedom of religious worship, and
bequeathed it to us as a priceless heritage."
This Anderson is a clever fellow, thought Stephen, and a
fluent talker. Already his eloquence had brought quiet to the
room, and caused those who were fumbling with the papers to
let them fall motionless in their laps. But what a knave! Here
1920.] THE LOYALIST 667
he was deliberately playing upon the sympathies of his audience
in the role of a Catholic.
"We have signified our intention of taking this momentous
step, because we are of the undivided opinion that our rights
have been attained, and having been attained, there remains no
further cause for martial strife. No longer do grounds of conten-
tion between us and the mother country exist. Our bill of rights
has been read abroad and honored, and overtures of conciliation
have already been made. The object for which we linked our
forces with the rebel standard, the happiness, the supreme happi-
ness of our country, has been gained. We no longer desire open
warfare.
"The idea of an American Parliament, with its members of
American birth, is a welcome one. It is a fitting, worthy ambi-
tion. We are confident that we are capable, at this juncture, of
enacting our own laws and of giving them the proper sanction.
We are capable of raising our own taxes. We are worthy of
conducting our own commerce in every part of the civilized globe
as free citizens of the British Empire. And we are convinced
that we should enjoy for this purpose the blessings of good gov-
ernment, not necessarily self-government, and that we should be
sustained by all the power requisite to uphold it, as befits free
and independent children bonded together in a concert of
purpose.
"This we desire; this, of course. But we seek also that free-
dom in matters of religious worship without which no nation can
attain to any degree of greatness. Under a government con-
ducted solely and independently by the Colonists we know that
such a consummation would be impossible. I need not remind
you of the deplorable state of affairs which obtained previous to
the opening of hostilities. I need not recall to your minds the
anti-Catholic declaration of the Continental Congresses. I need
not recall to you the machinations of John Jay, or the manifest
antipathy of the Adams, or the Hamiltons, or the Paines. I need
not recall to you how the vaunted defenders of American lib-
erties and freedom expressed their supreme detestation of Cath-
olics and all things Catholic, and how they were determined that
the nightmare of Popery should never hold sway over these free
and independent Colonies as it does even now in Canada. I need
not recall how the Colonies, with the sole exception of this colony
of Pennsylvania, debarred the free and legitimate exercise of
your religion within their bounds, and restricted its public cere-
monies; how you were restricted by oaths required by law,
even here in Pennsylvania, which you could not take had you
668 THE LOYALIST [Aug.,
been so successful as to be chosen to office. I need not remind
you of these truths. You already know them. It would be idle
to repeat them."
"This man is exceedingly dangerous," muttered Stephen,
"and exceedingly well-informed." He jotted down several notes
on the reverse of his paper.
"We have been displeased with the conduct of the war, im-
measurably so. And we have lost all faith in the good will of our
fellow colonists, in matters religious as well as in matters politi-
cal. They have refused to treat with the ministers of concilia-
tion. We are about to join our forces to those of the mother
country in order that we may render our own poverty-stricken
land an everlasting service. We are destined to take our places
among a band of true and genuine patriots, who have, above all
things else, the welfare of their own land at heart, and we are
about to commit ourselves to this course together with our for-
tunes and our lives. Since our people are blinded by the avarice
and the prejudice of their leaders, we shall take into our own
hands the decision and the fortunes of this war, trusting that
our cause may be heard at the bar of history when strict judg-
ment shall be meted out. We have broken with our people in
the hope that the dawn of better days may break through the
clouds that now overshadow us t "
He paused, for a moment, to study the temper of his audi-
ence. There was no sound, and so he continued.
"It is the glory of the British soldier that he is the defender,
not the destroyer, of the civil and the religious rights of the
people. Witness the tolerant care of your mother country in the
bestowal of religious liberties to the inhabitants of our once op-
pressed neighbor, Canada. The Quebec Act was the greatest con-
cession ever granted in the history of the British Parliament, and
it secured for the Canadians the freedom of that worship so dear
and so precious to them. So great was the tolerance granted to
the Catholics of the North, that your fellow colonists flew to arms
lest a similar concession be made here. It was the last straw that
broke the bonds of unity. For, henceforth, it was decreed that
only a complete and independent separation from the British
Parliament could secure to the people the practice of the Protes-
tant faith.
"Now we come to the real purpose of this organization. We
are about to pledge ourselves to the restoration of our faith
through the ultimate triumph of the British arms. Nobody out-
side of America believes that she can ever make good her claims
of independence. No one has ever taken seriously her attempt at
1920.] THE LOYALIST 669
self-government. France, alone, actuated by that ancient hatred
for England, inspired by the lust of conquest and the greed of
spoliation, has sent her ships to our aid. But has she furnished
the Colonies with a superior force of arms? Has she rendered
herself liable for any independence? Your mother country alone
has made this benign offer to you, and it is to her alone that you
can look and be assured of any reconciliation and peace.
"Victory, once assured, will establish peace and everlasting
happiness. Victory, now made possible only by the force of
arms, will assure us toleration in religious matters. And why
not? This fratricidal strife should not occasion any personal
hatred. England is not our foe, but our mother in arms against
whom we have conceived an unjust grievance. Let us lay aside
our guns for the olive. Since our fellow-citizens will not accept
just terms of conciliation, let us compel them to do so by the
strength of our arms.
"Tomorrow we embark for New York at the place of landing
indicated on the papers of enlistment. There we shall be in-
corporated into a regiment of a thousand men. The recruiting
there has met with unlooked-for success. Colonel Clifton re-
ports that the ranks already are filled. Your admission alone is
awaited, and the ship which will bear you down the waters of
the Susquehanna tomorrow will carry a message of cheer to
those who have already intrusted themselves, their destinies,
their all to the realization of our common hope.
"You will now take the oath of allegiance to the government
of His Majesty, which I shall administer to you in a body. To-
morrow at the hour of eight I shall meet you at the pier of em-
barkation. I shall be glad to accompany you to reveal to you
my interest in your behalf. Only with a united front can we
hope for success, and to this purpose we have dedicated our lives
and our fortunes. I shall ask you to rise to a man, with your
right arm upraised, to take the oath of allegiance to your King."
The spell that held them broke and the bustle began. A
mumble filled the room, followed by moments of animated dis-
cussion. Neighbor spoke to neighbor in terms of approval or
plied him with questions menacing and entreating. Anderson
maintained his composure to allow them to settle again into a
period of quietude before the administration of the oath. At
length Stephen arose as if to question, and was given permission
to speak by the chairman, Mr. Anderson.
"What immunity does His Majesty's Government guarantee
to us after the war?"
670 THE LOYALIST [Aug.,
"The usual guarantee will, of course, be made," Anderson
replied.
"Does that mean that we shall be reestablished in the good-
will of our fellow-citizens?" Stephen again inquired.
"Unquestionably. When the Colonists see the immense bene-
fits which they have acquired, they will readily condone all
wrongs."
Intense interest was already manifest throughout the room.
Faces were eagerly bent forward lest a word be lost.
"Such considerations are irrelevant to our purpose," dis-
missed Anderson with a wave of the hand.
"It is of vital consequence to us, however. We must return
to our people to live with them, and we cannot live in an atmos-
phere of hatred. Who knows that our lives may not be placed
in jeopardy! My question deals with this. Will any provision
be made against such a contingency?"
"It is too early to discuss the final settlement, but you have
my assurance that suitable protection will be given."
"Your assurance?" repeated Stephen. "What amount of as-
surance may you offer to as, you who, admittedly, are one of
ourselves?"
"I consider that an impertinent question, sir, and in no way
connected with the business before us."
"It is of vital concern to us, I should say; and I for one am
desirous of knowing more about this affair before yielding my
consent."
"You have signed your papers of enlistment already, I be-
lieve. There is no further course then for you to pursue."
There was a rustle among the seats. Some had begun to
realize their fate; some had realized it from the start, but were
powerless to prevent it. Two or three faces turned a shade paler,
and they had become profoundly silent. The others, too, held
their tongues to await the result of the controversy. For here
was a matter of vital concern to all. Up to now very few de-
serters, especially among the Catholics, had been discovered
among the American forces. They had heard of an individual
or two surrendering himself to the enemy, or of whole families
going over to the other side in order to retain their possessions
and lands. But a mutiny was another matter altogether. What
if they failed and the Colonists gained their independence!
"I suppose we are powerless," admitted Stephen in a low
tone of voice as he watched the effect of his words on the gather-
ing. "We are confronted," he continued, "with the dilemma of
estrangement no matter what side gains."
1920.] THE LOYALIST 671
"England can't lose," interrupted Colonel Clifton, who here-
tofore had been seated, an attentive observer. "And with victory
comes the establishment of the will of the conqueror. Care will
be taken that there shall be adequate reparation."
"Very good!" answered Stephen. "Now together with that
privilege of immunity, can we be assured of the extension of the
Quebec Act? Has England so decreed?"
"Not yet," Anderson admitted, "but that extension or one
equal to it will be made one of the conditions of peace."
"We are sure of that, then?"
"Well, we are not sure, but it is only logical to infer such a
condescension will be made."
"I don't agree with you, I am sorry to say, for the English
Parliament may be of another mind when peace and victory have
been established."
"You are interrupting the meeting. Please let us continue
with our business," Anderson sharply reproved him.
"I speak for my fellow-citizens here," said Stephen as he
turned toward them with an appealing gesture, "and I maintain
that it is our privilege to know certain matters before we transfer
our allegiance."
It was now plain to the company that Anderson was worried.
His white, thin lips were firmly compressed as the wrath in his
heart blazed within him. He was aghast at the blow. It had
come from a quarter wholly unexpected. That this fellow in
these shabby clothes should be gifted with a freedom of speech
such as to confound him when he thought his plans realized to
the letter, was astounding. Why, he might sway the minds of
the entire assembly ! Better to silence him at once, or better still
banish him from the hall than to cope with the possibility of los-
ing the entire multitude.
"You have interrupted this meeting more than I care to have
you, sir. If you will kindly allow me to proceed with the busi-
ness before the house I shall consider it a favor."
"I ask my fellow-citizens here," shouted Stephen by way of
reply, "if you or any man possesses the right to deprive us of free
speech, especially at a time as momentous as this. I ask you,
my friends, if I may continue?"
"Yes! Go on! We will hear you !" were the several
acclamations from the throng.
Anderson heard it with perceptible confusion. He fumbled
nervously with his fingers, wholly ignorant of what to say.
"Let me ask, then," said Stephen, "if the idea of independ-
ence is wholly exclusive of religious toleration. Why are we, a
672 THE LOYALIST [Aug.,
mere handful of men, about to pledge ourselves to the accomplish-
ment by force of arms what already is accomplished in our very
midst? Freedom of religious worship is already assured. The
several actions of the Colonial governing bodies lend us that as-
surance. England can do no more for us than already has been
done; and what has been done by the Colonies will be guaranteed
by the elective body of the people in the days of independence.
I am fearful of the hazards that will accompany this enlistment.
Give me leave to address you on this topic that you may under-
stand my troubled state of mind. I appeal to you. Give me leave
to talk."
Whether it was the spontaneous sound issuing from the
ranks of those already initiated into the secret, or whether a
chord already attuned in the hearts and minds of the entire as-
sembly had been marvelously struck by him, there was a rever-
beration of approval throughout the room in answer to Stephen's
plea. So unanimous was the demonstration that Anderson took
alarm. The air of democracy revealed itself in their instinctive
enthusiasm. And while nothing might result from Stephen's
rambling remarks, still it would afford them consolation that
their side of the question had been aired. To a man they voiced
their approval of the privilege which had been begged.
"Ay! Speech! Take the floor!"
CH-APTER VIII.
"I have no desire to make a speech," Stephen began, "but I
have asked for this privilege of addressing you because we are
moving through critical times, and because there are serious de-
cisions to be made this evening which it is neither right nor
possible for us to make without a full consideration of the state of
affairs. I have devoted much serious thought to this subject. I
have labored to arrive at a just conclusion, and it is in that spirit
that I would speak. I feel, too, that I have an inalienable right
as a free-born citizen to express my views freely and publicly,
as befits a loyal adherent of the principles which we are now de-
fending with our blood. And first among those principles is that
which guarantees representation in all matters that are of vital
concern to us."
He had not left his chair, but continued to talk from his
place beside it, turning, however, somewhat in the direction of
his audience. Silence reigned throughout the room and every
face was turned full upon him.
"I, too, had accepted the terms of enlistment on the plea of
the acquisition of our rights, so admirably exposed to us by our
1920.] THE LOYALIST 673
good friend, Mr. Anderson. As I pondered the matter, however,
I seriously questioned whether this were the proper time for the
employment of such methods. What assurance have we if in-
deed assurance be needed that this is not another trick of the
enemy? Bear with me, please, while I unfold to you my
thoughts.
"Our leader and our guide in these matters, Mr. Anderson,
has told us that this business of recruiting has been a great suc-
cess. But did he tell us of the sinister methods often resorted to,
of the many threats exercised over a great number of us, of the
debts relieved, of the intimidation employed? He declared with
manifest satisfaction that the recruiting in the city of New York
had been marvelous in its results, yet he did not explain to our
satisfaction the reason which impelled the leaders of this revolt
to seek members from the neighboring cities to help swell the
ranks; nor did he tell of the means made use of to secure that
marvelous number in the city of all cities, where such recruiting
would be most successful because of the present British occupa-
tion. Furthermore, he failed to tell us that he himself is not a
Catholic, or that his true name is not Anderson, or of his history
previous to his appearance in this city. Neither did he tell us that
Lieutenant-Colonel Clifton, while a Philadelphia Catholic, is a
British subject, having accepted British allegiance on the capture
of the city a year ago last September. There are many items of
importance which were not revealed to us. Shall I continue? I
have an abundance of facts to disclose to you, if you give me
leave."
So favorable had been the impression produced by the speech
of Anderson that Stephen felt apprehensive lest his own criticism
and contradiction would not be accepted as true. And so he
paused to learn if possible the nature of his reception.
"Yes ! . . . We want to hear them ! . . . Tell us more ! . . ."
There was a wild outburst of approval, followed by a gen-
erous handclapping. In the confusion, Stephen observed Ander-
son, together with Colonel Clifton, leave their places on the plat-
form and take seats on the side of the room.
"It is quite true that we have no quarrel with the English
people. We have no quarrel with their king or the framers of
their laws. It is equally true that the governments of Great Brit-
ain and the United Colonies have become involved in a military
struggle, a struggle to the death; nevertheless we would be the
last to imply that there exists any essential antagonism of inter-
ests of purposes between the two peoples. We are not engaged
in a contest between Englishmen and Americans, but between
VOL. cxi. 43
674 THE LOYALIST [Aug.,
two antagonistic principles of government, each of which has its
advocates and its opponents among us who sit here, among those
who live with us in our own country, among those who reside in
far-off England. The contest is a political contest, the ancient
contest between the Whig and the Tory principles of govern-
ment, the contest of Chatham and North, and Richmond, Rocking-
ham and Burke transferred to this side of the Atlantic. The
political liberty to which we have dedicated ourselves is no prod-
uct of our imaginations; our forefathers of the seventeenth cen-
tury brought it to our shores and now we naturally refuse to sur-
render it. It is the principle for which we are contending the
principles that these United Colonies are and of a right ought to
be free and independent States; and in all matters else we are
loyal foster children of His Majesty the King, as loyal and as in-
terested a people in the welfare of the mother country as the most
devoted subject of the crown residing in the city of London.
"War was inevitable. This has been known for some time;
but there has been no lack of cordiality between the people of the
United Kingdom and the people of the United Colonies. We are
opposed to certain principles of statecraft, to the principle of
taxation without representation, to the same degree as are the
Whigs of our mother country. We cherish the warmest senti-
ments of love and admiration for the English people, and we are
ready to become their brothers in arms at any future date for
the defence of those very ideals which we now are trying to estab-
lish the blessings of democracy; but we abominate autocracy
and will have none of it. In this regard we may be said to have
disinfected our anger, but never to have diluted it."
The Tory element moved about in their seats, and Stephen
suspected for a moment that he was being treated with an air of
disdain. He shifted his point of view suddenly.
"To say that the Catholic people of this country is dissatis-
fied with the conduct of the war is begging the question, and
brands them with a stigma which they wholly undeserve. We
admit for the sake of argument that our early Colonists may have
proved themselves somewhat intolerant and perhaps rendered
conditions of life disagreeable to us; still gold must be tried by
the fire. We grow vigorous under storms of persecution. And
while it is true that the American Congress of 1774 protested
against the legislature of Great Britain establishing a 'religion
fraught with impious tenets,' yet it is equally true that the Con-
gress of 1776 resolved to protect 'all foreigners in the free exercise
of their respective religions.' The past has been buried by this;
the future lies before us.
1920.] THE LOYALIST 675
"We do not grieve on that account. Rather are we proud of
our adhesion to the cause of independence, and you yourselves
are no less proud of your own efforts in this regard. The Com-
mander-in-Chief is warmly disposed towards the Catholic element,
not alone in the army, but among the citizenry. His own body-
guard is composed of men, more than thirty of whom bear Cath-
olic names. One of his aides, Colonel Fitzgerald, is a Catholic.
His Captain and Commander of the Navy, nominated and ap-
pointed by himself, is a Catholic, John Barry. We are appre-
ciative of the services of our General, and we are ready to render
ourselves worthy of the esteem and the respect in which we are
held by him as was evidenced by his abolition of the celebration
of Guy Fawkes Day, so detestable to us.
"I repeat this to impress upon you that this is not the time
for religious controversy or for nicely calculating the scope and
the extent of our service. The temper of the times requires unity
of action and definition of purpose. Our people respect us.
Whatever restrictions were lodged against us in the past have
been broken down now before the battering ram of public opinion.
The guarantees for the future given by our own brethren, that we
shall be permitted the free and unrestricted exercise of our re-
ligious observances as well as the right to worship God according
to the dictates of our own consciences, are of more endurable tex-
ture than the flimsy promises of the enemy. Our noble and gen-
erous ally, France, already had procured for us that respect and
recognition so indispensable to our safety and, contrary to the
opinion already expressed here tonight, has sent us six thousand
men, the first installment of an army of at least twelve thousand
trained soldiers, destined to be put directly under General Wash-
ington's command. Together with these she has already fur-
nished Congress with large sums of money to enable us to carry
on the war. The dawn of a brighter day is now breaking over the
horizon, and in the east the sun of justice and of toleration and
of liberty may be seen breaking through the low-lying clouds of
oppression, prejudice and tyranny which have so long obscured
it. In our history there has been no coward, no Tory, no traitor
of our faith. We are still Loyalists; but of different type. That
precious and historic document of July 4, 1776, definitely and for
all time absolved us from all allegiance to the British Crown. By
nature, then, we have become citizens of a new government, a gov-
ernment instituted by and subject to the peoples of these free
and independent States. Henceforth, Loyalty is for us synony-
mous with the best interests of our own country."
He paused.
676 THE LOYALIST [Aug.,
The sigh throughout the room was distinctly audible as he
ended his paragraph with a rhetorical pause. He caught the
sound on the instant and understood its meaning as the orator,
holding his audience in breathless intensity, allows them to drop
suddenly that he may appreciate his control of their feelings.
Their pent up energy gives way to an abrupt relaxation followed
by a slight movement of the body or an intermittent cough. From
these unconscious indications, Stephen knew that he had held
their interest and he did not intend that they should be allowed
to compose themselves until he had finished. He began at once
on the evidence of the plot.
"The members of this proposed company before whom I have
the privilege of speaking, have been the victims of a gigantic plot,
a plot that found its origin in the headquarters of the British Army
at New York City. It was for this purpose that John Anderson
came to Philadelphia. He has carried on communication with
the enemy almost without interruption. Because the work of
recruiting in the city of the enemy was a failure it was
decreed that the city of Philadelphia, as the most Tory of the
American cities, be called upon for the requisite number. Of the
progress here, you already know. Of the multifarious means em-
ployed, you yourselves can bear excellent witness. Of the ulti-
mate success of the venture you are now about to decide.
"The Military Governor, General Arnold, was early initiated
into the scheme. For a long time he has borne a fierce grudge
against Congress, and he hoped that the several Catholic mem-
bers of the body might be induced to forsake the American cause.
They sought Father Farmer, our good pastor, as chaplain of the
regiment, but he refused with delicacy and tact. Indeed
were it not for the hostile state of the public mind, a campaign
of violence would have been resorted to; but Arnold felt the pulse
of dislike throbbing in the heart of the community and very
wisely refrained from increasing its fervor. All possible aid was
furnished by him, however, in a secret manner. His counsel was
generously given. Many of your names were supplied by him
together with an estimate of your financial standing, your worth
in the community, your political tendencies, the strength of your
religious convictions. And what a comparatively simple matter
it was for one thus equipped to accomplish such marvelous and
satisfactory results.
"I repeat, then, General Arnold is strongly prejudiced against
us. It is an open secret that Catholic soldiers have fared ill at his
hands. Tories and Jews compose his retinue, but no Catholics.
I am not critical in this respect, for I observe that he is enjoying
1920.] THE LOYALIST 677
but a personal privilege. But I allude to the fact at this moment
to assure you that this scheme of forming a regiment of Roman
Catholic Volunteers is directed solely to subvert the good rela-
tions already existing between us and our brethren in arms. The
promises made bore no hope of fulfillment. The guarantees of
immunity deserve no consideration. The Quebec Act, and for
this I might say in passing that we are duly grateful, was never
to be extended. In view of these observations, I ask you : are you
willing to continue with this nefarious business? Are you?"
"No!" was the interruption. The outburst was riotous.
"Arrest the traitor! ... I move we adjourn! . . ."
Stephen held out his hands in supplication to beseech them to
hear him further.
"Please, gentlemen! Just one more word," he pleaded.
They stood still on their feet and listened.
"Has it occurred to you, let me ask, that the vessel which has
been engaged to transport you to the city of New York is named
the I sis, a sloop well-known to sea-faring men of this city? She
is owned by Philadelphia citizens and manned by a local crew.
Does not this strike you as remarkably strange and significant
that a vessel of this character should clear this port and enter the
port of the enemy without flying the enemy's flag? Think of it,
gentlemen! An American vessel with an American crew em-
ployed by the enemy, and chartered to aid and abet the enemy's
cause."
They resumed their seats to give their undivided attention to
this new topic of interest. Some sat alert, only partly on the
chair, some sat forward with their chins resting in the palms of
their hands. So absorbed were they in the question of the vessel
that no other thought gave them any concern. The side door
opened and closed. Yet no one seemed to notice the occurrence;
even Stephen had failed to observe it.
"As a matter of fact," he continued, "the ship has not been
chartered by the enemy. She is about to clear this port and enter
the port of the enemy by virtue of a pass issued through General
Arnold . . . Please, just a moment, until I conclude," he ex-
claimed, holding out his hand with a restraining gesture. "This
matter has heretofore been a close secret, but it is necessary now
that the truth should be known. To issue a pass for such an
errand is a violation of the American Articles of War, and for
this offence I now formally charge Major-General Benedict Arnold
with treason."
"The traitor! . . . Court-martial him! . . ." shouted several
voices.
678 THE LOYALIST [Aug.,
"I charge him with being unfaithful to his trust. He
made use of our wagons to transport the property of the enemy
at a time when the lines of communication of the enemy were no
farther distant than Egg Harbor. He has allowed many of our
people to enter and leave the lines of the enemy. He has illegally
concerned himself over the profits of a privateer. He has im-
posed or at any rate has given his sanction to the imposition of
menial offices upon the sons of freedom who are now serving in
the militia as was the case with young Matlack, as you will
remember. And he has of late improperly granted a pass for a
vessel to clear for the port of the enemy. I desire to make these
charges publicly in order that you may know that my criticisms
are not without foundation. I have in view your welfare alone."
"Ay! . . . We believe you! . . . Let us adjourn!"
"Let me ask Mr. Anderson one or two questions. If they can
be answered to your satisfaction we shall accept his overtures.
On the other hand, let us dispense once and for all with this
nefarious business and frustrate this insidious conspiracy so that
we may devote our energies to the task before us which alone
matters that of overcoming the enemy.
"First: Who has financed the organization, equipment,
transportation of this regiment of Roman Catholic Volunteers?
"Second: From what source or sources originated the vari-
ous methods of blackmail?
"Third: Who first suggested the cooperation of General
Arnold?
"Fourth: What pressure was brought to bear in the obtain-
ing of the passport for the vessel to clear port?"
But there was no Anderson to give answer. It was found
that he, Colonel Clifton and several members of the party, had
disappeared from the room. No one remembered seeing them
take their departure, yet it was observed that they had left the
platform in the course of Stephen's speech to take seats on the
further side of the hall, near the door. This might have opened
and closed several times during Stephen's speech, especially at the
time when the aisles were crowded towards the close of the ad-
dress, and little or no attention would have been paid to it. Very
likely Anderson had taken advantage of such an opportunity to
make an escape.
It was a very different room now. The remarkable quiet had
now given way to a precipitous uproar nearly approaching a
riot. Men surged about one another and about Stephen in an
endeavor to learn the details of the plot. Groups separated them-
1920.] THE LOYALIST 679
selves from other equally detached groups, all absorbed, however,
in the same topic. Voices, formerly hushed, now became vocifer-
ous. The walls reverberated with the tumultuous confusion.
"What dupes!" one was remarking to his neighbor. "How
easily were we led by his smooth talk!"
"We were misguided in our motives of allegiance. We might
have sensed a trick of the enemy," was the reply.
"Let us win the war, first," shouted a third.
"Ay! Freedom first; then religious liberty."
"Who is he?" another asked. "It cannot be Cadwalader."
"No," answered the neighbor. "This was pre-arranged. He
borrowed Cadwalader's card to come here."
"I always told you Arnold was no good," sounded a great
voice. "He'd sell us to the devil if he could get paid for it. I
suppose he'll go to New York sure."
"Let him. Wish he was out of here."
"Say!" one asked Stephen rather abruptly. "How did you
get all this straight?"
"I interested myself the moment the scheme took root. I
assured myself that all was not as it should be, and I took pains
to verify my suspicions," was the grave reply.
"I know, but how did ye get 'em?"
"By following every move this Anderson made. I tracked
him even to Mount Pleasant."
"And got beforehand with Arnold?"
"I overheard the major portion of the conversation."
"Pardon me?" asked another individual, neater in appear-
ance than the majority, and evidently of more education, "but
have I not seen you before?"
"Perhaps you have," laughed Stephen.
"Where?"
"I could not begin to imagine."
"Where do you live? In town?"
"For the present, yes."
"Who are you?"
"Can't you see? Just one of you."
"Never saw you in those clothes before. If I am not greatly
mistaken you are the one who came to the Coffee House one day
with Matt. Allison."
"Yes," admitted Stephen, "I am the same."
"How did you come by those clothes?"
"Borrowed them."
"In disguise, eh?"
"It was necessary to simulate a disguise. Otherwise I could
680 THE LOYALIST [Aug.,
never have gained admittance here. I learned that Jim Cad-
walader had been impressed into the company and I arranged to
come in his place."
"Oh!"
"You took a mighty big risk."
"It was necessary. But I knew that there was but one way
of playing this game, and that was to defeat them openly at their
own game. I had to depend, of course, upon the temper of the
crowd. All might be lost or won at one throw of the dice. I
worded my remarks to that effect and I won."
"What did you say your name was?"
"I did not say what it was," Stephen exchanged in good-
natured repartee, "but since you ask, it is Meagher.
"Captain Meagher?"
Stephen smiled.
It must have been fully half-past nine when the meeting
broke up with the departure of Stephen. He had lingered long
enough to assure himself that the company was of a mind far
different from that which had brought them together. They
would go forth wiser men. But they knew that the people of the
city could be moved quickly to indignation. How were they to
explain their conduct? They resolved to lay the story with all its
details before the bar of public opinion, and allow that tribunal
to discriminate between the shades of guilt.
Anderson, of course, had fled. That in itself was a confes-
sion and a point in their favor. It was plain to their minds that
they had been victimized by the clever machinations of this man.
If there had been any lack of unity of opinion concerning the
righteousness of the project before, there was no divided opinion
now. They knew what they were about to do, and they made all
possible haste to put their thought into execution.
The ancient antipathy against the Military Governor was but
intensified. Rumor would spread the charges to be published
against him, of that they would take proper care. It was enough
that they had been deluded by Anderson, but to be mere pawns
in the hands of Arnold was more than they could stand. Too long
had he been tolerated with his Tory wife and her manner of
living and now was an opportunity. Their path of duty was
outlined before them.
Thoroughly satisfied with his evening's work, Stephen
turned down the street whistling softly to himself.
(TO BE CONTINUED.)
IRew Books.
CURRENT SOCIAL AND INDUSTRIAL FORCES. Edited by
Lionel D. Edie, Associate Professor of History and Politics,
Colgate University. New York: Boni & Liveright. $2.50 net.
It has become a commonplace that the desire for social and
industrial reforms has greatly increased, both in breadth and
intensity, since the Great War. Simultaneously and inevitably
have grown social dissatisfaction, unrest, and criticism of the
present order. But the theories and proposals of reform and the
expressions of unrest exhibit a bewildering variety. They com-
prise almost countless gradations from the wild and destructive
assertions and projects of the Communist to the relatively con-
servative demands of the orthodox trade unionist or the cautious
granger. In the present volume the attempt is made to present a
great variety of statements by men who, for the most part, can
properly be designated liberals. A few Socialists are represented,
and the names of John D. Rockefeller and E. H. Gary are also
found, but these do not take from the collection its general
character of moderation.
The selections are arranged under nine headings: Forces of
Disturbance; Potentialities of Production; The Price System; The
Direction of Industry; The Funds of Reorganization; The Power
and Policy of Organized Labor; Proposed Plans of Action; In-
dustrial Doctrines in Defence of the Status Quo and The Pos-
sibilities of Social Service. All these topics are subdivided, some
of them very minutely. For example, "Proposed Plans of Ac-
tion" has no less than twenty-seven subordinate topics, treated
by as many writers.
The editor informs us in the preface that the plan of the
volume grew out of his need for a text in courses on Current
Historical Forces. The work is designed to provide the student
with a rather comprehensive view of current liberal opinion in
the field that it covers. No one of the productions was written for
this volume. All are extracts from other books, from magazines,
or from addresses. In a word, the volume is a source book for
the use of students. However, its usefulness is not confined to
the members of college classes, but is available to all persons who
desire to know what some of our most active minds are thinking
on the social questions.
In any collection of this sort, the limitations of the compiler
are bound to be in evidence. The majority of readers will find the
682 NEW BOOKS [Aug.,
names of some writers who, in their opinion, do not deserve a
place in the book, and will regret the absence of others who ought
to be represented. Accordingly the reviewer would call attention
to the fact that the book contains the name of only one Catholic
writer, Frank P. Walsh, and that it makes no reference to the
Programme of Social Reconstruction of the National Catholic
War Council. Both these omissions may be explainable on the
theory of ignorance, but the latter, at any rate, evinces a degree
of ignorance that, in a university man, is inexcusable.
SIBERIA TODAY. By Frederick F. Moore. New York: D.
Appleton & Co. $2.00 net.
One of the refreshing factors of a post-war book is that the
author can say what he really thinks. Therein lies much of the
merit, value and interest of Siberia Today. Captain Moore served
on the Intelligence Staff. He knows his East well, although one
judges that he had not had, until this service, much experience
with the lower classes in Siberia. He brought to the work an
open mind, and a keen intelligence. What he writes is a fair
criticism of our lukewarm attitude in Siberia.
It is perhaps unfair to judge Siberia as a whole by what he
found in the provinces east of Baikal Lake, but the conditions
were sufficiently appalling to justify his inclusive title. The con-
ditions were these a people bent on destruction, bought by
Bolshevik paper money, innocent of any desire to create a respect-
able self-government, perfectly willing to let the United States
feed, clothe and cure them so long as the game lasted. Looking
no further than the pleasures of the moment, they are not aware
that the hundreds of thousands of German prisoners in their
midst are slowly but surely enmeshing Siberia in German control.
Our Army went to Russia with no definite policy except that
of doing nothing. It was not permitted to take sides, to punish
or to govern an area. It was obliged to assume the attitude of
an indulgent spectator. Meanwhile the Japanese did do things
and have gained "face" in the East, whereas the United States
has lost it. The Siberian did not understand our brand of ideal-
ism; it did not fit in with the regime of upstart Cossack dema-
gogues, who ruled with the firing squad, nor did it stir the
Siberian to any desire for bettering the lamentable condition in
which he found himself. The lack of a Russian policy: that is
Captain Moore's basic criticism, and he found its evil effects every-
where he went in the Maritime cities, in the Amur and in
Trans-Baikalia. Britain had a definite policy and her work was
placed in the hands of officers experienced in handling subject
1920.] NEW BOOKS 683
peoples. Japan also had a policy and carried it through without
scruple. But we were neither hot nor cold. Consequently the
work of an intelligence officer came pretty close to being a farce.
Captain Moore has a good journalistic sense, and he has
enlivened his criticisms by many vivid and lively pictures of life
in Siberia today. Apart from the fact that the tragedy of it is
more blatant than under the Tsar, it seems not to have improved
in the past ten years. Travel is just as bad, morals are at just as
low a level, living conditions and business are still ruined by graft.
Someone has called Siberia "Russia's treasure house and cess-
pool." It will be a treasure house when the people free them-
selves from the domination of Bolshevism; until then it will be
the cesspool that Captain Moore found it
I
A HISTORY OF THE VENERABLE ENGLISH COLLEGE, ROME.
By Cardinal Gasquet. New York: Longmans, Green & Co.
$5.00 net.
Cardinal Gasquet's record was written as a memorial of the
English College on the occasion of the centenary of its re-opening
in 1818. The fact that the celebration of the anniversary had to
be deferred because of the World War, is only an added incident
to point the series of vicissitudes which the Venerabile has under-
gone since its historic foundation. Cardinal Gasquet traces its
legend back to its shadowy beginnings in the Schola Anglorum
of the eighth century, and to its more authentic materialization
in the English Hospice established to harbor the English pilgrims
to Rome for the Jubilee of 1350. The most interesting pages,
perhaps, are those that tell of the tempestuous times of the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries when, under the direction of
the Jesuits, the College was furnished its bede-roll of martyrs,
who perished for the Faith at Tyburn. They are worthily com-
memorated in the beautiful chapter, "Salvete Flores Martyrum."
The period of reconstruction, after the vandalism of the French
republican troops, is associated with the name of Doctor Wise-
man who, as pupil and Rector of the College, added lustre to its
scholastic laurels. Many interesting sidelights upon the other
personages Cardinal Pole, Father Persons, Cardinal Allen,
Bishop Cradwell who vivified its history, as well as individual
details of the regimen, discipline and curriculum of the Beda
help to make this memoir entertaining to the general reader. Not
the least item of interest is the "Pilgrim Book," or visitors' record,
in which we find inscribed the names of John Milton and Richard
Crashaw. Many illustrations, including College views and por-
traits, enhance the attractiveness of this distinctive volume.
684 NEW BOOKS [Aug.,
AN INTRODUCTORY COURSE IN EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOL-
OGY. By Hubert Gruender, S.J. Volume I. Chicago:
Loyola University Press. $1.50 net.
Father Gruender's volume is an excellent book not only for
class work, but for private study as well. The style is alert and
interesting, and the experiments suggested need neither elaborate
apparatus, nor the skill of a virtuoso. Of the fifteen chapters,
which comprise the volume, the first seven are devoted to the
phenomena and theories of color. The next five chapters deal
with the visual perception of space and the problems relating
thereto. The last three chapters examine attention, sense-per-
ception, and imagination respectively. These final chapters are
especially interesting. In them are briefly, but vividly and graph-
ically, explained the limits and narrowness of consciousness; the
power and lure of the subconscious; the tricks played on us by
expectant attention, and the sense illusions and false judgments
caused by it; how a very tiny and quasi inchoate sense-stimulus,
infinitely elaborated by the imagination, forms the sense percep-
tion whether visual, auditive or olfactory of the normal adult;
and lastly the prodigious and almost uncanny power of the
imagination whether creative or reproductive in the realms of
music and art. The student, who begins his psychology under
Father Gruender, will never have the slightest idea of the be-
wilderment besetting his elders, in their unfruitful endeavor to
extract enlightenment from inscrutable Latin text-books; nay
more, he will hardly taste at all that wearisome bitterness of
learning of which some old teacher speaks.
PRIMITIVE SOCIETY. By Robert H. Lowie. New York: Boni
& Liveright. $3.00.
Dr. Lowie's book is refreshing because it is of a variety
nowadays unusual. It is a scientific investigation of the data of
Primitive Society, without any of the reams of pseudo-scientific
presupposings and theorizings that characterize much of the liter-
ature of anthropology. Dr. Lowie is an honest investigator of
facts; his conclusions are based upon and pared down to con-
sistency with his facts. He exhibits no bias; he has no pet
theories to substantiate with partial criticism; he avoids the
sweeping generality that has masqueraded all too long in primi-
tive sociological studies for science.
His book has a distinct value for the student of primitive
religions. It gives him the answer to many of the generalized
conclusions of Morgan's Ancient Society, which has had long
standing as a cornerstone to much materialistic sociology. In-
1920.] NEW BOOKS 685
deed, Dr. Lowie takes issue with many of Morgan's conclusions,
specifically in the chapter of Primitive Society, dealing with
Sexual Communism. Dr. Lowie, of course, does not deny that
polygamy and polyandry took many and varied forms; indeed,
he is scrupulously minute in detailing these varied forms: but
he does deny that this is evidence of anything approaching a
general law of universal primitive sex promiscuity, and his denial
is based on well authenticated facts.
Primitive Society is a worth-while book. It is interestingly
written and valuable and readable, even for an amateur anthro-
pologist or sociologist. Its factual solidity makes it of permanent
worth in any library.
The publication of such a scientific contribution is a sad
blow to Socialist philosophizers. For it runs amuck through the
evolutionary-necessity theory of culture-progress with which
Morgan would have consecrated Marxian theory. Nor will Dr.
Lowie even admit the existence of Laveleye's primitive commun-
ism in property.
CATHOLIC BEGINNINGS IN KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI. An
Historical Sketch by Rev. Gilbert J. Garraghan. Chicago:
Loyola University Press. $1.25.
Father Garraghan has written an interesting chapter on the
origins of Catholicity in Kansas City. As early as 1821 Francis
Gesseau Chouteau, a grandson of Laclede, the founder of St.
Louis, established a general agency of the American Fur Com-
pany on the south bank of the Missouri River, a short distance
below the mouth of the Kansas, opposite Randolph Bluffs. He
came with his wife and children from St. Louis in a pirogue, the
journey lasting twenty days. He named the settlement Westport
Landing, the site of the present Kansas City. Around the agency
a group of French-Canadians with their Indian wives and half-
breed children gathered, for they recognized it as an excellent
site for the trade with the far West.
The first missionary priest to evangelize the trans-Mississippi
Indian tribes was Father Charles De la Croix, who traveled
through this territory in the spring and summer of 1822. In
1828 Bishop Rosati sent Father Joseph Lutz to work among the
Kansas Indians, about sixty-five miles above the mouth of the
Kansas River. The first resident priest, Father Benedict Roux,
came to the Creole settlement on the Kansas River in 1833. He
remained only one year, but his numerous letters to Bishop
Rosati, which have been preserved in the Archives of the arch-
diocese of St. Louis, give us a good insight into the state of
686 NEW BOOKS [Aug.,
Catholicity in those early days. On Father Roux's transfer to
Kaskaskia, Illinois, his place was taken by the Jesuit, Father
Charles Van Quickenborn, who came to minister to the Kicka-
poo Indians. The Jesuits, Fathers Hoecken, Eysvogels, Aelen,
and Point, took care of the Catholics of this section until the
arrival of Father Donnelly, who became pastor of St. Francis
Regis' Church, Kansas City, in November, 1846.
WOMEN OF 'NINETY-EIGHT. By Mrs. T. Concannon, M.A. St.
Louis: B. Herder Book Co. $2.25 net.
This is the period made famous by the Emmets, the Shear-
eses, the Teelings, Fitzgerald, Nielson and Tone, and those other
Irishmen who fought the brave fight and lost. Yet as splendid
as is the recital of their deeds, we have only to learn of the
suffering and sacrifice of their women to know the full measure
of Irish faith, courage and devotion.
This is just what Mrs. Concannon does in her very worthy
book. She directs our eyes to the lives of those Irish women,
whose influence enabled and strengthened their men to struggle
and die for their ideals. And what we see is truly pathetic, yet
richly inspiring. The terrible sacrifices and the deep sorrows
nobly borne by the women of this period, furnish a chapter of
history that is richly embroidered with deeds of true heroism.
But Mrs. Concannon, in recalling the work of Elizabeth Mason
Emmet, Amelia Mary, Duchess of Leinster, Jane Anne Sheares,
Mary Teeling, Matilde Tone, and the other women who partici-
pated actively in this crisis in Irish affairs, does more than pay a
tribute well deserved. She gives us the key to the secret why
Ireland has been able, against such tremendous odds, to continue
her long struggle for liberty. She shows us the influence of her
women, and we know at once that it was because of them that
Ireland has endured, and that it will be because of them that she
will come to the realization of her hopes and her ideals.
ST. LUKE: THE MAN AND HIS WORK. By H. McLachlan,
M.A. New York: Longmans, Green & Co. $3.00.
In a dozen chapters, Mr. McLachlan, lecturer in Hellenistic
Greek in the University of Manchester, discusses St. Luke, the
man of letters, the linguist, the editor, the theologian, the humor-
ist, the letter writer, the reporter, the diarist, etc. The work will
be read with interest by the Catholic Scriptural scholar, espe-
cially as it gives in brief the views of German and English Prot-
estants and Rationalists on every phase of the Lucan problem
authenticity, language, accuracy, doctrine and the like.
1920.] NEW BOOKS 687
The writer refutes the Rationalist position "that St. Luke
worked up his facts to fit into a preconceived theory." But then,
to take away with his right hand what he gives with his left, he
adds: "His sources are often scanty and legendary, and his de-
ductions imperfect and misleading" statements which he no-
where proves. Against Weiss he defends the account of the
Census of Quirinius, quoting the best treatment of the question,
Ramsay's Was Christ Born at Bethlehem? He rejects as not
proven the theory of Krenkel that St. Luke used Josephus in
preparing his Gospel. He shows St. Luke's accuracy in detail, as
instanced by his use of the word politarchs for the rulers of
Thessalonica (Acts xvii. 8), a name which does not appear
elsewhere in Greek literature. It is none the less correct, for
there is a stone in the British Museum, found in an arch of
Salonica, which contains an inscription with this very word.
The chapter on Luke, the theologian, is full of inaccuracies.
We are told, for example, that there is a marked difference be-
tween the teaching of St. Matthew and St. Luke with regard to
the doctrine of future punishment; that the function of Jesus
was that of prophet rather than priest; that demonology is a
controlling idea of St. Luke's work; that the parable of Dives and
Lazarus does not describe the state of the righteous and wicked
after death, and much of the same order.
MERCIER, THE FIGHTING CARDINAL. By Charlotte Kellogg.
New York : D. Appleton & Co. $2.00 net.
Parts of this work have already appeared in the pages of
various periodicals; that they have been collected and, with ad-
ditional new matter, published in the present form, is matter
for general congratulation.
Mrs. Vernon Kellogg has performed a task for which she
was exceptionally qualified, as is shown in the foreword by Mr.
Brand Whitlock. Being a member of the C. R. B., she had special
opportunities for personal acquaintance with the "fighting Car-
dinal," as well as for close observation of the effect of his words
and deeds upon the mind and temper of the Belgian people. It is
with these experiences that she deals, exclusively. From the
opening chapter, in which she describes, as an eye-witness, the
thrilling scene in the Cathedral of Sainte Gudule on the day, in
July, 1916, that marked the eighty-sixth anniversary of Belgium's
independence, she holds close to her subject without digressions
into matters which do not directly concern the great Prelate.
A brief autobiographical sketch, "From Boy to Cardinal," is fur-
nished; then, she leads us, step by step, in his wake, through the
688 NEW BOOKS [Aug.,
dreadful years of the occupation; the armistice; and his visit
to this country. Much of it is fresh, vivid material; and all of it
is presented in a delightful manner. The author has a literary
gift that enables her to express herself gracefully and concisely;
with taste and discrimination, she has also grasp of spiritual
values; and really remarkable is the clarity of her vision regard-
ing things which she, as a non-Catholic, would not naturally be
expected to see in their true perspective. An entire chapter is
given to the War-time relations between the Holy See and the
Cardinal, wherein are refuted the reports of the Pope's disappro-
bation of His Eminence's actions, rumors circulated by German
agencies, in the hope of thus weakening the Cardinal's sway;
another chapter is devoted to his sayings; and, in conclusion, we
have the full text of the celebrated Christmas Pastoral of 1916.
The book is a tribute of loving veneration to the great Pre-
late from one not of his Faith, and a short, valuable history with
a special claim to the appreciation of Catholics.
PIERRE AND JOSEPH. By Rene Bazin. Translated by Frank
Hunter Potter. New York: Harper & Brothers. $1.75 net.
ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD. By Edith O'Shaughnessy. New
York: Harper & Brothers. $2.00 net.
Literary friendliness urges the reviewer to adopt as his own
the publishers' modest dictum that "Pierre and Joseph ... re-
veals Bazin in his full strength as a delineator of character and
of stirring events," while Truth leans over to whisper, "Nothing
of the sort."
This latest novel of the gifted Frenchman, who has rendered
such yeoman service for God and country, adds not a single leaf
to his laurel crown. Published serially in the famous Revue
des Deux Mondes, and using as a medium, though with varia-
tions, the oft-employed theme of two brothers fighting on oppo-
site sides in this case it is Pierre in the French army and
Joseph in the German it is quite conceivable that in war time the
story might serve as not-to-be-despised patriotic propaganda. In
the period of reconstruction, it has little, if any, practical value.
Indeed, it sounds in places the jarring notes of a "hymn of hate"
that ill accord with the era of justice into which we profess to
have entered.
Neither is Pierre and Joseph stimulating when regarded as
literature. There are, to be sure, a few passages that recall to
us the Bazin of ante-bellum days. But, for the most part, the
interpretation is labored, and much space is devoted to moralizing
upon the obvious. One looks in vain for the telling realism that
1920.] NEW BOOKS 689
makes The Nun stand out forever upon one's memory, or the
warmly-throbbing, yet restrained passion, of The Coining Har-
vest. The general effect of the novel is accentuated by a transla-
tion, which is awkward and infelicitous.
In striking contrast to M. Bazin's treatment of the Alsatian
problem is Mrs. O'Shaughnessy's Alsace In Rust and Gold. The
writer says in her preface (and one notes it with relief) that
"in this record there are no polemics and no statistics." It is,
rather, a sprightly and colorful diary of an American woman's
brief abiding in Alsace, the tiny fragment of it wrested from
Germany at the very beginning of the War and administered from
then on by the French Military Mission.
We have a right to expect a good deal of the author for two
reasons: first, because of her name; second, because of the prece-
dent created by her Diplomat's Wife In Mexico. Nor are we
doomed to disappointment. The slim volume of one hundred and
eighty odd pages runs the entire scale of human emotions, ex-
hibiting, withal, delicacy of perception and a fine understanding,
both of those for whom she writes and those of whom she is
writing. Shrewd observations concerning people and world af-
fairs are punctuated with clever anecdote. Mrs. O'Shaughnessy's
descriptive powers are of high order, and are reenforced by a
brace of excellent photographic illustrations.
Alsace In Rust and Gold has a quality of permanence that
will make it readable ten, fifteen, twenty years hence, which is
more, far more, than can be said of much that is coming from
the presses just now. It should occupy an honored place on the
shelf, marked "Travel," in every well-regulated library, whether
public or private.
ST. BERNARD'S SERMONS ON THE CANTICLE OF CANTICLES.
Translated from the original Latin by a Priest of Mount
Melleray. Vol. I. Dublin: Browne & Nolan, Ltd.
It is woefully pathetic how little we Catholics know of our
own. If in the eyes of the postivist, Mr. Frederic Harrison, St.
Bernard was "a truly great man," what should be the measure of
our estetm and our appreciation? The measure, de facto, has
been very small almost negligible. St. Bernard has remained
almost unknown: Patmore endeavored to have us know him bet-
ter, but Palmore is seldom read and, at best, gave us only short
extracts. The great sermons of St. Bernard on the Canticle of
Canticles have remained untranslated by Catholics, and conse-
quently unknown to Catholics until the present hour.
VOL. cxi. 44
690 NEW BOOKS [Aug.,
To the zealous "Priest of Mount Melleray," who has under-
taken this stupendous work and has already given us this first
volume, we are under a weighty debt of gratitude. The work was
long, extremely arduous, and ofttimes perplexing, because St.
Bernard's Latin is so syncopated. But the translation is clear:
easily moving and inviting. These Sermons may rightly be placed
among the richest treasures of spiritual reading. They are, as
Bernard himself, vigorous, practical; ascetical, mystical. He who
could rouse the people to a second Crusade, could also speak, in
the loftiest accents, of the most intimate union of the soul with
God. Delivered between journeys and in the midst of excessive
world-wide labors, they show not only how Bernard kept his soul
upon the highest peaks while his zealous feet walked the earth,
but also how our souls may train themselves to the following of
that personal perfection incumbent upon us all, while we fulfill
the common round of every-day life.
No greater blessing has been given to us than this translation
of St. Bernard's Sermons. We sincerely hope it will be the
beginning for thousands of Catholics of a knowledge of the great
Saint and we eagerly look forward to the next volume, trusting
that the success this one shall meet, will be a great encourage-
ment, and something of a recompense to the translator.
THE ETHICS OF MEDICAL HOMICIDE AND MUTILATION. By
Austin O'Malley, M.D., Ph.D., LL.D. New York : The Devin-
Adair Co. $4.00.
The Ethics of Medical Homicide and Mutilation discusses
every phase of the questions indicated by the title. In fact, the
treatment is so comprehensive that it embraces many topics that
a layman would not expect. Dr. O'Malley first establishes the
principle that the deliberately willed and directly intended taking
of the life of an innocent person is never lawful. Then he con-
siders the problem of when human life begins and when it ends,
there being more difficulties about these apparently simple ques-
tions than one would imagine. The following twenty chapters
take up in detail the numerous moral issues involved in killing or
mutilating a human being that has begun to live and has not yet
died.
In the main the treatment is very thorough and satisfactory.
But the book is marred in places by a somewhat too disdainful
attitude towards those who, on disputable points, disagree with
the author. Dr. O'Malley has given us, beyond doubt, the best
treatment in English on these important questions. The book
should be read by every physician, nurse and priest. In their
1920.]
NEW BOOKS
professional activities they are sure to meet with innumerable
practical applications of the cases here discussed. Catholic phy-
sicians and nurses, especially, will find it an admirable means of
learning the Catholic position on many questions where the non-
Catholic medical practice differs widely.
But -not only should the professional man and woman master
its contents, lay men and women are also likely to be brought
face to face with some of its problems, and they should know
beforehand the right line of conduct. Their decisions should not
be made for them by some non-Catholic physician. Educators
should read it that they may the more wisely advise their charges
as to the future. In fact, all but the immature should read,
ponder, and master this very important book.
MORNING KNOWLEDGE. By Alastair Shannon. New York:
Longmans, Green & Co. $5.00 net.
This work was written in the prisons of Turkey. It is an
attempt to solve the problem of reconstruction. In order that
the new era may not again lead to the horrors of another world
war, an absolutely new beginning must be made, in which the
thought of the past will be rejected and an entirely new philos-
ophy of life will be formulated.
The author adopts Bergson's creative evolution as the basis
of his new philosophy and new religion; but with this main
thought are associated many other recent philosophical ideas.
To Christianity, sin, Redemption are given new meanings out of
harmony with our traditional views and absolutely unwarranted.
This new philosophy of undetermined desire, action, faith and
love inevitably leads to pantheism.
MOSES AND THE MONUMENTS. By Melvin G. Kyle, D.D.,
LL.D. Oberlin, Ohio: Bibliotheca Sacra Co.
The author of this work presents in book form the L. P.
Stone lectures delivered by him at the Princeton Theological
Seminary. In this splendid defence of the Mosaic authorship of
the Pentateuch, Dr. Kyle bases his convincing conclusions largely
upon researches conducted by himself in Egypt. The documen-
tary theory is rejected on literary and archaeological grounds.
With cogent logic he shows that a contemporary of the earthly
history of the Israelites would alone be in a position to know and
set down the contents of these books of the Bible. The Penta-
teuchal times are Egyptian and Mosaic times. Peculiar words,
phrases and narratives, the Egyptian affinity of literary character-
istics, history, art and architecture are all witnesses of the Mosaic
692 NEW BOOKS [Aug.,
authorship. The exilic and post-exilic literature of the Bible
shows unmistakable evidence of Babylonian influence; the Penta-
teuch is the work of one who was "learned in all the wisdom of
the Egyptians." The absence of definite eschatological teaching
of the Pentateuch is not a valid objection against the Mosaic
authorship. The Egyptians possessed definite ideas of the future
life and the Israelites, no doubt, were acquainted with the doc-
trine of their oppressors on this point. The silence of the author of
the Pentateuch is thus all the more necessary in order that the
Chosen People might not interpret the resurrection in the ma-
terialistic sense taught in Egyptian theology. It was necessary
to teach them first the spiritual idea of life, the true notion of
God and His worship : the doctrine of resurrection and the future
life must be reserved for later and more complete revelation.
This teaching was out of place when their cause of revelation was
just begun.
The work is well written and a valuable addition to the con-
servative Biblical literature. Illustrations in the appendix are
well chosen and instructive.
A GENERAL HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN ERA. In two
volumes. Volume I. From the Birth of Christ to the So-
called Reformation, A. D. 1 to 1517. By Nicholas A. Weber,
S.M. Washington, D. C. : Catholic Education Press.
As the centuries go by, we are compelled to compress their
history more and more, in order to cover, even in a cursory
manner, their huge realm. But it matters much how that is ac-
complished. In this book great care has been exercised in the
compression. For instance, the tale of the persecutions from
A. D. 64 to 312 fills but five pages, nevertheless it is the best
we have seen; the Crusades in like manner occupy but ten pages.
Chapter V. is the sanest that has come under our notice, concern-
ing Roman Life, Law, Art and Civilization. Most of the so-called
histories of today are inclined to glorify some epoch, state or
hero, and fall under the head of "special pleading," but Dr.
Weber appears to have no "axe to grind." His views on Moham-
med, his account of Mohammedanism and the Caliphs appear just
and well considered. His judgments of some of the monarchs and
rulers of the Middle Ages far more measured and milder than
many we have met e. g., of Henry I. of Anjou and Barbarossa;
of Philip the Fair and William of Nogaret.
The author seems to credit Adrian's bull, concerning the
Donation of Ireland, at the same time disbelieving the accusation
of nationalism on the part of the Pope. Throughout there is a
1920.] NEW BOOKS 693
refreshing absence of condemnation: facts are stated; events
speak for themselves; but events seen through the vista of the
age, the culture, the temper of the times in which they happen.
In any fair presentment of the history of the Middle Ages one
fact is patent the Church stands for moderation, gradual change,
compromise even, save in matters of sin there she is firm, for she
may not yield in essentials, in principles. To each epoch is ap-
pended a bibliography giving ample scope for research on any
particular point. H. C. Lea is a quoted authority on the Inquisi-
tion, yet we must remember to take his statements with a grain
of salt. The book is intended for High School and College stu-
dents, and this fact has been kept in mind. The second volume,
a more difficult task, is awaited with impatience, and will re-
ceive a cordial welcome from all teachers.
THE LOOM OF YOUTH. By Alec Waugh. New York: George
H. Doran Co. $1.90.
By now we should have become hardened to infant prodigies.
Daisy Ashfords and poetic Hilda Conklings are upon us in swarms.
It is a passing phase in the publishing business, and indicates
nothing more than the fact that one publisher having made a
success out of a book written by a child, other publishers must
try to do the same. Although written by a boy of sixteen, The
Loom of Youth falls into this category. It is an example of the
sophistication of adolescence. Or, shall we say, the temerity of a
publisher?
It is an English public school story, written with a certain
deftness and fluidity of style, and it concerns itself with the school
life of Gordon Carruthers. He represents a type of English boy
the type that later went so gallantly to war and fell so nobly
but not an interesting type. He is too rounded. There aren't
any uneven spots in him. That same criticism applies to the
action of the novel. It goes on with endless football and minor
school altercations but nothing much seems to come of it all.
Therein may be the book's artistry. In England it is said to
have produced something of a sensation for a time, as a faithful
portrait of a modern English public school life. If it is a faithful
portrayal, the next generation of Englishmen had better begin to
buck up. Certainly they should discover, as Gordon discovers
here, that football isn't the whole of education and that, of the
studies presented to youth, history is not to be despised.
The Loom of Youth is apt to bore American readers because
the viewpoint is annoying, and the action and dialogue not suf-
ficient to stimulate reading. The book abounds in English school
694 NEW BOOKS [Aug.,
slang. One wonders, in this day of a serious paper shortage, why
a later novel of Mr. Waugh's was not chosen instead of this.
He has written more, and the promise held in this volume is
being fulfilled. His will be an interesting pen to watch.
UP THE SEINE TO THE BATTLEFIELDS. By Anna Bowman
Dodd. New York : Harper & Brothers. $3.00 net.
The author calls the Seine "the unknown river," and straight-
way takes us on pilgrimage from Havre to Amiens and shows us
the "France of many faces," through which the Seine coils its
cobra-way. The reader is shown the great natural beauties of
this comparatively unknown country. But not merely does she
give us a geographical treatise or Baedeker's guide. She re-
peoples each town with the folk of a day that is gone and re-
invests each hamlet with its one time importance. In Trouville
and Deauville is reacted the tragic story of the flight of the
Empress Eug6nie. At Honfleur, the traveler tells us of the
ancient Fete of the Virgin and the blessing of the sea, of which
she was a devout and interested spectator. Honfleur also recalls
the story of the abdication of Louis Philippe and the rise of the
Revolutionists. And so it is with the other towns described:
the writer sees not their natural beauty alone, but she makes
them live again in the scenes of ancient days, when princes and
kings gloried in conquest or suffered in tragedy.
The book is intensely interesting both for its geography and
its history. It can be excelled in only one respect an actual visit
up the Seine to the battlefields.
A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR. Volume VI. The British
Campaign in France and Flanders, 1918, July to November.
By Arthur Conan Doyle. New York: George H. Doran Co.
$3.00.
In three hundred and eight pages Sir Conan Doyle has given
us a detailed account of the British forces and their movements
during the last weeks of the conflict, as well as a chapter of
summary dealing with the armistice, and an appendix giving a
graphic description of the author's personal experiences on the
memorable day of the breaking of the Hindenburg Line. The
history is furnished with a well done set of maps. The final
words of Chapter Twelve are worthy of the Conan Doyle we used
to know and we give them hearty echo: "Not to change rival
frontiers, but to mold the hearts and spirits of men there lie
the explanation and the justification of all that we have endured.
The system, which left seven million dead upon the fields of
1920.] NEW BOOKS 695
Europe, must be rotten to the core. Time will elapse before the
true message is mastered, but when that day arrives the war of
1914 may be regarded as the end of the dark ages and the start
of that upward path, which leads away from personal or national
selfishness towards the City Beautiful upon the distant hills."
PAX. By Lorenzo Marroquin. Translated by I. Goldberg, Ph.D.,
and W. V. Schierbrand, Ph.D. New York : Brentano's. $2.25.
No writer of South America has written so ably of life
among our Southern neighbors as the well-known Colombian
novelist, Lorenzo Marroquin, who died two years ago. He shows
us the people of Colombia in their homes, at the opera, at the race
track, in their offices, at their banquets and their political as-
semblies. We are present at their weddings, their funerals, their
Corpus Christi processions; we come in contact with their clergy,
their nuns, their poets, their newspapermen, and their politicians;
we see them in their days of peace and prosperity, and we see
them in the agony and devastation of revolution.
This novel is indeed an indictment of war and an appeal for
peace not only for South America, but for the world. The story
abounds in spirited caricatures of loathsome national types the
corrupt politician, the sordid profiteer, the callous millionaire,
the neurotic poet, the insincere revolutionist and at the same
time tells a love story both pathetic and winsome.
Occasionally the translators are at fault through ignorance
of things Catholic they do not know the difference between a
monstrance and a reliquary but on the whole the translation
is well done. The book is free from the ignorant anti-clericalism
that marks the work of the much exploited Spanish writer, Blasco
Ibanez.
THE BRAZEN SERPENT. By Rev. John A. McClorey, S.J. St.
Louis: B. Herder Book Co. $1.50 net.
Father McClorey's sermons are full, elaborate and develop
well the theme selected. Each discourse runs to some thirty
pages, and no reader can complain that the fare is meagre. The
subjects treated are the burning topics of the day, namely: The
Profanation of Love; The Monopoly of Wealth; Safeguards of
Marriage; Religion and Culture; Heroism and Mediocrity, and
lastly, Sorrow for Sin. For the preparation of these sermons the
author has evidently read widely, and has embodied a large
amount of information within his outlines. For instance, a large
mass of expert investigation is adduced to show the lamentable
conditions under which ordinary wage-earners labor in the large
cities. Again, he proves from the testimony of many non-Cath-
696 NEW BOOKS [Aug.,
olics the harm and demoralization accruing from culture divorced
from all serious religious training. If we may be permitted a
literary criticism, we should say that the portion of the sermon
which expounds the Gospel story or parable is sometimes a little
too exclamatory and rhetorical.
HOUSEHOLD PHYSICS. By C. H. Brechner. New York: Allyn
& Bacon. $1.40.
When the author announces in his preface that "Household
Physics is written primarily for girls," he gives the keynote of his
work namely, to interest girls in the study of physical science by
making them see its practical applications so common and so
numerous, but many times so little understood by the average
young woman in the home. The first chapters serve mainly as an
introduction, in which Heat is the large general topic. Brief ex-
planations of ordinary activities in the home are included here.
Later chapters discuss the various topics of general Physics, but
everywhere special emphasis is given to the household phase or
application of the subject being studied whether it be heating,
lighting, ventilation, electricity, magnets or levers. In addition the
author treats such developments of modern life as telephones,
kodaks, motion pictures, airplanes, and others that are directly
the outcome of Physics.
The book is attractive and well written. It abounds in clear,
intelligible diagrams and interesting modern illustrations. Groups
of useful questions as well as simple problems are included. The
main topics are numbered, thus making reference easy. Alto-
gether Household Physics is a text that will be welcomed for
use in regular high school classes for girls, and one that is ideally
suited to the Vocational or Household Arts School.
JUST HAPPY. By Grace Keon. New York: The Devin-Adair Co.
$1.65.
Dog lovers will delight in this pleasant little story of the
big, black, ugly bull dog, scarred veteran of many battles, "death
on dogs," but the gentle, devoted friend of the humans who show
him kindness. How Pete made his entrance into a large family
of children, despite the protests of "Mother;" how he quickly
proved himself invaluable, winning her heart, as all others; and
how the treatment given to him in his new home bore out the
promise of his new name, Happy: all this is told agreeably, with
humor as well as sentiment. We welcome to our circle of friends
both the dog and the people with whom a kindly fate cast in
his lot.
1920.] NEW BOOKS 697
ON THE TRAIL OF THE PIONEERS. By John T. Paris. New
York: George H. Doran Co. $3.50.
This is an excellent, condensed history, compiled from many
sources, of the early emigrations from the East to the country
beyond the Alleghenies, even to the Pacific. It is interesting
reading, these stories of the hardships and difficulties experienced
by those resolute men and women who sought to establish their
families and their fortunes in the new land, from which they
hoped all things. The tales are told largely in their own words.
A glance at the accompanying bibliography shows what pains-
taking research collected these records of pioneer travel, much of
the material being in publications long forgotten and out of
print. From these also came the very interesting illustrations.
THE AMERICAN CATHOLIC. By Rev. George T. Schmidt. New
York: Benziger Brothers. $1.25.
"Considered from the standpoint of our higher vocation and
destiny, we serve America best when we lead Americans to their
goal, to God." This is the ideal which Father Schmidt holds up to
his readers in the eighteen brief chapters of his little book. The
author's aim is the enlightenment of Catholics on questions of
importance for the welfare of the Church, such as the Catholic
Press, Church Support, Freemasonry and Spiritism. The Amer-
ican Catholic is instructed in parish activities, the spread of
Catholic books, the use and integrity of the ballot, and the organ-
ization of Catholic societies. The titles will suggest the uni-
versal character of the book, and how well fitted it is to develop
that most pressing need of the day a zealous lay apostolate.
The book is written in a clear, simple style with a wealth of il-
lustrations and references to many Catholic books.
MEMORY SKETCHES. By P. J. Carroll, C.S.C. South Bend, Ind.:
School Plays Publishing Co. $1.35 net.
These Irish stories of Creelabeg and its humble folk and
especially of their beloved priest, are intimate little pictures of the
country people of Ireland, whose lives and faith are as sweet as
the wind that blows over the hills in the springtime and whose
portrayal is as refreshing. The artistry of the sketches is perfect
and in them can be seen the fine lines of the master painter, who
gathers from a memory that is kindly, intimate and full.
Father Carroll's book is a small one, but it is rich in pictures
that do more than present scenes of Ireland. They take us into
the very hearts of the Irish people and show us the golden
treasures that exist there. The contact is instant; the portrayal
complete.
698 NEW BOOKS [Aug.,
THE POWER OF GOD AND OTHER ONE-ACT PLAYS. By
Thacher Howland Guild. With Sketches of His Life and
Work. Urbana, 111.: University of Illinois Press. $1.25.
This affectionate little memorial volume is issued by the
University of Illinois in honor of a former alumnus of great
promise. All three of the plays included, "The Power of a God,"
"The Higher Good," and "The Portrait," have been successfully
produced by college societies: and at least the first two the one
a study of hypnotism, the other dealing with a Bowery "Mission"
are distinctly above the average in their realistic dialogue. The
eloquent and sympathetic introduction by Professor Baker, of
Harvard, adds to the value of the book.
COGGIN. By Ernest Oldmeadow. New York: The Century Co.
$1.75.
This novel's distinction derives from more than one source.
Using only material woven of commonplaces of English life,
without aid from any love-story, or from intricacies of plot, the
author has fashioned a tale deeply tinged with romance; he has
handled a conversion to the Faith along lines that are to the best
of our recollection, unique in the fiction written around this
subject; and to the novelists' gallery of children he has brought
a most original and winsome newcomer.
The time is 1851; the scene, the town of Bulford. Henry
Coggin is the eleven-year-old son of an illiterate Dissenter, a
rags-and-bone man : Oswald Redding is the Anglican rector of the
parish, cultured, fastidious, temperately self-indulgent, conscien-
tious, but not ardent in the service of God, serenely content in the
incumbency of an excellent living, and in the conduct of conven-
tional services in the old and beautiful church of St. Michael.
By apparent accident it devolves upon the Rector to champion the
rights of little Coggin, who is a phenomenon of self-education,
in regard to an endowed scholarship, endowed a hundred years
ago with the intention that it should be eligible to all boys born
within the topographical limits of the parish; but it has now
virtually ceased to function for the benefit of any but children
of the Established Church. From what seems the merest casual
act of justice, strange consequences ensue. The social gulf be-
tween the Rector and the little Baptist narrows until their lives
are closely connected; and the momentous outcome is the man's
conversion to Rome.
Fantastic and impossible as the author's undertaking ap-
pears, it is accomplished with entire conviction. No doubt the
book is to be classed as propaganda; but propaganda is seldom so
1920.] NEW BOOKS (599
engagingly presented. Not study or discussion guides the Rector
into the road to the City of God, but the logic of the heart and
the liner instincts. His spiritual progress is by way of reparation,
deepened sympathy for his fellowman, self-denying charity; its
arduous outward course runs through a sequence of incidents de-
vised with dramatic, resourceful ingenuity, yet so simply and
naturally that they seem inevitable. There is neither rancor
nor satire. Controversy is dexterously evaded. The author tells,
primarily, a story of the true adventure that springs inexhaustibly
from new arrangements of personal relations.
The book has faults, the more irritating because they could
have been easily avoided had the author exerted himself a little
more. Nevertheless, its vitality is deep-rooted and its appeal is
wide. They will not be Catholic readers only who, after all de-
fects have been admitted and regretted, abandon themselves to
enjoyment of its vigorous individuality, its human warmth and
sweetness, the freshness of its charm.
FAMOUS GENERALS OF THE GREAT WAR. By Charles H. L.
Johnston. Boston : The Page Co. $2.00 net.
This book, written primarily for young people, gives in lively
and pleasing fashion, interesting accounts of the lives of the great
generals of the recent War. Its style is most entertaining and
suited to the readers for whom the book has been written. There
is much to inspire in its recital of the great events in the lives of
Joffre, Sir John French, King Albert of Belgium, Ferdinand Foch,
Sir Douglas Haig, John J. Pershing, Armado Diaz, Jan Smuts,
and the other famous leaders of the armies of the United States
and her Allies.
The book can be commended as historically accurate in its
larger outlines, and extremely interesting in those incidents that
tend to give an adequate picture of the human side of these
dominant factors in determining the issues of the great conflict.
THE SETTLING PRICE. By William E. Hingston. Boston : The
Cornhill Co. $1.75 net.
This is an entertaining novel, which reveals the inner work-
ings of the stock markets, the wheat exchange and the banks. It
takes the reader into that field of business which is marked by
intense struggle, and where principles are adhered to when profit-
able, but not otherwise. It is the age-long story of might this
time using the weapons of commerce to accomplish its purpose.
Billy Conyers, outside salesman for Wheeler & Watson,
wheat merchants, is in love with Kate Wheeler, who is unaware
700 NEW BOOKS [Aug.,
of the crisis through which her father's business is passing.
The salesman learns of the plans to ruin his firm by preventing
the delivery of grain. He is able to circumvent the schemes of
the company's enemies, much to the satisfaction of the senior
member's daughter.
The story is intensely interesting, told with skill and rounded
to a fine climax.
COLLECTED POEMS, 1881-1919. By Robert Underwood John-
son. New Haven: Yale University Press. $4.00.
This collected edition of the verse of our present Ambassador
to Italy includes the contents of several volumes now out of print:
"The Winter Hour," "Songs of Liberty," the "St. Gaudens" ode,
"Poems of War and Peace," the "Italian Rhapsody," along with
many fugitive pieces, some of them inspired by the recent War.
The whole comprises a poetic heritage in the classic and con-
servative tradition of Anglo-American poetry, a thoroughly hon-
orable heritage, with the calmness of mature thought and big
interests. To be sure, all the poems are not of equal value "To
the Spirit of Luther," written in the early days of the War, being
a most uninspired sonnet of Wordsworthian reminiscence. But
the omnipresent dignity of Dr. Johnson's muse, his understand-
ing love for Italy, and his unfailing respect both for his medium
and his reader, bespeak alike the scholar and the citizen of the
world.
THE SWING OF THE PENDULUM. By Adriana Spadoni. New
York: Boni & Liveright. $1.90.
This novel cannot be commended as a work of art. The
story does not grip, several of its chapters are so episodic that
they might be suppressed without loss, and the male characters
are not men, but marionettes. The central figure for we would
not misapply the noble name of heroine to such a creature is
Jean Norris, who heartily detests her mother's Catholic piety and
austere ordering of life. Jean's philosophy is practical pagan-
ism; she marries, and she and her partner resolve not to have
any children. After some time husband and wife separate, and
make their own lives. Jean takes up social service and phil-
anthropy, but divorced entirely from all religion or belief, and
she does not hesitate in the intervals of her social activities to
sacrifice a woman's greatest treasure. This denouement is stated
coolly, without any palliation or excuse, as a mere neutral fact of
no importance. It is further stated that Jean feels no shame or
remorse for what she has done. Finally she marries tant Men
que mal the fourth individual who happens to cross her path.
1920.] NEW BOOKS 701
APPLIED MATHEMATICS. For Junior High Schools and High
Schools. By Eugene Henry Barber. New York: Allyn &
Bacon. $1.25.
The author states in the preface that this book has been
written to meet the demand for a practical course which shall
coordinate the schoolroom lesson with the actual problems of
the industrial and commercial world. This it proceeds to do
from Addition to Mensuration. It will be found extremely useful
for a review of Arithmetic before leaving the Junior High School.
Its methods are the latest, and the pupil is taught to make use of
the numerous charts, tables, computations, etc., abundantly pro-
vided. Its problems are varied, interesting and up-to-date, giving
training in practical work, together with useful information on
household, farm, factory and office work.
AN exceedingly enthusiastic, very youthful curate is Father
Ladden, Curate, by Louise Margaret Whalen (Manchester,
N. H. : Magnificat Publishing Co. $1.50), and withal very
lovable. He has high ideals and little conceit, and is therefore
open to life and life's lessons, however bitter. His "lines seem to
have fallen in pleasant places," as far as pastors go, but we
think he is pictured as being a "wee bit" hyper-sensitive. Per-
haps it takes a priest to paint a priest. Who shall say?
AND YOU SHALL FIND REST FOR YOUR SOULS is an attrac-
tive little booklet by Francis Jerome, addressed to those out-
side of the Church who seek rest and peace (Catholic Truth
Society, London. 8 pence).
.
PAMPHLET PUBLICATIONS.
Information valuable to Irish sympathizers is contained in the
following pamphlets, issued by the Friends of Irish Freedom,
National Bureau of Information, Washington, D. C.: Irish Republican
Arbitration Courts; Ireland and British Misrule; The Irish Land Ques-
tion; Owen Wister, and An Answer to Rev. Walter McDonald. Ireland
Since the Larne Gun-running, by John J. O'Gorman, D.C.L., is issued
by the Catholic Record Office, London, Canada. (Five cents.)
The Friends of Freedom for India print an address by Eamon De
Valera, entitled India and Ireland (25 cents).
Great Britain in Egypt, by Herbert Adams Gibbons, a reprint of
The Century Company, New York, maintains that the right of self-
rule, for which the War was fought, has been denied Egypt as it has
been denied Ireland.
702 NEW BOOKS [Aug.,
Every small country striving for national freedom appears to
have a society to further its cause. A new-comer is the "Friends of
Ukraine." This society issues two pamphlets on Ukraine, one,
Ukraine and the Ukrainians, by Emil Revyuk, the other, Inhuman
Blockade Strangling a Nation.
The student of Bolshevism will find interesting and enlightening
information in Bolshevism in Russia and America, by R. A. McGowan
of the Social Action Department of the National Catholic Welfare
Council (The Paulist Press. 10 cents), and three pamphlets printed
by the American Association for International Conciliation: Certain
Aspects of the Bolshevist Movement in Russia, Part I, which deals with
the character of Bolshevist rule, and economic results of Bolshevist
control. The second pamphlet, under the same title, states the Bolshe-
vist programme of world revolution. The third is entitled Some Bol-
shevist Portraits, a sketch of the Bolshevist leaders.
The Industrial Shepherd is the title of a pamphlet treating of the
services rendered the nations by Pope Benedict XV. during the War.
(Central Bureau of the Central Society, St. Louis, Mo.)
From America Press we receive A New Saint, Margaret Mary
Alacoque, by John C. Reville, S.J. (10 cents.) This will be read with
profit by all who have a special devotion to the Sacred Heart.
Among welcome new booklets on the Mass are The Sacrifice of the
Mass (St. Louis: B. Herder Book Co. 15 cents), and A Guide to High
Mass (Catholic Truth Society, London. 1 penny).
Other pamphlets from The Catholic Truth Society (London) whose
titles bespeak attention are : The Epic of the Dark Continent, by M. A.
Vialls; The Catholic Church and the Principle of Private Property, by
Hilaire Belloc; The Road Home, by P. Rudkin, and Have Anglicans
Any Right to Call Themselves Catholic? by Herbert E. Hall, M.A.
Burns & Gates, Dublin, offer a pamphlet of special interest to
students of Church History. It is entitled The Early Papacy (to the
Synod of Chalcedon, 451), by Adrian Fortescue (2 shillings, 6 pence).
The Catholic Truth Society of Ireland issues A Plea for Catholic
Education, by T. N. Burke, O.P., with a foreword on the present Irish
educational position by the Most Rev. Laurence Gaughran, D.D.,
Bishop of Meath. The Social Teachings of James Connelly, by Rev. L.
McKenna, S.J. (Postpaid 1 s. 5 d.)
The True Church, instructions reprinted from the "Redemptorists'
Mission Book," is issued by James Duffy & Co., Dublin. Price, sixpence.
From the press of the Indian Catholic Truth Society we have
The Pope and the War. From the Australian Catholic Truth Society
we note Catholic Essayists, The Great Quest and Other Papers, by
Albert T. Power, S.J.
A Safe View of Spiritism for Catholics, by Rev. Joseph C. Sasia,
S.J., is the title of a pamphlet issued for free distribution, and which
should be in the hands of every Catholic who wants to know the truth
about Spiritism. (O'Connor Co., San Francisco.)
IRecent Events.
Towards the last of June the Bolshevik!
Russia. launched their long-heralded midsummer
drive against Poland with fifty divisions
along a front of approximately seven hundred and twenty miles,
and throughout the month the Poles have been forced to give
ground along the entire front. The offensive has rested almost
continuously with the Bolshevik forces which, according to latest
dispatches, have, by a pincers movement, placed the Polish army
in a very serious situation. This movement consists of a south-
westerly drive with Vilna as its objective, while the forces under
General Budenny are striking northwesterly toward Kovel and
Brest-Litovsk. On the right wing of their long line the Poles are
getting back toward the old Russian-German lines. Budenny's
Russian Army, which has had remarkable success west of Kiev,
is composed largely of cavalry. It has filtered through the Polish
lines at many points and compelled a general Polish withdrawal.
In the course of their withdrawal the Poles have been forced to
give up many important points, including Kiev, the Ukrainian
capital, the fortress of Rovno, one of the famous triangle of for-
tresses to the East of Dubno and Lutsk, and Lemberg, the former
capital of Galicia.
Besides the obvious reason of the immense concentration of
Bolshevik forces, Polish defeat seems ascribable largely to lack
of ammunition and military supplies. The Poles have been en-
deavoring for months without success to secure ammunition.
Some shipments were held up in London by the refusal of work-
ingmen to load the ships, others have been withheld by the Czechs
in retaliation for the disagreement over the Teschen district
plebiscite. Austria is also said to have been hindering shipments,
holding that they were contrary to the Peace Treaty. So des-
perate became their situation, the Poles were finally obliged
to ask for Allied intervention, and the Allies responded by prom-
ising help, on condition that the Poles withdraw to their legitimate
boundaries, and by sending to Moscow a proposal for an armistice
between Poland and Russia.
One of the results of the Polish ddbdcle has been the Polish
recognition of Lithuania as a de facto independent state. The
Lithuanian Government has issued a statement categorically deny-
ing that Lithuania, in conjunction with Germany, is planning a
704 RECENT EVENTS [Aug.,
military move against Poland the latter part of July. At the
same time it was stated that the Lithuanian authorities had dis-
covered a widespread Polish plot for the overthrow of the
Lithuanian Government. Among the documents seized were a
complete plan for Polish administration of Lithuania and detailed
lists of persons who were to occupy leading positions.
After a Cabinet crisis lasting fifteen days, a new Polish Cab-
inet was formed on June 24th, headed by Ladislaus Grabski, for-
mer Minister of Finance. The new Government is known as an
official expert Cabinet. Premier Grabski is a member of one of
Poland's best known and wealthiest families. Announcement
has been made that the Cabinet is non-political in character and
will be directed by resolutions accepted by the Diet.
Though the Bolsheviki have won important victories against
the Poles, they have been far from successful in the East, where
the forces of General Wrangel, anti-Bolshevik leader on the
Crimean front, have consistently advanced ever since June 14th,
when they began to move northward from the Crimea and the
Sea of Azov in three columns. Heavy fighting has occurred, the
struggle being particularly intense in the region of Oriakov, but
the Wrangel troops have been uniformly victorious. In one ac-
tion his forces captured 4,000 prisoners and forty big guns, and
in another they encircled a Bolshevik cavalry corps consisting of
eighteen regiments, on which the Wrangel forces concentrated
fire from armored trains and airplanes. Only one hundred and
thirty of the Bolsheviki escaped, 1,000 prisoners being taken and
the battlefield left covered with dead. The country occupied by
General Wrangel's army embraces approximately 22,000 square
miles of rich agricultural land, with heavy stores of grain. There
are said to be 2,000,000 people living in this area.
Recent dispatches from Sebastopol say that General Makmo,
with more than 20,000 anti-Bolshevik troops, has established con-
tact with the forces of General Wrangel. General Makmo, whose
headquarters are at Ekaterinoslav, declared he would cooperate
with Wrangel against the Bolsheviki, so dispatches state. The
Green Army, which is anti-Bolshevik, although not avowedly sup-
porting Wrangel, has been cutting railways and harassing the
Bolsheviki throughout the Kuban territory.
Early in July the Japanese Government announced its deci-
sion to occupy such points of the Province of Saghalien, Siberia,
as it deemed necessary, pending the establishment there of a
legitimate government and a satisfactory settlement for the
massacre last spring of two hundred Japanese at Nikolaievsk.
Japan is understood to regard the Province of Saghalien as ex-
1920.] RECENT EVENTS 705
eluded from the territory to be incorporated in the newly-founded
Eastern Siberian Republic. The limits of this new republic,
which has already been recognized by the Soviet Government,
probably will include the three continental provinces of Trans-
Bakailia, Amur, and the maritime province which includes Vladi-
vostok. These limits, however, remain to be defined by a
boundary treaty.
Relations between the Japanese Government and the new re-
public will depend entirely upon the action of the Siberians them-
selves, and the decision on their part to assume or repudiate re-
sponsibility for the massacre at Nikolaievsk. The anti-Bolshevik
population has welcomed the Japanese forces, which have taken
military possession of the upper part of Saghalien and the oppo-
site coast on the mainland as a result of the massacre. On the
other hand, an active propaganda against the Japanese is being
carried on by the sympathizers with the Soviet Government. At
last advice exchanges were in progress between the military lead-
ers on both sides, with the design of arranging temporary bound-
ary lines to separate the two nationalities and prevent hostile
collisions.
The Japanese Premier has announced that Japanese troops
would be withdrawn immediately from those districts of Siberia
where their presence no longer was needed. Japanese troops
will not be withdrawn from the Vladivostok region, however, the
Government holding that this stands on a different footing be-
cause Corea can be menaced from this direction. Many Japanese
live there and Harborovsk, within the region, constitutes a point
of strategic importance on the way to Saghalien.
On July 7th, the British and French turned the city and
province of Batum over to the Georgian Republic, completely sur-
rendering possession. Conditions are quiet on the surface, and
no immediate trouble is anticipated. It is reported a British
dreadnaught and a destroyer will remain after the other British
forces depart.
After several abortive attempts to form a
Germany. Cabinet, Konstantin Fehrenbach, who has
been President of the German National
Assembly, at last succeeded, late in June, in making up a Cabinet
from the three old coalition parties with himself as Chancellor.
That such a government will long be tolerated seems out of the
question, but Herr Fehrenbach succeeded in winning at least
temporary support for it in view of the approaching Conference
with the Allies at Spa, and the necessity for the existence at that
time of a responsible home government. The new Chancellor is
VOL. czi. 45
706 RECENT EVENTS [Aug.,
a man of sixty-eight and is, perhaps, best known as President of
the National Assembly. As a young man he studied for the priest-
hood, but later decided to become a lawyer. His professional
progress was rapid, and after playing a prominent part in Baden
politics he was elected to the Reichstag in 1903. As a member of
the Catholic Centre Parly he became one of Erzberger's right-
hand men. Though an excellent speaker, with a sense of humor
and of the right word, he has occupied himself mainly in com-
mittee work. He is a firm advocate of Germany's carrying out
the peace terms honorably and to the full extent of her ability.
The result of the Spa Conference, which is treated of in
another place in these notes, caused considerable tension through-
out Germany and may lead to another Cabinet crisis. The coal
demands of Premier Millerand especially created dissatisfaction,
and the signing of the disarmament agreement will probably
bring about the elimination of certain Cabinet members or the
withdrawal of the Deutsch Volkspartei from the coalition, that
party being especially incensed at Chancellor's Fehrenbach's at-
titude, which they characterize as lacking pluck and diplomatic
circumspection. The party leaders have been in consultation with
the remaining Cabinet members, and have unanimously advised
rejection of the coal demands and the return of the delegates to
Berlin unless M. Millerand makes concessions in the matter of
coal deliveries.
Fears are entertained that the approaching harvest in Ger-
many will not nearly come up to expectations. One authority
declares that so far as ascertained at present, something like one
billion marks will be required for purchases abroad, in order to
keep the country on the bread ration of the current harvest year.
As regards food for the mass of the people the situation is serious.
Food riots are reported from many parts of the country, includ-
ing Hamburg, Lubeck, Ulm and Havensburg, which are in Wiirt-
temberg, Osnabruck in Hanover, Crefeld in the Rhine province,
and Frankfort-on-the-Main.
The demands of the Allies regarding the reduction of the
army, disbandment of the military police and handing over of
aircraft and military material have aroused bitter press comment.
Both the Bavarian and Wiirttemberg governments have informed
the Berlin Cabinet that they regard the demands as unacceptable
because their fulfillment would endanger law and order, and so
would stand in the way of the country's economic reconstruction.
They declare themselves unalterably opposed, in the present dis-
turbed state of the country, to the disarmament and demobiliza-
tion either of the civil guard or the military police.
1920.] RECENT EVENTS 707
In the first official statement issued since the beginning of
the War, it was recently announced that Germany's floating debt
April 30, 1920, was 117,148,755,623 marks. The gross revenue
from taxes, duties, etc., from April, 1919, to the end of January,
1920, was 6,025,226,962 marks. The largest items are the special
war tax of 19181,011,000,000 marks; coal tax, 1,007,000,000
marks; customs duties, 652,000,000 marks; tax on business turn-
overs, 589,000,000 marks; wine tax, 311,000,000 marks. The
postal and telegraph revenue shown separately for the same
period were 1,404,000,000 marks.
The referendum at Eupen and in Malmedy, formerly Ger-
man but now Belgian, showed only two hundred registered pro-
tests against Belgian occupation out of a total population of
68,000. This referendum was taken in accordance with a clause
of the Versailles Treaty, which provided that for six months
after the Treaty went into effect, the people at Eupen and Malmedy
should be permitted to record in writing a desire to see the whole
or part of Eupen and Malmedy remain under German sove-
reignty.
The budget committee of the Reichstag at a session early in
July set aside 196,000,000,000 marks in the supplementary esti-
mate for the construction of merchant shipping. Shipyards will
receive subsidies in monthly installments, according to the pro-
gress of construction. The Council of the Empire has sanctioned
the expenditure of 2,500,000,000 marks for the upkeep of the
army of 100,000 men allowed under the Versailles Treaty.
After preliminary meetings between the
France. French and English Premiers at Hythe,
England, and later at Boulogne, the Su-
preme Council of the Allies met at Brussels on July 2d and 3d
chiefly to discuss the fixation of the German indemnity. No defin-
ite decision was arrived at, however, prior to the Conference at
Spa, where on July 5th, for the first time since the signing of the
Peace Treaty, Allied and German delegates sat at the same table.
The Germans won certain concessions, mainly in the matters of
the disarmament date and of coal deliveries. The Versailles
Treaty had provided that by March 31, 1920, the strength of the
German army should be reduced to 100,000 men, but at present
she has about 1,000,000 men under arms, and is far behind on the
deliveries of war material which she had promised. By the new
arrangement she is given an extension of time to October 1, 1920,
to reduce her army to 150,000 men and to January 1, 1921, to
reduce it to 100,000 men. With regard to the coal deliveries of
708 RECENT EVENTS [Aug.,
29,000,000 tons due them annually, the Allies agreed to the Ger-
man request that the coal situation be considered by experts of
both sides before Germany is called upon to meet the Allied de-
mand establishing priority for them on German coal.
In addition to the German negotiations, the Allies took up
other important matters. On July llth on the request of the
Poles asking Allied intervention, they sent to Moscow a proposal
to the Soviet for an armistice between Poland and Russia, subject
to the condition that the Polish troops retire behind Poland's legit-
imate boundaries, the armistice to be followed by a meeting of
all border States to fix boundaries. Should the Soviets refuse an
armistice and attack the Poles within their proper boundaries,
the Allies declared they would give the Poles full assistance. At
the same time this proposal was made, an announcement was
made, on behalf of the British Government, stating that there was
no foundation for the rumor that Great Britain intends to make
separate peace with Russia.
The negotiations that have been carrying on for the last
several months between Leonid Krassin, the Soviet representative
in London, and the British Premier were just on the point of com-
plete settlement when the Polish request for intervention arrived.
The conditions stipulated by the British Government before trade
could be resumed and accepted by the Moscow Government were
as follows: That each Government refrain from inimical action
or official propaganda against the institutions of the other; in
particular that the Soviet Government should agree to stop efforts
in Persia, the Caucasus and Turkey; to release immediately all
British prisoners; to quit all propaganda in India and Asia, and
to recognize the Russian foreign debt.
Ever since the presentation of the Peace Treaty to the Turk-
ish delegation in Paris last month, there have been considerable
differences of opinion with regard to it among the Allies. The
Turkish delegation, after submitting the Treaty to the Govern-
ment at Constantinople, had announced that they would uncom-
promisingly refuse to sign any peace treaty which deprived
Turkey of the Smyrna district, Adrianople or Eastern Thrace.
At the Spa Conference, however, the Allied Governments decided
to insist on the signing of the original Treaty with only slight
modifications.
The French objection to the Turkish Treaty was based on
the feeling that French interests in Turkey were sacrificed to
Great Britain, and that the Treaty represents the prevalence of
the British policy over the French. The French idea was to make
terms with the Turkish Nationalists, who under the leadership
1920.] RECENT EVENTS 709
of Mustapha Kemal are in revolt against the Sultan and the
Constantinople Government, and who, the French believe, are the
strongest party in Turkey. The British, on the other hand, advo-
cated defying the Nationalists, and by taking a close hold upon the
Sultan's government to force it to accept the Allies' terms.
The chief practical result of the British stand was the agree-
ment, arrived at during the Hythe Conference, between Lloyd
George and the Greek Premier, M. Venizelos, whereby the Greeks
were authorized to send troops against Kemal's Nationalist forces.
Later on the French joined the British in commissioning the
Greeks to make war on the Nationalists. British warships were
sent to assist the Greeks. Continuous fighting has gone on during
the month between the Greek Army and the Nationalists, the
advantage resting decidedly with the Greeks. On July 8th Greek
forces captured Brusa, an important Asia Minor city, fifty-seven
miles southeast of Constantinople. Military observers predict
the complete collapse of the Nationalist movement within a
short time.
The conference of international jurists composing the Com-
mission for the Permanent Court of International Justice which
has been in session for the past month at the Hague, has adopted
the plan suggested by Elihu Root and Lord Philimore, the British
representative, for the permanent formation of the court. This
provides that one panel of nominees for places on the court be
chosen by the Assembly of the League of Nations, in which all the
nations are represented, and another panel by the Council of the
League, in which only the great Powers have places. It is prob-
able that the court as finally constituted will consist of fifteen
judges, five from the great Powers and ten from the smaller.
The Hague has been selected as the permanent seat of the Court.
The first meeting of the Assembly of the League of Nations
will be held on November 15th under the call of President Wilson.
While the place for the session has not yet been selected, it is
understood that the meeting will be held either at Geneva or
Brussels. In the absence of ratification of the Peace Treaty by the
United States Senate, the American Government will not partici-
pate in the sessions of the League.
Recent reports issued by the French Government show the
extent to which work has been resumed in industries and factories
of the invaded districts. In the industrial department of the
Muerthe and Moselle eighty per cent of the pre-war factories and
establishments are again at work. In the Ardennes and Nord the
proportion is seventy-eight per cent, and in the Lille district it
has risen as high as eighty-four per cent. In all departments out
710 RECENT EVENTS [Aug.,
of 3,700 industrial establishments, 2,810, or more than seventy-
live per cent, were again partially or completely at work on June
1st this year.
Exports of 5,970,000,000 francs from January 1st to the end
of May are shown in official statistics, recently given out, as
compared with 2,116,000,000 francs during the same period last
year. Imports increased 1,927,000,000 francs. Imports of food-
stuffs showed a reduction of 109,000,000 francs.
The new Premier, Giovanni Giolitti, an-
Italy. nounced in June the names of his Cabinet
members. The Cabinet is composed of
five Liberals, two Catholics, three Radicals, two Parliamentary
Socialists, and three non-political experts. Giolitti, who was
driven from the Premiership five years ago on Italy's entrance
into the War, which he opposed, is now considered to be more
powerfully and generally supported than ever before during his
long political career.
A recent official dispatch confirms an earlier report that
Avlona, Albania, has been captured from the Italians by Albanian
insurgents. The majority of the Italian garrison was taken off
by warships. Many were wounded and thirty-six Italian officers,
including four colonels, were made prisoner. The Italians lost
four hundred and eighty-five killed, besides seven big guns,
several thousand rifles, and much material. Premier Giolitti is
reported as favoring the recognition of Albanian independence,
and early in July he sent Baron Aliotti to negotiate an Italo-
Albanian understanding. At last accounts, however, fighting still
continued.
Serious trouble occurred late in June at Ancona, on the
Adriatic Sea, when a battalion of Bersaglieri mutinied and were
only subdued after being besieged in their barracks for twelve
hours. Ancona is the centre of anarchist revolutionary propa-
ganda. A week after the outbreak of the mutiny the authorities
arrested 1,500 anarchists. From letters and documents found
on them, there is proof that the plot that precipitated the mutiny
was planned by the notorious anarchist, Malatesta.
To the same source are ascribed many outbursts throughout
the country. Malatesta, who is called the evil genius of the
working classes, has been stirring up discontent in the industrial,
agricultural and military life of the people ever since his return
to Italy, after many years of exile in London, on the cessation of
the Great War and the proclamation of amnesty. Owing chiefly
to his influence and that of his newspaper and propaganda agents,
1920.] RECENT EVENTS 711
serious riots have broken out in various parts of the country, in-
cluding Milan, Pisa, and many of the smaller towns. The Gov-
ernment's measures towards repressing the disorders are meet-
ing with success. This was especially evidenced by the failure
of the Socialists to induce the General Federation of Labor to call
a nation-wide strike.
Premier Giolitti recently received Alceste de Ambris, d'An-
nunzio's chief of Cabinet, who explained d'Annunzio's desire for
"systemization" of the Adriatic question, which is apparently as
far from solution as ever. Signer de Ambris said that d'Annunzio
refused to permit the substitution of regular troops in place of his
volunteers, and demanded the annexation of Fiume to Italy, or
at least its proclamation as an independent state with territorial
continuity with Italy. Meanwhile d'Annunzio is making efforts
to open trade relations with the Jugo-Slav hinterland. Ships are
allowed to enter port with cargoes for the Jugo-Slavs, while an
Italian vessel has just finished loading a cargo of lumber from
Jugo-Slavia. It has been consigned to firms in Alexandria,
Egypt. Assurances have been given, it is learned, that American
ships carrying goods for cities in the interior may enter Fiume
and discharge their contents without molestation. Colonel Sani,
the poet's chief secretary, has been in conference with the sub-
prefect of Sussak, the Jugo-Slav suburb of Fiume.
Recent dispatches announce the repudiation of d'Annunzio
as commander in Fiume by a group of influential Fiumians, who
sent a protest to the National Council against the leaders
of the Autonomist Party. Dr. Antonio Grossich, the President
of the Council, promised to take up the matter with the poet, to
which the hearers of the protest objected, declaring they did not
recognize the poet's command. The protest was signed by one
hundred of the leaders in Flume's business and professional life.
A demand that Italian forces along the armistice line near
this city retire westward twelve miles, was made early this week
by an officer of the Serbian Army in an ultimatum sent to General
Bergamo, of the Italian occupation forces. The latter refused to
move, insisting that the ultimatum was unofficial, because it did
not come from Belgrade through Rome.
July 17, 1920.
With Our Readers.
AN important appeal has just been issued, as an editorial tor
our Catholic weeklies, by the Rev. J. Danihy, S.J., Regent of
the Marquette University School of Journalism.
The appeal speaks of the vastly increased problem which,
from the beginning of America's entrance into the War, and
again since the signing of the armistice, the Catholic body of this
country is called upon to face.
"It was this realization that led to the formation of The
National Catholic War Council, and later to the development of
The National Catholic Welfare Council with its different sections
and bureaus covering all the activities of the Church. One of the
most important and one of the most promising for the future, of
these departments, is that devoted to the Catholic press.
"Taking over the equipment and facilities of the Catholic
Press Association, this new department has begun what we hope
will prove the stepping stone to great things in Catholic jour-
nalism.
"With the approval and cooperation of the Hierarchy, not
only the development of the Catholic papers now in existence,
but the realization of a long cherished dream for Catholic dailies
is on its way to fulfillment. The great drawback of lack of
means should no longer cripple the growth of the Catholic Press.
With the organization of the Catholic News Service our editors
are assured of accurate, up to the minute reports of all important
events in the Catholic world. Of course, this will take time: but
with the energetic men at the head of affairs we can look with
confidence to the future."
* * * *
FEATHER DANIHY then takes up the vital question upon the
I right answer to which any success of the proposed work will
depend the need of trained men to assume the ever-increasing
responsibilities of the Catholic press. Up to the present time that
work has been done by men who sacrificed much to serve the
Church in the field of Catholic journalism. Now that their work
has borne fruit, and an expansion, beyond the dream of a decade
ago, is promised, it behooves us to ask ourselves: Where are we
going to find the men capable of performing the task well?
Some may answer that we have many well trained Catholic
journalists holding high positions on secular newspapers: that
1920.] WITH OUR READERS 713
the Catholic press, if it would pay them equally good salaries,
could in a very short time command their services. Thus would
it find itself equipped with a very capable personnel. It seems
to us that such an answer is quite inadequate. Our experience
does not confirm it. Journalism may be learned at any school
equipped for the purpose: Catholic journalism cannot.
* * * *
ripHE man, Catholic or non-Catholic, who accepts a position on a
1 secular journal, particularly on what is known as a metro-
politan daily, lives in an atmosphere and is controlled by an
environment that is not Catholic. We do not say it is anti-
Catholic. It is secular and modern in all that the words connote
in association. The journal or newspaper itself is owned by a
capitalist or a capitalistic corporation. Its editorial policy is so
regulated. It has many departments and no common conscience.
What it will publish on one page concerning a fundamental moral
or religious question, it will contradict, perhaps without ex-
planation or apology of any kind, on another. Moral integrity as
one organic whole it does not recognize. It takes to itself a free-
dom from responsibility that God has given to no one. It claims
that it must and has the right to tell all the news it will color the
reporting and publication of that news with its own propaganda.
* * * *
/^ATHOLICS working on the secular newspapers rebel, at least
\^ inwardly, against the tyranny of this modern conscience-
less machine. They feel, as all true literary men feel, that any
real self expression must reverence, as a fundamental truth, the
integrity of life, the responsibility of the mind's utterance. Their
Catholic faith is hampered; straitened in strange channels unless
they may so answer to it. The reigning thought of the newspaper
office is that one religion is as good as another; that dogmatic
truth is the last thing a newspaper will accept; that the sensa-
tional, the unusual, the morbid must be "fed up" to the people
to add zest to life. The Catholic soul grows weary of such un-
reality, such machine-made emotionalism, such theatrical play-
ing with the tragedies, the tears, and the degradation of life.
He feels that the modern newspaper coins into money the weak-
nesses and the sins of humanity.
The estimate of what the people want, according to the
ordinary secular editor, would lead one to believe in Luther's
doctrine of total depravity rather than in the hopefulness and
helpfulness of Christ. "Statistics compiled by the Marquette
University School of Journalism," says Father Danihy, "on the
angle from which crime, scandal and divorce stories are treated
714 WITH OUR READERS [Aug.,
throughout the country, show an alarming tendency on the part
of once conservative journals to play up the sensational, the
lewd and the revolting side of life."
* * * *
SUCH an atmosphere and such an environment will never make
the Catholic journalist. Indeed, if we need a Catholic press,
those who will conduct it will not be graduates of a journalism
in so many ways opposed to the Catholic spirit.
Moreover a Catholic journalist on a Catholic press has far
greater and more complex problems to meet than offer in the
secular field. We do not wish to minimize the training he should
have as a journalist. Indeed we maintain, as his primary requi-
site, not only ability to write well; but to write in the modern
style that will attract and win. Too often intention in Catholic
journalism is made to cover a multitude of sins. Too often every-
thing is overlooked because the Catholic writer is right in sub-
stance. This also is failure to regard and reverence the integrity
of the soul in action. There is an external charm that wins and
a beauty of expression that of itself captivates many minds. And
this grace of expression, this finer sense of taste and of style
has been often discounted or neglected. Yet it is the essential for
success, the sine qua non of a Catholic journalist as of a Catholic
literary writer.
* * * *
THIS grace is, we might say, the studied possession of non-
Catholic writers. Nor is it too much to add that many Cath-
olics are influenced, perhaps unconsciously, towards accepting
un-Catholic opinions and attitudes by the newspaper, periodical
and book wherein the author successfully "puts over" what is
specious in style, but noxious in truth.
The successful appeal in much of what we might call modern
spiritual non-Catholic literature is due to the attractive manner
of presentation, and to the fact that, in great part, old traditional
Catholic truth is presented. The human mind will not altogether
be deceived. It always seeks some substantial nourishment.
Modern mystical treatises: dissertations on New Thought: culti-
vation of the quiet hour and of the mental powers, all these have
borrowed something from the treasuries of Catholic literature.
* * * *
A CATHOLIC journalist should know how to present: how to
f\ discriminate. What we have said but hints at the vast field
he must be prepared to cover. The great War presented new
problems to the Catholic body of America. And those who think,
who see in the world of today the result of the War and the
1920.] WITH OUR READERS 715
question of reconstruction, searching for guidance, look to-
wards the Catholic Church to see perchance if they may find it
there.
Upon the Catholic journalist rests the duty of showing that
there it may be found. He must be solidly grounded in Catholic
doctrine, for the doctrines of our Faith are the guide both to the
philosophy and to the conduct of life. He must hold close to his
own soul the integrity and unity of life, the responsibility to God
of all its sources, its powers, its purposes. The Redemption
through Christ must be with him, a vital ever present and reign-
ing truth; the Kingdom of Christ whereby we are saved, whereby
we are made one with Christ and with one another, a dominant,
practical reality. His fidelity to the Church must be as to the
living, speaking Christ, preserving and declaring the truths that
show earth and heaven as the creation and possession of the One
God, Who has made both the angels and the flowers, and made
them "good."
* * * *
THE greatness of an office must be measured by its opportunity.
This is surely the foundation that will make journalism Cath-
olic. As Father Danihy adds, "such a training is seldom found
in the journalist of today."
The opportunities Marquette University presents for young
Catholic men to acquire this training, merit for it the praise and
the support of the Catholic body of the country.
"The more we think of the future of Catholic Journalism and
the influence of the men who will be at the head of it, the more
we are impressed with the need of a broad journalistic training,
which includes among the first essentials of its course not only
a familiarity with literature and science in general, but also a solid
training in logic, sociology, psychology, and ethics."
Moreover our Catholic people, who should form a large and
intelligent reading public, must be further aroused to their re-
sponsibility to read clean, upright newspapers: to cultivate ac-
tively a taste for Catholic literature and increase their intelligent
interest in the apostolate of the Catholic press.
WHEN one meets with an article entitled "Christianity and In-
dustry," he naturally looks for a dignified and serious con-
sideration of an important question. But titles, like clothes, are
often disappointing. There is a paper, so titled in the American
Journal of Sociology by Albion W. Small. Emanating from the
University of Chicago and written by a man who has gained
eminence in his field, one has the right to expect scholarly treat-
716 WITH OUR READERS [Aug.,
ment. It never rises above the sophomoric and, most frequently,
falls far below it. Dr. Small's estimate of the influence of Chris-
tianity upon industry is found in two cheap sentences: "That
from Constantine to the Constitution of the United States, Chris-
tianity was mostly owned and operated by the politicians," and
"during the fifteen centuries in which this truth (the spirit of
Christ) was muzzled, the Christian teachers mostly played into
the hands of the politicians."
Thus does a learned professor lend himself to the fanatical
pamphleteer.
* * * *
THE true measure of Dr. Small, both as an historian and a so-
ciologist, may be gauged from both sentences. Nothing could
prove more effectively how ill fitted he is either to interpret
history or to guide human society.
The hope of Christianity he places in the Inter-Church World
Movement with its vast funds (that are not but were to be). In
the light of his hope he states that "American Protestants are
united as they never were before, for any reason, in assessing
and collecting of themselves that inconceivable sum and in guar-
anteeing its conscientious use." But now that one Protestant
denomination after another has withdrawn from the Inter-
Church World Movement, and the Movement has itself collapsed,
what will Dr. Small say? He saw in this combine "a mental
and moral unity" on the part of Protestant sects, which they
never possessed before: "functionally," he proclaimed, though he
promised to avoid rhetoric, "they have been born again." If such
combination was the sign of life, is its passing the sign of death?
* * * *
THE Inter-Church World Movement was born of the desire of
leading Protestants to possess the necessary note of unity,
even if it could be but an external note. The Protestant de-
nominations have it not, and know they have it not. The oppor-
tunity furnished by the War and in after the War work loomed
great in the light of such a possibility. Separately, preaching
division and disruption, they would be a laughing stock. To-
gether, as apparently one body, could they not evangelize the
world? Indeed sponsors of the Movement aroused their hearers,
time and again, by preaching the new crusade this money would
launch for a united Protestantism to carry the light of Christ
into the benighted countries of Europe, such as France, Italy,
Spain, and Austria : into Central and South America. Federation :
combination: united action that would promote efficiency: the
building up of the Protestant churches at home: consolidation:
1920.] WITH OUR READERS 717
the union church all these were to he horn of the Inter-Church
World Movement.
A vast sum of money was to be collected for a period of five
years. It was to be distributed according to pre-arranged budgets.
All was to be controlled by a central hoard. The authority that
board possessed would force an apparent unity of operation, of
appeal, of action.
* * * *
BUT water cannot rise above its source. There are many
treasures which money cannot buy. And the greatest of them
all is Christ. Unity is born only of Him and Protestantism is
organically concerned with protesting against Him. Historically
it broke His unity in principle and it can agree, it can be one,
only in opposition to that unity. Practically and theoretically the
sects cannot agree among themselves and never can agree. It is
against their nature. They can agree in opposition to the Cath-
olic Church, the Church of Christ.
Through a great money combination they sought to acquire
the pretense of possessing that which they could never have:
unity, and the combination has fallen to pieces, as it was inevit-
ably bound to do. So little appreciation has Dr. Small of true
spiritual influences that he writes of this movement, already a
failure: "American Christianity is equipped as never before for
decisive action in the economic drama now enfolding." One
must remember that its equipment was to be, for the next five
years, one thousand three hundred million dollars.
* * * *
THE Inter-Church World Movement, after its collapse, was de-
scribed by Dr. Charles R. Brown, dean of the Yale School of
Religion, as a dream which had become a nightmare. Dean
Brown is a Protestant and was addressing a body of Congregation-
alists. He complained of its self-appointed authority and tyranny.
He sounded the Protestant keynote: "We have sore need of get-
ting back to the ultimate significance of the regenerate man
wisely striving in his particular station to do the will of his
Master." The Inter-Church World Movement is, according to him,
"a symptom of a tendency which is, in my judgment, a hurt and
loss to our American Protestantism. The Men and Religious
Movement, the Laymen's Missionary Movement, the Inter-Church
World Movement, and all the rest have resulted in disappoint-
ment . . . They all left a dark brown taste in the mouth of
Protestant Christianity in this country."
718 WITH OUR READERS [Aug.,
THE people of Austria are suffering lamentably from lack of
food. The results of undernourishment are painfully ap-
parent through the alarming spread of tuberculosis and softening
of the bones. In truth, the very existence of Austria as a nation
is at stake. Its cries will, we feel, be heard by the wealthier,
happier countries of the world. In our own country the Baroness
Elsie von Rast and the Rev. John Egger, O.S.F.S., are soliciting
help for this cause. Contributions may be sent to either ad-
dressed, care of The Kolping House, 165 East 88th Street, New
York City. His Eminence, Cardinal Gibbons, has sent out the
following letter:
To WHOM IT MAY CONCKRN: May 24, 1920.
I have received letters today from the Cardinal-Archbishop of
Vienna commending to me the mission of Baroness von Rast and the
Rev. Johann Egger. They have been sent by His Eminence, Cardinal
Piffl, to gather funds for the relief of the suffering people of Vienna.
The letters they bring with them tell of conditions which are deplor-
able. The population of Vienna, now two and one-half millions, is on
the verge of starvation.
I heartily commend their mission to the generosity of the public
and trust that they will meet with success wherever they go.
I am, Faithfully yours in Christ,
(Signed) J. CARDINAL GIBBONS,
Archbishop of Baltimore.
A PROPOSED "Catholic Federation of Arts," is welcome evidence
that the Church as the Mother of Art is coming into her own
again. Not in vain has Francis Thompson pled with "pastors"
and "pious laics" to "unroll the precedents of the Church's past,"
to recall that "Francis of Assisi forswore not Beauty, but dis-
cerned through the lamp, Beauty, the Light, God."
Inadequate means, the pressure of necessity with, it must
be confessed, a strange blindness to the powerful function of
religious art and a still stranger willingness to use in the service
of God the spurious for the real, have combined to rob our
American Catholic churches and our American Catholic people
of their birthright of beauty, so lavishly spread before them in the
Old World and in the Latin Americas. Exceptions only prove
the rule.
* * * *
THE best alone is a worthy offering to the Most High: it alone
is a worthy instrument of His grace. The Catholic Federa-
tion of Arts is born of this principle.
" 'Nothing is too good for our Eucharistic Lord' ought to be
1920.]
WITH OUR READERS
719
the common sentiment of the federation. Therefore its members
pledge themselves to produce works that are honest, enduring and
artistic, for shams and tinsels have no place in the temple of
truth.
"The urgent need of concerted action on the part of art
workers is felt by all. Undoubtedly there are artists and archi-
tects who are fully alive to their responsibility for the talents re-
ceived from the Most High, and hence desire to use them in His
service. Individually these can achieve little, but united they may
accomplish much. . . While the happy condition of the glorious
Middle Ages is not feasible at the present time, at last the spirit of
the ancient guilds may be revived and embodied into the forth-
coming constitution of the federation."
* * * *
THE purpose of the Catholic Federation of Arts is:
1. To bring together for discussion, consultation and co-
operation Catholic artists and lovers of Christian art. The federa-
tion embraces architects, mural painters, sculptors, altar builders,
lace workers, workers in metal, stained glass and mosaics; in
fine, all who are engaged and interested in the noble work of
erecting and beautifying the house of God.
2. To draw up such a constitution as will embody laws and
principles conducive to the proper development of true Christian
art.
3. To diffuse and foster knowledge of and appreciation for
Catholic art.
4. To safeguard the spiritual welfare of Catholic art students.
* * * *
can be done by establishing local centres or chapters
throughout the country. Educators of the present day con-
sider art a valuable factor in the thorough education of youth and
heartily endorse it. There is no reason why local centres could
not be established in all Catholic colleges and academies. Such
art centres should be of exceptional value in our ecclesiastical
seminaries."
We see in this "Federation" the promise of a medium for the
education of priests and people in the true principles of art, as
also for enlisting in the service of the All-Highest talent, now
latent, awaiting only the invitation of the Master. We would ask
for it, therefore, friends from among our readers. Those wishing
to cooperate in the movement may address: Studio of Christian
Art, St. Anselm's College, Manchester, New Hampshire.
BOOKS RECEIVED.
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, New York:
A Monograph on Plebiscites. By S. Wambaugh. The Proceedings of the
Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907. By J. B. Scott. The Declaration
of London, February 26. 1909. By J. B. Scott. Treaties for the Advancement
of Peace Between the United States and Other Powers Negotiated by the Hon.
W. J. Bryan, Secretary of State of the United States.
BONI & LIVERIGHT, New York I
Growing Up. By M. H. Vorse. $1.75 net. The Wanderer, or Many Minds on
Many Subjects. Compiled by M. E. McAuley. $2.00 net. Pic, the Weapon-
Maker. By G. Langford. $1.75 net. The Great Modern American Stories.
Compiled by Win. D. Howells. $2.00 net.
DOUBLEDAY, PAGH & Co., Garden City, New York :
Letters of Travel. By R. Kipling. The Rescue. By J. Conrad. $2.00 net. The
Old Humanities and the New Science. By Sir W. Osier, M.U., F.R.S. .$1.50.
Arthur Hugh dough. By J. I. Osborne. .$2.25.
HARPED & BROTHERS, New York:
How We Advertised America. By G. Creel. $5.00 net. Vagabonding Through
Changing Germany. By H. A. Franck. $4.00 net. ,
LONGMANS, GREEN & Co., New York:
Father William Doyle, S.J. By Alfred O'Rahilly. $3.50 net. An Essay on
Medlxval Economic Teaching. By G. O'Brien, Litt.D. $4.75 net.
THE CENTURY Co., New York:
France and Ourselves. By Herbert A. Gibbons. $1.50.
D. APPLETON & Co., New York:
French Literature of the Great War. By A. Schlnz. $2.00 net.
E. P. DUTTON * Co., New York:
Soviettsm. By W. E. Walling. $2.00 net. Jewish Fairy Tales and Stories.
Translated by G. Friedlander. The Ordeal of Mark Twain. By V. W. Brooks.
The Sword of the Spirit. By Z. H. Humphrey.
GEORGE H. DORAN Co., New York:
The House of Dreams-Coine-True. By M. Pedlcr. Democracy and Ideals.
By J. Erskine. American World Policies. By D. J. Hill. Daisy Ashford:
Her Book.
JOHN LANE Co., New York:
Swinburne as I Knew Him. By Coulson Kcrnahan. $1.25 net.
P. J. KENEDY &. SONS, New York:
Dante, "The Central Man of the World." By J. T. Slattery, Ph.D.
THE NATIONAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY, New York:
The Red Conspiracy. By J. J. Hereto. $2.00.
THOMAS Y. CROWELL Co., New York:
The Man of Tomorrow. By C. Richards.
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN Co., Boston :
Mary Marie. By E. H. Porter, fl.90.
SMALL, MAYNARD & Co., Boston:
Old Plymouth Trails. By W. Packard. Plays. By S. Glaspell. Wings of the
Wind. By C. Harris.
C. A. DAKO, 1C Pulaski Road, Boston:
Albania, the Master Key to the Near East. By Christo A. Duko.
J. B. LIPPINCOTT Co., Philadelphia:
The Charm of Fine Manners. By H. E. Starrett. $1.00 net.
B. HERDER BOOK Co., St. Louis:
Adventures Perilous. By E. M. Wilmot-Buxton, F.R.H.S. $1.80 net. St. Teresa,
and Her First Eiiglish Daughter. $1.80 net. In An Indian Abbey: Some Plain
Talking on Theology. By J. Rickaby, S.J. $2.40 net. Ireland in Fiction.
By S. J. Brown, S.J. $3.75 net. A Commentary on the .Veiti Code of Canon
Law. By Rev. P. C. Augustine, O.S.B., D.D. Vol. IV. $2.50 net.
DOMINICAN SISTERS' PUULISHING Co., Tacoma, Wash.:
The Interchurch and the Catholic Idea. By Rev. A. M. Skelly, O.P.
BROWNE & NOLAN, Dublin:
The Catholic Student. By Rev. M. Hickey, D.D. fi s. net.
THE TALDOT PBUSS, Dublin:
Ulster Songs and Dallads. By Padrlac Gregory. 2s. 6 d.
PIERRE TEQUI, Paris:
Retraite de Premiere Communion Solennelle. Par J. Millot. 5 fr. Transflguree
par I'Eucharistie et par la lutte. Par L. Lajoie. 1 fr. 50. Admirable Histoire
de Joseph. Par Abb4 F. Rouault. 2 fr. Cornet de Jeanne d'Arc. Par E.
Roupain, S.J. 2 fr. 50. Vers la Victoire. Par Monseigneur E. L. Julien. 5 fr.
Le lion Esprit au College. Par Monseigneur J. Tissier. 3 fr. 50. En Marge des
Combats. Par G. Joly. 3 fr. 50. Nos Tributs de Gloire. Par Monseigneur J.
Tissier. 3 fr. 50. La Novice Parfaite. Par C. E. Thevenot. 2 fr. Un
Caractere (Le Cardinal Mercier). Par E. Roupain, S.J. 2 fr. Le Predicateur
des Relraites de Premiere Communion. Par Ph. G. Laborie. 4 fr. 50. Les
Prowesses du Sacrii-Cceur. Par E. Truptin. 5 fr.
THE
Catholic &(orld
VOL. CXI.
SEPTEMBER, 1920
No. 666
"N. C. W. C." THE CHURCH IN ACTION.
A Layman's View.
BY BENEDICT ELDER.
HE Church in being and the Church in action pre-
sent to our minds two different aspects of the one
Church.
The Church in being, in her very nature, im-
presses us with her essentially divine character;
whereby, in spite of hostile forces, with her organization
always opposed and sometimes sadly deranged, she continues,
unbroken, her existence, and is maintained by manifest Provi-
dence to check the errors of men, confound the sects, teach the
world vital, healing truth and sanctity and save mankind.
The Church in action, although inspired and vivified by
the Holy Ghost, impresses us forcibly with her human side;
with the energy of her leaders, with their strength and moral
stature, their trained and ready minds, their clear vision and
wide knowledge and virile sympathy; wherewith, though inex-
perienced in the comprehensive and minute processes of world
organization, they are able to search out and develop, to co-
ordinate and bind together in unity, and set to work, all the
scattered forces in the Catholic world.
The Church in action not only is divine in her teaching,
her guidance, and the fulfillment of her mission; but is great
Copyright. 1920.
VOL. cxi. 46
THE MISSIONARY SOCIETY OF ST. PAUL THE APOSTLE
IN THE STATE OF NEW YOUR.
722 "N. C. W. C."THE CHURCH IN ACTION [Sept.,
also in her human wisdom, rich in her human resources,
touching in her human appeal, and an unequaled power for
good in her human precept and example. Where she is not
found in action, humanity is seen to suffer. When she was in
action in Africa, civilization flourished there. When she was
in action in Asia, the eyes of the world were turned toward
the East. When she was in action in Europe, Europe was the
garden of civilization. When her action in Europe was im-
peded or cut short, Europe declined to what we have wit-
nessed these past five years, what still we behold transpiring
(here.
The whole history of the progress of civilization, since the
beginning of the Christian era unto this day, might very well
be written around the names of the great Catholic men and
women whose lives and works mark the different periods of
the Church in action.
Catholics in America have a record of religious activity
that is not without distinction. Bishops, priests, and laymen,
in every diocese, in every city, have been active, enterprising,
zealous in the cause of the Church; but, speaking largely, and
leaving aside the great Councils of Baltimore, there has been
among them little concert of action or of plan. Many of our
religious Orders have done signal work. Their achievement
has, perhaps, no parallel in history; but it has been wrought
without coordination or unity in the field as a whole. Lay
societies have flourished among us, and one or another has
performed distinctive service to the Church; but they have
always worked independently of and sometimes even at cross-
purposes with one another. A Catholic press that is devoted
and loyal and not without strength, has been developed; but
the concert of thought and expression that is indispensable
to the highest uniform excellency has been wanting.
We have Catholic books without number; but no Catholic
literature. We have Catholic readers in fair proportion; but
nothing like a recognized, not to say weighty, Catholic opinion
on public questions. Our missions have grown into parishes,
our parishes have multiplied, our dioceses have increased in
number and have grown in strength quite steadily and in
many cases quite remarkably; we have won place and pres-
tige in our country; but there has never been here a "Catholic
movement."
1920.] "N. C. W. C"THK CIIl'RCII IN ACTION 723
We have not yet seen the whole Church as a unit in
action.
"The Church has had for years its dioceses and arch-
dioceses well organized and well equipped," said the Rt. Rev.
Bishop Russell at the meeting of the Catholic editors in Wash-
ington; "but we have never until last September had a national
organization; we have never had a national interest in the
Catholic activities of the whole country." It was last Septem-
ber that the Catholic hierarchy, at the call of his Eminence,
Cardinal Gibbons, issued at the instance of His Holiness, Pope
Benedict XV., met in Washington. This was the largest meeting
of the hierarchy ever held in America. It was called for the
purpose of "organizing on a national scale every field of
Catholic activity." The comprehensive plan outlined by the
venerable Cardinal and proposed to the assembled bishops by
the Programme Committee was accepted almost in its entirety,
with the important exception of financial proposals. The Na-
tional Catholic Welfare Council, which is the Catholic hier-
archy of the United States acting as a corporate unit, was ac-
cordingly voted into being and has since been organized in
detail. The Church in America is, therefore, now in action as
a unit, and "N. C. W. C." is a symbol of all that the Church in
this country stands for in the organized activities of her
people.
It was the writer's privilege to be present at the Washing-
ton meeting of Catholic editors, where was taken the first for-
mal action in the way of bringing Catholic publishers and
writers of every description into the general organization of
the Press, Publicity and Literature Department of the N. C.
W. C. One could not but feel a glow of satisfaction at the
large spirit of cooperation there manifested upon all sides.
One could not miss its meaning. It marked, we all believed,
the beginning of a new epoch, in which, as never before, the
Church in America will stamp the influence of her teaching
upon our national life, in civic, social and industrial affairs,
and in all public questions that have a direct bearing on
Christian faith and morals.
As Bishop Russell unfolded to this meeting the complete
scheme of organization of the N. C. W. C., and presented in
detail the plans proposed for the Press Department, each ad-
ditional feature of the programme outlined told of new pos-
724 "N. C. W. C."THE CHURCH IN ACTION [Sept.,
sibilitics, opened new avenues of activity, revealed new sources
of energy, to be developed and utilized by the Church in action.
One could see in prospect a quickening of the mass-sense of
our Catholic people. One imagined the rising generation of
Catholics exerting a mighty force in the nation, confronting
the evils of their time with a hitherto unknown solidarity of
thought and action.
As in the early days of the Church, when Catholics by their
exemplary conduct set themselves as a class apart; when they
did not amass great wealth or limit the size of their families
or procure divorces or frequent the public baths or surround
themselves with a number of slaves; did not, in short, devote
their lives to self-indulgence as was the manner of their time;
but instead practised self-discipline and schooled themselves
to charity; so today, with the Church as the Church in action,
thoroughly organized, fully equipped, and functioning in her
work as in her teaching with undivided singleness of purpose
and complete unity of plan we can hope that in this genera-
tion or in the next, her children by their virtuous lives and
their distinctive good works will again verify to great masses
outside the fold her divine mission to mankind.
Henceforth, the entire hierarchy will meet annually. This
alone presages a wider and more intimate knowledge among
the clergy of the needs of our times, and a deeper, more abid-
ing confidence among the laity that the Church, divine in her
origin and in the true source of her strength, is great even on
her human side, and is in every way entitled to their full
loyalty and support. Between times, the N. C. W. C., that is
to say, the hierarchy as a corporate entity, will function
through an Administrative Committee, composed of seven
members of the corporation, elected annually by secret bal-
lot, who constitute the executive body, just as a Board of Di-
rectors in corporations generally. The members of the Ad-
ministrative Committee elected last September to serve until
the next annual meeting are: Archbishop E. J. Hanna, of San
Francisco, Chairman; Archbishop D. J. Dougherty, of Phila-
delphia; Archbishop Austin Dowling, of St. Paul; Bishop P. J.
Muldoon, of Rockford, the Vice-Chairman; Bishop William T.
Russell, of Charleston, Secretary; Bishop Joseph Schrembs, of
Toledo; and Bishop Regis J. Canevin, of Pittsburgh.
The Administrative Committee will in turn function
1920.] "2V. C. W. C."THE CHURCH IN ACTION 725
mainly through Departments. Five Departments have so far
been erected. They are: Legislation, under Archbishop
Dougherty; Social Service, under Bishop Muldoon; Education,
under Archbishop Dowling; Press and Literature, under
Bishop Russell; and Catholic Societies, under Bishop
Schrembs, a department which, to us of the laity, holds out
special hopes. Others will be erected as the work advances
or as occasion may require.
A representative of each of these departments sits as a
member of the Executive Department headed by a General
Secretary, with headquarters at Washington. The organization
of each Department, under the Bishop in charge, is very elas-
tic, affording all latitude necessary to elicit full interest and
utilize every talent in both clergy and laity for any given
activity. Committees, secretaries, executive boards, advisory
councils, composed of clergy and laity, men and women,
representative of every organization and every interest in any
way affected, as the business in hand indicates, are provided
for; with virtually no restrictions other than what they them-
selves impose, except that before final action in the name of
the N. C. W. C., the approval of the bishop in charge must be
secured. Thus liberty and authority are combined; unity with
the utmost freedom is secured; and the fullest encouragement
is given to initiative and enterprise on the part of all.
The plan is at once resilient and strong; at the same time
democratic and safe. It envelops and stimulates everything
without absorbing anything. It reaches all organizations of
Catholics, national, diocesan or parochial, but without affect-
ing the identity or interfering with the distinctive line of work
of any. It extends to every individual who is active in the
Catholic cause; but without imposing any restraint that one's
own bishop and pastor do not impose. Indeed, the very ex-
cellence of the plan depends upon preserving the identity and,
as far as may be, promoting the special interests of all existing
organizations, and upon encouraging the most active initiative
on the part of individuals; for it is just this coordination, de-
velopment and use of all Catholic activities and resources,
without concentration on any one or any single group, that
affords the Church in action her unequaled facility for reach-
ing all classes of society with her influence. Humanly speak-
ing, right here is the secret of that power, which the Church
726 "N. C. W. C."THE CHURCH IN ACTION [Sept.,
has shown time and time again in different countries, and at
least twice throughout the civilized world, to check the decad-
ent forces of exaggerated materialism, renovate society, and
set humanity once more in the way of true and lasting
progress.
The decision of the hierarchy to enter upon this broad
scheme of organization was not reached hurriedly or by
unanimous acclaim. It is better so. The fire that flashes up
quickly, soon flickers out. The "unanimous approval" of a
large body of men has not the moral force that is popularly
supposed. In the Jewish Great Sanhcdrin, one of the most
learned bodies of men in ancient or modern times, it was a
rule that when capital judgments were unanimously voted,
they could not be carried into execution, the reason being that
where no division of opinion on a matter of great import
appeared in such a body, this was evidence that its members
were influenced by some common prejudice or other pre-dis-
position. By the same token, the wisdom of the decision of the
hierarchy to organize on a nation-wide scale every field of
Catholic activity in this country, is confirmed by the slight op-
position at the time expressed, as we may be sure that every
reasonable objection to the plan was then considered, and
dismissed.
In fact, for many months before the National Catholic
Welfare Council was formed, "N. C. W. C." signified the
National Catholic War Council; and while the latter is now
coming to an end, and the new Council is a distinct organiza-
tion, broader in aim and scope and permanent in character,
much of the old Council's plan of organization has been incor-
porated in the larger scheme. For instance, the idea of en-
couraging lay societies to greater effort by giving them a con-
stituent place in the organization without absorbing them or
interfering with their distinctive activities, was successfully
tried out by the War Council. Certainly the War Activities
of the Knights of Columbus lost nothing of value, and that
Order itself nothing of prestige, through having the endorse-
ment and assistance of the Administrative Committee of
Bishops of the old N. C. W. C. And now Bishop Schrembs has
formed two organizations, one of women's societies, the other
of men's, which promise immense good to the American
Church. In nearly every parish, there are many laymen and
1920.] "N. C. W. CrTHE CHURCH IN ACTION 727
laywomen who longed to do something for the Church; but
hitherto they have often been obliged, all unwillingly, to
stand idle in the market place. By wise and keen-sighted
direction, these men and women will be set to work in their
appropriate place. Why should not the reproach leveled at
the Church, that she does not know how to utilize the zeal
and energy of her laity, cease to have force and a new era,
like to the first age of the Church, be inaugurated?
Again, the idea that Catholics as a body should hence-
forth take a more active part in the solution of the industrial
and social problems of our country, that there should be,
from time to time, some authoritative, even though not in its
strictest sense binding, expression of the Catholic mind on
vital questions of public and common concern, that a means
of rallying Catholic sentiment, of stimulating Catholic
thought, of forming and strengthening a distinctive Catholic
opinion on matters affecting the common welfare, should be
at hand all this was implied when the Bishops of the old
Council issued their now celebrated "Reconstruction Pro-
gramme."
Nor is there anything new or strange, in the Catholic
world, in the coexistence of centralization and democracy.
The Church is the one institution in the world in which the
two can coexist. As Americans we are traditionally opposed
to too much centralization, fearing that our democratic insti-
tutions, indeed our very liberties, must in consequence suffer
undue limitation. In the case of civil government there is
ground for such fear. Civil governments have a coercive
power. They not only bind to obedience when they are just,
but they physically compel obedience, whether or not just.
Past history does not afford us any example where democratic
liberty among citizens has long survived the strong centraliza-
tion of government. The danger of this trend or this tendency
in government is, therefore, wherever it appears, a very real
danger.
Not so in the Church. The function of the Church, it is
true, is to govern, but to govern spiritually, to exact "a reason-
able service," flowing freely from reason enlightened by faith.
She binds to obedience, but she does not physically compel
even the least of us to obey. Her strength is in her moral
force; otherwise, she has none. We obey her because she is
728 "N. C. W. C."THE CHURCH IN ACTION [Sept.,
right. If we in any case surrender our liberties it is only
because we do so willingly. Whether she is centralized or
decentralized, organized or disorganized, cannot affect the
freedom of our choice. The democracy of the Church, in this
aspect, is as absolute as anything on earth can be. All the
power she is able to exert could not force one person, against
his own will, to do the least thing. Centralization of Catholic
ficlivities and resources is, therefore, free of danger to the
democracy that the Catholic faithful enjoy. The two can exist
together in the Catholic world. They have existed together
in the past, in times that we refer to as the great Ages of Faith,
when, not only in subscribing to defined dogmas, but also in
their large civic activities, in their social and industrial
affairs, in their works of education, science and art, all
Catholics were united in aim and generally cooperated in
action.
The complete order of those days will never return. The
whole social order of an age does not change without cause.
But there is no reason, though the main structure is wrecked,
to discard the perfectly sound timbers of the old building;
none to re-dig the foundations when they were laid on solid
rock. The fatal blunder of the sixteenth century can yet be
retrieved, when the structure of society now building is set
on the old rock foundation, and the timbers that still are sound
are again put to use, rehewn a little, perhaps, to fit in with
our up-to-date plans, but with their fiber unshaken and their
strength unimpaired. The new building may take its form and
symmetry from our own times; its compartments may be ar-
ranged to suit present-day needs; its appointments may con-
form to modern standards; but unless its foundation and struc-
tural timbers were those of the Ages of Faith, the thing would
one day end in disaster for us all.
The sixteenth century was an age of religious inventions,
which since have all collapsed; the seventeenth, an age of
political inventions, which since have all been wrecked; the
eighteenth an age of philosophical inventions, which since
have all been abandoned; the nineteenth, an age of mechanical
inventions, which since have been a help in building civiliza-
tion, but more efficient in destroying it. Through all the
Church has remained unchanged, unscathed, in universal be-
ing. With human ingenuity again exhausted, as after the col-
1920.] "N. C. W. C."THE CHURCH IN ACTION
729
lapse of Roman civilization, she again rises to action, again
calls together her children to help save mankind.
America, the land of great promise, the home of noble
and generous people, the source of the world's richest sub-
stance, naturally will be one of the principal theatres of the
Church in action, and here the N. C. W. C. occupies the
centre of the stage. We all are players, priests, and laymen,
men and women, everyone, though each one makes and learns
his own lines. For the sake of God and humanity we must all
strive that when played out they will be in perfect accord.
The coming meeting of the hierarchy is looked forward to
in a spirit of prayer and hopefulness by laymen and women
throughout the whole country. Since the meeting of last
September, a new tide, if I may borrow a famed expression,
is running in the hearts of American Catholics. Proud of the
great work so nobly begun by our bishops in that memorable
gathering and encouraged by the wonderful progress which
the Administrative Committee has made in putting into action
the measures resolved upon, we are confident that our leaders,
with God's blessing, will solidfy the results already obtained
and remove any lingering doubt that a new era has truly
dawned.
RALPH HODGSON.
BY THKODORE MAYNARD.
HE first book of a poet is commonly his best.
Many a rapturous youth has been greeted with
delight for the promise of his initial artistic
essay, and has failed to fulfill his promise. The
lyrical impulse tends to work itself out rapidly,
to expend all its energy in its first flight. The minor poet
possesses no reserve force, and tends to grow more accom-
plished and less inspired as he grows older.
This tragic fate has even befallen those who are by no
means among the minor poets. It befell Swinburne, whose
quickly gained maturity steadily declined after his thirtieth
year. When so astounding a talent dwindled away into a
commonplace respectability, when all that magnificent rush
and riot became hardly more than a mechanical habit, there
is small wonder that lesser gifts are unable to sustain them-
selves for long.
Such is not the case with Ralph Hodgson. His first book,
The Last Blackbird, published in 1907, shows skill, but nothing
that one would expect to develop into genius. Indeed, it is the
skill, the assured skill, of The Last Blackbird that must lie
heavily upon the heart of the critic. Here is a young man who
has shot his last poetic bolt. We can praise his verses sadly:
praise them because the verses are good: sadly because they
are not suggestive of better work to come.
Nevertheless the critic has been confounded, for Mr.
Hodgson has completely cast away and renewed his skin. He
has not merely developed; to all intents he is become a new
poet, apparently owing no debt to his past.
If, however, we look back (with the wisdom that arrives
after the event) to Mr. Hodgson's early volume, we will be able
to see, I think, some hints of the peculiar quality that this poet
has made his own. Here and there lines are to be found that
are more than clever, a whimsical note half-heard, a cadence,
a trill, preludes to a great burst of song. These stir, as birds
in a bush, in the opening of "The Winds," a poem which, like
1920.] RALPH HODGSON 731
so many poems in the book, is made out of a metrical device
that is not only rigidly formal, but rigidly conventional.
Great scutcheoned moths with velvet hoods,
And moths whose wings bore no device,
Blundered out of dusky woods.
Constrained by some rare avarice
Or deeper sense not guessed by me,
To seek in flame their Paradise.
Bleaching fern and waning tree
Tired of these the willow-wren
Sang and slipped off oversea.
No medaled thrush for music then!
And the blackbird cock made melody
No more than his brindled hen.
Hour in, hour out, the dragon-fly
Raced his image in a ditch
Blue with cloudless undersky.
Here we observe an originality of phrase such as "Blun-
dered out of dusky woods," and an originality of image,
Hour in, hour out, the dragon-fly
Raced his image in a ditch;
but the technique masters the artist, not the artist the
technique. This is true of nearly all the pieces included in
The Last Blackbird; but among the exceptions to the rule may
be cited the ballad "St. Athelstan," where we see the poet
shaking himself free from his bondage, and beginning to ac-
quire that easy mastery over his medium which later was so
triumphantly vindicated in "The Song of Honor." Another,
though less striking exception, is the lyric "Thrown."
I'm down, good Fate, you've won the race;
Bite deep and break a tooth in me;
Nor spit your poison in my face,
And let me be;
Leave me an hour and come again
With insults new and further pain.
732 RALPH HODGSON [Sept.,
For of your tooth I'll make a pen,
And of your slaver ink, and will
I bring a joy to being then
To race you still;
A laughing child with feathered heels
Who shall outspeed your chariot wheels.
For the rest there is a good deal of ingenuity in Mr. Hodg-
son, in his first phase, not a few cunning tricks, a dash of
humor, and an apprehension (perhaps the most hopeful sign
of future power) that things are not entirely satisfactory with
him. A good stanza from his long (too long) poem entitled
"My Books:"
Books of travel; books of sport;
Books of no or some or great
Theological import;
Books about affairs of State,
is followed by an exceedingly bad stanza where the writer is
over-concerned with his facile cleverness:
Near the "Wit's Interpreter"
(Like an antique Whitaker,
Full of strange etcetera),
"Areopagitica."
"The Erring Muse," "An Elegy Upon a Poem Ruined by a
Clumsy Metre," and "The Vanity of Human Ambition and Big
Behaviour," are interesting as showing that Mr. Hodgson did
not feel a complacency which has ruined hundreds of artists.
Otherwise these three poems seem to be a fuss about noth-
ing. They are not without flashes of humor, but they are long-
winded, forced and exceedingly tiresome. In one of these oc-
curs the quatrain:
Go to ! I will to Prose and win his favor.
Too soon my lyric wine is at the lee;
Too soon my lyric salt hath lost its savour;
I will to Prose and pray him succor me.
Fortunately Mr. Hodgson did not carry out his threat for,
ten years after the publication of The Last Blackbird, he gath-
1920.] RALPH HODGSON 733
ered together all of his work that he wished to preserve and
brought it forward under the title of Poems. Separate poems
had been published in the form of broad sheets and were well-
known, but not more than half a dozen of such poems had ap-
peared in a decade until the last slim volume, which had
been announced some lime in advance, eventually saw the
light. Upon Poems, a tiny collection of the work of ten years,
Ralph Hodgson's reputation rests. It is about a third of the
size of The Last Blackbird, but it has set its author among the
leading poets of the day. And so little does Mr. Hodgson
think of the larger volume, that he has taken care that it shall
never be included in the bibliographies inserted at the end of
"Georgian Poetry." It sold, I am told, about twenty copies
upon publication, and the poet is no doubt glad to know that
it did not become more widely known. He has been freed
from Juvenilia, and will, I fear, not be grateful to me for hav-
ing disinterred The Last Blackbird's skeleton. I have done so
for a definite critical reason, and to do Ralph Hodgson honor.
It would be difficult to find another instance, unless pos-
sibly that of Gray, of so much fame arising from so thin a
sheaf of verse. I cannot believe that Poems contains the
whole of Mr. Hodgson's output during a period when Tagore
has written a score of books! No doubt infinite care has been
taken to set the finishing touch to every song, but even so a
great deal of work must have been suppressed to leave an ex-
quisite residium. By taking thought stature if not bulk has
been added unto.
The chief point to notice, however, is not that Mr. Hodg-
son has allowed only his finest work to go before the world;
not that he must have suppressed a crowd of lyrics; but what
has been suppressed in the lyrics of which the poet is not
ashamed to confess himself the father. The Last Blackbird
was overloaded. In that book the unessential was not cut
away so sternly as in Poems. Ralph Hodgson has learned
how and what to omit, and the result is an absolute clarity.
Mr. Davies also has a good deal of this knack of clarity (de-
spite his awkward syntax), but Mr. Davies does not use the
blue pencil or the knife. In the whole of Poems there is not a
word that is unnecessary or that is not perfectly apt. As an
example of this effective economy I will take "The Swallow,"
which ends abrupt and complete in the middle of a sentence.
734 RALPH HODGSON [Sept.,
The morning that my baby came
They found a baby swallow dead,
And saw a something, hard to name,
Flit moth-like over baby's bed.
My joy, my flower, my baby dear
Sleeps on my bosom well, but oh!
If in the autumn of the year
When swallows gather round and go
Coming now to a consideration of the main body of Ralph
Hodgson's work we shall, if we inquire what is its most char-
acteristic note, find that it is that of praise. I speak of the
matter and not of the manner of his poetry, though these are
(as in all great art) bound together; so that the poet's ecstasy
of gratitude rises above and succeeds in transforming Christo-
pher Smart's fine but frigid stanza scheme, with which he
works, into a new and a marvelous artistic instrument. This
is "The Testament of Bcautysprite," an excellent, rapturous
thanksgiving: from it I quote two separate but related
passages :
I heard the universal choir,
The Sons of Light exalt their Sire
With universal song,
Earth's lowliest and loudest notes,
Her million times ten million throats
Exalt Him loud and long,
And lips and lungs and tongues of Grace
From every part and every place,
Within the shining of His face,
The universal throng.
* * * *
The music of a lion strong
That shakes a hill a whole night long,
A hill as loud as he,
The twitter of a mouse among
Melodious greenery,
The ruby's and the rainbow's song,
The nightingale's all three,
The song of life thai wells and flows
From every leopard, lark and rose
And everything that gleams or goes
Lack-lustre in the sea.
1!)20.] RALPH HODGSON 735
Ralph Hodgson is not theological, yet his attitude is very
religious. The whole creation is pressed into singing "The
Song of Honor" to make up a sort of compendium of gratitude.
Nothing is too lowly or loo exalted to escape, for
God loves an idle rainbow
No less than laboring seas.
In "The Bride," as a background to the picture, stands the
patience of Providence of which the poet is conscious while he
writes :
I thought of you sweet lovers,
The things you say and do,
The pouts and tears and partings
And swearings to be true,
The kissing in the barley
You brazens, both of you!
I nearly burst out crying
With thinking of you two.
It put me in a frenzy
Of pleasure nearly pain,
A host of blurry faces
'Can shaping in my brain,
I shut my eyes to see them
Come forward clear and plain,
I saw them come full flower,
And blur and fade again.
One moment so I saw them,
One sovereign moment so,
A host of girlish faces
All happy and aglow,
With Life and Love it dealt them
Before it laid them low,
A hundred years, a thousand,
Ten thousand years ago.
One moment so I saw them
Come back with time full tide,
The host of girls, your grannies,
Who lived and loved and died
To give your mouth its beauty,
Your soul its gentle pride,
Who wrestled with the ages
To give the world a bride.
736 RALPH HODGSON [Sept.,
In "Eve" we have again as a background to the picture
Providence, but now it is the tragedy of Providence frustrated.
This is didactic criticism, so I hasten to add that Mr. Hodgson
invariably avoids the didactic, which however much in place
in the critic would be ruinous to the poet. It is difficult to keep
clear of the entangling nets; one would think it would have
been impossible in a poem whose subject was the Fall of Man.
But the consummate artistry of Mr. Hodgson achieves the im-
possible in a triumph far more amazing than the technical
skill displayed in the haunting music of the verse itself. It is
even more amazing than that superb stroke of the infernal
toasting of Eve with which the poem concludes:
Picture that orchard sprite
Eve, with her body white,
Supple and smooth to her
Slim finger tips,
Wondering, listening,
Listening, wondering,
Eve with a berry
Half-way to her lips.
Oh had our simple Eve
Seen through the make-believe!
Had she but known the
Pretender he was!
Out of the boughs he came,
Whispering still her name,
Tumbling in twenty rings
Into the grass.
Here was the strangest pair
In the world anywhere,
Eve in the bells and grass
Kneeling, and he
Telling his story low . . .
Singing birds saw them go
Down the dark path to
The Blasphemous Tree.
* * * *
Picture her crying
Outside in the lane
Eve, with no dish of sweet
Berries and plums to eat,
1920.] RALPH HODGSON 737
Haunting the gate of the
Orchard in vain . . .
Picture the lewd delight
Under the hill tonight
"Eva!" the toast goes round,
"Eva!" again.
It might be pedantic to read into "The Bull" which to-
gether with "The Song of Honor" and "Eve" make a central
group of supreme excellence among Mr. Hodgson's poems the
ideas of Providence and of Praise; or to assert in so many
words that God is as mindful of a dying bull as of a sparrow
falling to the ground. But at the risk of pedantry, I will say
that I think that these ideas dig their philosophic roots amid
the tangled undergrowth and the towering trees of a tropic
forest. A certain grimly powerful and unpleasant realism has
concealed the poet's intellectual intention. But the realism is
only the accidental circumstance here. For the realist turns
away from the loathsome vultures and flies gathering round
the dying chieftain of the herd, in whose dim brain are pass-
ing dreams that are memories of his prime, and in turning
refers the particular to the universal in a dirge over mortality.
Pity him that he must wake;
Even now the swarm of flies
Blackening his bloodshot eyes
Bursts and blusters round the lake,
Scattering from the feast half-fed,
By great shadows overhead;
And the dreamer turns away
From his visionary herds
And his splendid yesterday,
Turns to meet the loathly birds
Flocking round him from the skies,
Waiting for the flesh that dies.
VOL. cxi. 47
THE PEARL OF PARAY.
BY L. WHEATON.
T is part of the character of the Saint of Paray to
stand aside in the shadow until the great devo-
tion of which she was the apostle had spread over
the entire world; until the noble basilica, its
universal monument, was completed, and Incar-
nate Love, the Living Fact symbolized by the flaming
Heart, was given by Papal decree to little ones and all the
world as daily Bread; for the Pascendi Gregis of Pius
X. is the crown and consummation of Margaret Mary's work.
Then the shy and diffident Beata stepped into the blaze of
glory prepared by her "tremendous Lover" for the devoted
creature whose mission was an anguish, its incentive a con-
suming joy.
The great women saints are all stamped with their own
individuality, illumined by grace. Teresa, Catherine, Ger-
trude, Paula, the Foundresses, the nuns down to the unique
Bose of Lisieux, each has her particular beauty and force of
character, natural charm as well as supernatural gifts, and by
their writings and personal history they have determined the
opinion of posterity as to the separate flavor or quality of their
sanctity. We can find the woman in the saint.
But here is one, undistinguished, indeed insignificant,
colorless, meant to be so, clumsy even stupid in the commonest
domestic offices, no not stupid love is never stupid but ex-
tremely unfortunate in her disposal of the convent crockery,
in her unsatisfactory sweeping of the cloister, in anything she
was given to do. It is only in the retrospect (and all the de-
positions were made in the afterglow when her cause had
triumphed) that her sisters explain her abstraction and awk-
wardness by her helpless thrall to Love. She was just an un-
interesting girl hopelessly enamored, dazed, preoccupied, con-
sumed by the divine favors. "I saw Him, I felt Him near me,
and understood Him much better than if I had seen and heard
Him with my corporal senses." How could she see the cob-
web in the cloister when Some One stood between her and
1920.] THE PEARL OF PARAY 739
her work? How could she hold the plate in her wet hands
when she was trembling with joy, how could she thread her
needle when her eyes were clouded with tears of immeasur-
able happiness? The only explanation of her singularities is
that she was beside herself with love; and being ignorant of
any theological theory of her experiences, she simply took
what came, bewildered with the delight, confused by the hu-
miliation of the external consequences of her abstraction; for
like all finer souls, she was sensitive and not unaware of the
strange impression she was making on her little cloistered
world.
These Divine favors began in her novitiate days. That
dear and wise Mother de Saumaise, who guided her during the
difficult period of the Revelations and who brought her into
spiritual relations with Father de La Colombiere, had not yet
come to govern Paray, and even she, at one time, was puzzled
by her though she loved and trusted her. Now, before her
profession, the question arose as to whether she had the sim-
plicity necessary for a Visitandine; holy as they recognized her
to be, had she their "spirit?" Poor Margaret Mary! The fact
was that she was simplicity itself and her spirit was of God,
with nothing to spoil it; but her conduct certainly was, to the
general eye, queer. She turns to her Divine Lover with wist-
ful reproach: "It is You Who are sending me away. You
draw me altogether to Yourself and I cannot do things like
others." And yet she cannot give up this secret life for any
inducement. Our Lord tells her to let her Superior know that
He will make her more useful to the order than she can wish,
"metis d'une mftniere qui n'est encore connue que de Moi."
Who has had so extraordinary an influence on the whole civil-
ized world as this useless, absent-minded girl? And to her
order she is its perfect star.
The ways of Christ with His hidden favorites are as varied
as their own characters and history. With Magdalen and the
beautiful soul of Margaret of Cortona, He is gentle, careful,
exquisitely delicate. He shields them from the least wound,
they must never be hurt by man's scathing tongue. His deal-
ings with them reveal one aspect of His human character.
With Gertrude He is munificent, outpouring of His love in
response to her warm nature; with the ankress of Norwich,
the Lady Julian, homely and tender; with Catherine intimate
740 THE PEARL OF PARAY [Sept.,
to the point of apparent identity; with Teresa royal, mag-
nificent, melting; but with Marguerite, who had none of the
gifts of these others, He was baffling in the extremes of tender-
ness and severity.
First He made the diffident girl His very own by such a
siege of her unlessoned heart as she could not resist. She
was inebriated with the torrent of His pleasure. She would
when she had the chance, and this occurred often in her pro-
fessed life, kneel for seven and twelve hours at a time, per-
fectly motionless before the Blessed Sacrament, oblivious of
time and life, feeling, as she said, as if she had no body. And,
when questioned by her Superior as to what took place during
those hours, she went through the anguish of trying to tell
love's secret. At first, as on the occasion of the rapture fol-
lowing her profession, she says guardedly: "C'est en ce jour
que mon divin Maitre voulut bien me recevoir pour Son
epouse; mais d'une maniere que je me sens impuissante d'ex-
primer. Seulement je dirai qu'il me parlait et traitait comme
une epouse du Thabor." And in the midst of these hidden
tokens of His secret love, she was being treated with scant
consideration and a sort of irritated toleration by those about
her; never was she satisfactory, never useful:
Sharpness me save
From being slain by sweet.
The charm and external dignity of her sister saints was
necessary for their special mission. Here it was neither neces-
sary nor expedient. Our Lord once took her little heart and
placed it in the burning furnace of His own; and there she
saw it, but a tiny shining speck in all the glow. She did not
matter essentially. She was as official in her uses as the priest
who brings down the Presence on the altar. She was the
little typist taking down the divine dictation; the insignficant
messenger proclaiming the great message. No one must
notice the medium till she has served her purpose, then the
untold glory of heaven and earth. A Teresa might have dis-
tracted by the exceeding grace and human power of her own
splendid personality; a Catherine might have confused the
eye with that strangely recurring divine resemblance. Any
other of the divine confidantes might have been too lovely with
visible sanctity and natural gifts to do this special work. But
1920.] THE PEARL OF PARAY 741
here is only Psyche awaiting all her color and life from Love :
Feeling her nothingness her giddiest boast
As being the charm for which He loved her most.
She was the little gypsy maid sued from her hedge by the
High King:
For far off royal ancestry betrayed
By some wild beauties to herself unknown,
Some voidness of herself in her strange ways,
and by that voidness offering the nothingness which is capac-
ity. The Lord of her heart is alternately alluring and master-
ful; she is bewildered with delight, annihilated with majesty,
joyfully tremulous under the severity of correction, "kiss'd and
beaten, too," He gives her all that can keep her soul enthralled,
controlled, possessed by Him.
Yet ever and anon through the years of her painful ex-
ternal life, between the onslaughts of that imperious Love, she
falls back upon her poor self dismayed at that situation in
which His crushing commands have placed her. It is the
strangest, indeed the most interesting in its sharp contrasts,
of all those complete and ultimate romances which furnish
the hagiography of the Church, full of heavenly paradoxes
and apparent inconsistencies, so secret and so public, the in-
strument so incapable, yet so exactly right; the shrinking
dread of the surface existence, the palpitating delights of that
hidden and almost uninterrupted intercourse, the anguish and
the joy; the secluded Burgundian town and the world-wide
apostolate; the great basilica of Montmartre looking down on
the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them, and the
little Visitandine church, separated by a grille from the mon-
astery. Here at curfew come the village folk for their night
prayers, conducted by the cure, who mounts the pulpit, candle
in hand and prays audibly with them, pausing for thefr
examen of conscience, then sends them away with a blessing.
Silence and darkness fall upon this sanctuary, the heart of all
the world, as Rome is its head.
One looks at the altar and remembers Who came forth
from the sacramental mystery and made His plaint to the
adorer at the grille. He will always have His way. He wants
human love; she must get it for Him; she has done so. She
has carried to the farthest ends of the earth the message of
742 THE PEARL OF PARAY [Sept.,
His Heart. It is the Renaissance of Love and she, who was
the drudge, "I'esclave," as she called herself, is now the
Princess Royal of that Heart with which in life she was in-
fatuated.
It is almost impossible to write of such love as this. "None
but Thyself can utter Thee throughout all days." If only the
stiff phraseology of the time could be converted into the lan-
guage of the Discourse after the Last Supper of which, indeed,
it is the supplement, it would be more simple and impressive.
What the Saint understood in the depths of her soul or heard
in some ineffable way in those divine colloquies, she has had
to translate retrospectively into phrases which may almost
sound rhetorical. But it is not the terms of the devotion, but
the power that lies behind the great promises that has made
it so magnificent and world-wide a success.
The humble Saint overwhelmed by the caresses of this
Spouse of Thabor is conscious that she is bearing no likeness
to the Crucified, "tout dechire and disfigure sur le Calvaire."
He tells her : "Luisse Moi faire chaque chose, en son temps, car
je veux que tu sois maintenant le jouet de A/on amour." Con-
versely, she would reply in exactly the same spirit, although in
a different tongue:
Thy love has conquered me;
Do with me as Thou wilt,
And use me as a chattel that is Thine.
Kiss, tread me under foot, cherish or beat,
Sheathe in my heart sharp pain up to the hilt,
Invent what else were most perversely sweet.
Go as Thou wilt and come! Lover divine,
Thou art still jealously and wholly mine.
The great difficulty in discovering our Saint lies not in the
paucity of matter regarding her, but in the immense quantity
of authentic documents which are so ostensibly written in the
afterglow of her triumph. In the Tablet of May 22d, Father
Martindale has thrown his unerring searchlight upon this
figure, obscured by conventional biography; and he fearlessly
tells us what he sees :
There is but little charm in Margaret Mary; rarely light
heartedness; merriment rarely; unless I err, never a sense
of humor. Dare I suggest, with utter reverence for a saint
whose help I have always asked, that without overwhelm-
1920.] THE PEARL OF PARAY 743
ing grace, she would have grown up in easy circumstances
empty headed and frivolous; in hard conditions stupid and
cowed? In her is no trace of originality nor of independ-
ence . . . Nothing is more forced and reforced upon her
by direct consciousness, by Superiors' admonitions and by
revelation, than her personal futility; her inadequacy even
for ordinary life, still more for a public, enduring Church-
wide mission. Blank canvas before God, Christ's wax, His
toy, His hand-ball; so will she feel herself. We shall not
wonder then to find in the expression of her highest visions
even that she is colloquial constantly, ungrammatical at
times, awkward and ill-arranged in style is a personal
matter merely no turn of phrase, no mannerism, no tiniest
sentence unmarked by the purest conventions of the
seventeenth century. Never, alas, I feel was there a period
of so sincere an artificiality.
The classicism of the French Renaissance was exuberant
and showed true temperament; that of the Empire was
shoddy imitation; this singular seventeenth century,
though points of originality project both in its austerities
and in its decoration, was extraordinarily obedient to its
own conventions, and of its children none more so than this
Saint. She reflects almost textually her authors. The same
rhythm, metaphors, false antitheses, conceits even, whether
it is she who speaks, or the Saints, or Mary, or Our Lord.
That she could understand. So by a tender condescension,
Our Lady to Bernadette spoke patois. Is all this super-
cilious? Please God, far from it. I believe Our Lord meant
exactly what He said when He repeated to her that by an
instrument wholly inappropriate, he meant to renew His
Church. I feel that the abstract Saint that Margaret Mary
too often seems, woos us but weakly; the very simple, very
frightened, often unhappy girl bidden to speak Christ's
secret to the world and to "renew His Church," is a figure
of enthralling pathos; and her one power of loving, with all
it meant of suffering and obedience, vindicates a thousand
times the better when we see the lack of all the rest, our
humble veneration.
While this is true of her in her strained and unnatural
childhood, her lonely girlhood and early years in religion,
when, indeed, "delight had taken pain to her heart," it is also
true that her later years were tranquil and externally dignified
and honored. One notices during this time, too, how much
744 THE PEARL OF PARAY [Sept.,
more natural and affectionate she is in her correspondence
with Mere de Saumaise. She is her "unique Mere," her
"toute chere et tres aimee Mere," while the redoubtable Mere
Greyfie who sifted the Saint as wheat, is "Ma tres honoree
Mere." She has been nervous and unlike herself under dis-
trust and dislike and miscomprehension; if it had not been
for the Unique Amour de son Ame, she would have withered
under the blighting influence; and now that anxiety and sensi-
tiveness were over, she moved from her false position into her
true place.
There is in Monsignor Bougaud's gracious and enlightened
biography of the Saint, a little picture as frontispiece, which
I like to think a sort of soul sketch of her. It has not the gen-
eral holy picture expression. The peculiar delicacy of mouth
and chin gives it a separate look as of some individual. It is
inexpressibly touching and, although obviously a fancy print,
it has caught the timid refinement of her character, and some-
thing of the infatuation of her heart. It might easily be the
Margaret Mary known in secret only to the One.
The historic setting of her life from 1647 to 1890 is not
without its interest. Father Martindale calls our attention to
her feminine contemporaries who are also her antitheses, al-
though of Jansenism and Quietism she probably knew nothing :
Does it seem ridiculous to set the gentle Visitation nun
against Angelique Arnauld? So naive a soul against a
Madame Guyon? ... To the rigorist she offered Christ
Compassionate; to the mystic absorbed in the Divine, the
Human Heart, the Man. And the more discarnate that de-
votion to the Word, self-emptied, annihilated as you will,
the more it needed safeguards in the Homeliness of Jesus.
There was also the contrast between St-Cyran and
Father de La Colombiere. Of all this, too, she knew nothing;
but she once remarked in a letter that she perceived a "strange
spirit of pride" prowling round the Visitation. The fires of
Paray would eventually melt the ice-bound influence of Port
Royal, but news from Paris came slowly down her way, and
she may never have heard of that stronghold of distrust.
Neither did she realize the character of Louis XIV., idealized
by her loyal Burgundian heart as the true son of her "Sacri-
ficateur" who had confided to her a message for him which,
1920.] THE PEARL OF PARAY 745
had he acted upon it, would have made all the difference to
himself and to history. It was not until on several occasions,
when the Superior had told her to represent the King in adora-
tion before the Blessed Sacrament, she experienced a storm of
temptation new to her innocent heart, that she was dis-
illusioned.
Of her time, too, were CorneilJe, Racine, Moliere, also
Bossuet and Fenelon. In England, Vaughan was still singing
his mystic songs. Crashaw had laid down his pen and his life
at Loreto. Milton was writing his Paradise Lost and Samson
Agonistes; he died in the year of the first Revelation; Bunyan
was compiling his Pilgrim's Progress, Dryden was drifting
Romeward, Swift was growing up, a bitter youth indeed; Pope
was beginning his poor sickly life under all the drawbacks of
a papist and a cripple; Addison and Steele were at the Charter-
house. All these facts seem irrelevant, yet they help to make
scenery and contrast. France was extreme in holiness and
wickedness; England was sauntering along the comfortable
via media which she had chosen for herself, with side issues
of high principle and righteousness and also of wickedness
and luxury, but never in quite the superlative fashion of
France. Herbert, Donne and Vaughan (Crashaw is unique)
were the sum of the religious feeling of England ; Jeremy Tay-
lor was over against Bossuet and Fenelon. The years of our
Saint's life included the execution of Charles I., the Titus Gates
Plot, and the Revolution in 1688, and these last events touched
very nearly certain souls who helped to make the far more
important inner history of that half century.
Familiar as is the account of the Revelations to the mil-
lions of the lovers of the Sacred Heart, who follow in the wake
of Margaret Mary's discipleship, no passing sketch can be
written of her without giving them the central place of interest,
for on these Revelations depends the world-wide devotion.
After the Saint had been prepared by love and pain, the
only vital experience of our human nature, for her great work
the Man-God committed to her the writing of what might be
called a new gospel of which she was to be the shy evangelist.
She was now irrevocably and entirely in His possession and
pliant to His Will. She understood His Human Nature in Its
own separateness of character; Its tastes, Its distinctive ways,
Its unbounded love. Now that He has made her, as it were,
746 THE PEARL OF PARAY [Sept.,
at home with His divinely Human Personality, He trusts her as
His own who will be altogether true, and intelligent with the
perfect intelligence of love. He confides to her the secrets of
His Heart. If He has allowed her to be humbled for Him, He,
lover-like, humiliates Himself to the point of confessing His
trouble of heart at the sight of man's indifference to Him. He
lowers Himself to stoop for our unwilling love, and trusts His
appeal for it to this simple nun. She is seasoned by love and
suffering and understands, and flings her whole self into the
abyss of His desire.
Her account of the great Revelations which have changed
the soul of the world wherever they have reached, was written
long after the time and in the diction and manner of her cen-
tury and country. Yet we can read between the lines that
there are ineffable things she cannot tell, the look, the pose,
the separate play of feature, the recurring gesture that makes
the Loved One so exquisitely familiar, and the same; the
movement of lips and eyes peculiar to just One Person; His
separate Humanity; His unique Beauty; His Ways, His Voice,
all the overpowering charm of that satisfying Presence, how
can she make these felt out of her stilted language? Perhaps,
even, such conventional phraseology is a relief, for it hides
the delight of her personal secrets, while she obediently fulfills
her mission. For love is of its nature secretive; and to publish
Love's desires is but to invite each individual soul to Love's
secret delight. Yet to her who knew so well His hidden, lovely
ways; whose sequestered bliss was too sacred to confide to
dull words if even she could find them, the whole recital is
anguish and reluctance, the reluctance of the secretly beloved.
"It is for Thy love alone, O my God," she began, "that I sub-
mit to write this in obedience, and I ask Thy pardon for the
resistance I have made. But as no one but Thyself can know
the extent of the repugnance I feel, so it is only Thou that
canst give me the strength to overcome it."
The truth of the following recital, taken from the Saint's
own words, has been authenticated by the Holy See. Jesus
Christ, true God and true Man, has come again visibly to the
world He died for to ask in person for the love of His creatures.
It is the greatest event since Pentecost; it is the interpretation
of the Eucharistic Presence, its symbol and supplement and
representative in the ordinary life of the world that lies out-
1920.] THE PEARL OF PARAY 747
side our churches. The Reformation and all that went with it,
separated religion from life: distinguished God from Love.
This devotion unites again what should be one. The ofiicial
character of Saviour and Redeemer, becoming more and more
abstract and remote, is merged into the living, personal Man-
God Who wants our intimate selves in the character of the
passionate Lover.
The zeal of the Apostolic age, the heroism of the cata-
combs, the intensity of eremitical and monastic life, the child-
like faith and fervor which lived and blossomed into sanctity
in the stormy Middle Ages, had been succeeded by the poison
of the Renaissance, the chill of the Reformation, and the
paralysis of Jansenism. He was forgotten, ignored, mis-
understood as He had not been in those ages of affirmation and
childish passion. Indifference is the one unbearable insult to
the lover: it is what breaks the heart. This is the substance
of the great Plaint that He is ignored : of the great Demand-
that His creatures whom He has left free, will give Him their
unconstrained love. He almost kneels to the heart He has
created free; He is the Kingly Mendicant of His subjects' alms.
Nor is this any new plea all through the Old Testament runs
the same Almighty desire for man's love.
"My child, give me thy heart." Promises, threats, per-
suasions succeed one another to gain the will of man to His
will. "You are My servant, whom I have chosen that you may
know and believe Me, that I Myself Am. I am, I am He that
blot out thy iniquities for My own sake; and I will not remem-
ber thy sins. Put Me in remembrance, and let us plead to-
gether; tell if thou hast anything to justify thyself." "O poor
little one, tossed with tempest without all comfort ... in a
moment of indignation have I hid My Face from thee, but with
everlasting kindness have I had mercy on thee." It is all in
the same strain of anxious desiring love. "As one whom the
mother caresseth, so will I comfort you and you shall be
comforted."
The first of the three great Revelations took place on the
Feast of St. John the Evangelist, 1673. The Saint writes:
"Once, being before the Blessed Sacrament and having a little
more leisure than usual, I felt wholly filled with the Divine
Presence, and so powerfully moved by it, that I forgot myself
and the place in which I was. I abandoned myself to this
748 THE PEARL OF PAR AY [Sept.,
Divine Spirit and yielded myself to the power of His Love.
He made me rest for a long time on His divine breast, where
He discovered to me the wonders of His love and the inex-
plicable secrets of His Sacred Heart, which He had hitherto
kept hidden from me. Now He opened it to me for the first
time, but in a way so real, so sensible, that it left me no room
to doubt, though I am always in dread of deceiving myself.
This, as it seems to me, is what passed : The Lord said to me,
'My Heart is so passionately in love with men that it can no
longer contain within itself the flames of Its ardent charity.
It must pour them out by your means, and manifest Itself to
them to enrich them with Its precious treasures, which con-
tain all the grace they need.' He added, 'I have chosen you as
an abyss of unworthiness and ignorance to accomplish such a
design, so that all may be done by Me.' " It was on this oc-
casion that He drew her heart into His. She speaks of the ex-
perience as one which lasted so long that she did not know
the time nor whether she was in heaven or on earth. "I re-
mained several days wholly inflamed, wholly inebriated." She
was speechless. When she was led to Mother de Saumaise
she could scarcely utter a word.
At last her life resumed its accustomed course and she
passed six months of quiet happiness, when during the Octave
of Corpus Christi the second Revelation took place. "Once
when the Blessed Sacrament was exposed, my soul being ab-
sorbed in extraordinary recollection, Jesus Christ, my sweet
Master, presented Himself to me. He was brilliant with glory;
His five wounds shone like five suns. Flames darted from all
parts of His Sacred Humanity, but especially from His ador-
able breast, which resembled a furnace, and which, opening,
displayed to me His loving and lovable Heart, the living source
of these flames. He unfolded to me," she continues, "the in-
explicable wonders of His pure love, and to what an excess He
had carried it for the love of men, from whom He had re-
ceived so much ingratitude. 'This is,' He said, 'much more
painful than all I suffered in My Passion. If men rendered
Me some return of Love, I should esteem little all I have done
for them, and should wish, if need be, to suffer it over again;
but they meet my eager love with coldness and rebuffs. Do
you at least console and rejoice Me by supplying as much as
you can for their ingratitude.' "
1920.] THE PEARL OF PAR AY 749
This is the best the Saint can do to make known in words
the import of the great experience in which, probably, no ordi-
nary speech was used. Our Lord asked of her to make
amende honorable by communicating every First Friday, and
by rising an hour before midnight on Thursday, to make rep-
aration to His wounded Heart for the sins of men and to con-
sole Him for the desertion of His Apostles.
The vision brought on a severe fever. Mother de Sau-
maise, perplexed but ever affectionate with the Saint, told her
to ask of God her restoration to health, promising that she
would recognize in her cure the sign of the supernatural char-
acter of all that had taken place, and that she would allow her
to make the First Friday's Communion and the hour of prayer
on Thursday night. Margaret's health was restored and the
Superior's promise was kept; but Mother de Saumaise was still
uneasy. She finally consulted some "learned people," accord-
ing to the old Memoires, and came to the conclusion that in
Margaret Mary's case there was "much imagination, a little
natural temperament, and perhaps even some illusion of the
evil spirit so skillfully disguised that the good Sister could not
perceive it."
Just at this juncture a promising young Jesuit with a repu-
tation for holiness arrived at Paray. Mere de Saumaise asked
this Pere de La Colombiere to give the nuns a conference, and
it is probable that she took the opportunity of placing her
perplexity regarding the young nun before him. He was ap-
pointed extraordinary confessor and when the Ember Days
came, Margaret presented herself before him. It was the right
moment, between the second and third Revelation, when her
situation was particularly painful. The Father was most kind
to her and offered to see her again the next day; but Mar-
garet's natural reticence held her and she gave an evasive
answer. In a few days, however, he returned and asked for
her. "Although I knew," she said, "that it was the will of
God for me to speak to him, yet I felt extreme repugnance in
answering his summons." All her reluctance disappeared,
however, in the wise and sympathetic encouragement of the
Father, who told her that she had every reason to thank God
for His goodness to her. This passage will show the nature
of the conversation :
"When I told him that my soul was pursued so closely by
750 THE PEARL OF PARAY [Sept.,
the Sovereign Goodness without regard to time or place, that
I could not pray vocally without doing myself violence so great
that I sometimes remained with my mouth open unable to say
a word . . .he told me to make such efforts no more and to
confine myself to my vocal prayers of obligation. When I
told him something of the special caresses and loving union
of soul I received from my Well-Beloved, and which I cannot
describe here, he replied that I had great reason to humble
myself and to admire with him the wonderful mercy of God
in my regard."
Many wondered why the gifted young Jesuit was sent to
an out-of-the-way place like Paray; in the sequence of events
the reason is plain. When, after the third Revelation in which
Our Lord told her that she must cause a Feast to be established
in honor of His divine Heart, Margaret asked : "Lord, how can
I?" He told her to address herself to that servant of God who
had been sent to her expressly to accomplish this design. It
was in this third Revelation that Our Lord spoke again of the
ingratitude and coldness which He met with in the Sacrament
of His love, adding, "And what is most painful to Me is that
they are hearts consecrated to Me."
The Life by Hamon 1 deals very fully with the condition
of things in the community itself. Hardness is the sin of the
professionally good : some of these nuns were saints with true
holiness of heart; most of them were rigorous observers of
their rule, but the Master Whom they served with external pre-
cision, was not altogether pleased with them. They thought
more of their own perfection than of Him. Their dealings with
the Saint on the occasion of her public act of reparation, re-
quired of her by Our Lord and which nearly cost her her life,
were certainly unkind to the point of harshness. The measure
of love to Him by what we do to "the least of these," was a
very scant one among some of her sisters. At the same time it
must be admitted that the less virtuous were somewhat justi-
fied in their irritation, when poor Margaret Mary, after beg-
ging off over and over again, was sent, under threat of the
Divine displeasure, to present herself as a victim of reparation
for them. It was the hardest thing she ever had to do this
diffident, humble creature. She knew exactly what would
happen if she did it; she felt its external appearance of cool
1 M. L'Abb6 Auguste Hamon, Litt.D., and Laureate of the French Academy.
1920.] THE PEARL OF PARAY 751
conceit and foolishness, but, she did it: one always has to pay.
She had given at last her all for the AH.
There comes in every dedicated life one supreme crucial
test, in which heart and spirit are crushed and broken only to
be restored to a risen life. The reluctance of the Saint who
cried with her Master, "Let the chalice pass," is encourage-
ment to souls who feel themselves weak and unheroic, and arc
called to do difficult and heroic things. The great thing is to
go blindly on and get it over, even if with shrinking and alarm.
On Friday, June 21, 1675, Sister Margaret Mary and Father
de la Colombiere consecrated themselves solemnly to the
Sacred Heart, and the Great Devotion began. The Jesuit was
then sent to England as almoner to the Duchess of York, Mary
Beatrice of Modena. Thus did the devotion take its rise in
that chilled atmosphere of heresy and oblivion. The Duchess
was a willing disciple, and it is good to know that in the midst
of those perilous times when feeling ran high on the subject
of the Duke's Catholic marriage and his own religion, the
private Chapel of St. James' Palace was the tiny field where
the seed of love was sown in England. Little is recorded of
the young Jesuit's work in London. He preached two Lenten
courses, as well as a sermon every Sunday and festival in the
Chapel Royal.
He wrote from time to time to Mere de Saumaise, who
sent him short notes and messages from Margaret Mary, but
his letters treat more of the Saint at Paray than of his own
affairs. He admired the Duchess as a "Princess of the deepest
piety. She communicates weekly and even oftener, and
spends an hour every day in mental prayer. Her dream is to
found a Convent of your order in Flanders for English girls."
After her own misfortune had driven her back to the Conti-
nent, it was she who first of all the clients of the Sacred Heart
petitioned the Holy Father, in 1697, for a Feast in Its honor.
It is in England especially that the last development of the
devotion, the Enthronement of the Sacred Heart in families,
has been. most rapid. It is the end of what was begun in the
King's Palace.
Part of Margaret Mary's mission was to see that a picture
of the Sacred Heart was to be enthroned in the palace of kings.
The first should have been at Versailles but, by a strange chain
of circumstances, the English forestalled the French palace.
752 THE PEARL OF PARAY [Sept.,
Pere de la Colombiere's health broke down in the fogs of a
London March, and he was expecting to return to France, when
a note from Margaret Mary warned him of fresh trials and he
remained to meet them. She referred to the Titus Oates Plot
and its consequences.
It makes things seem very near and familiar to link up the
inner and outer history of that special period. Several of the
Jesuit's friends were executed, and after three weeks in prison
he was banished. As his ship sailed out of English waters, he
prayed: "Thou knowest, O Lord, that at a word, at the slight-
est intimation from my Superiors, I am willing to return to
that shore to work and to suffer. Does Thy justice require yet
another victim, take my life." And in will he joined the
ranks of English martyrs indeed, almost in fact, for he died
of consumption, contracted in his English gaol. It is such
sacrifices as these that make the background of the great con-
versions of the nineteenth century.
The only amusing anecdote in the very serious biographies
of our Saint is one which tells of a book of Father de la Colom-
biere containing "Notes of a Retreat," published after his death
by the Jesuits. The nuns were so eager to hear it that the good
Superior, to please them, had it read aloud in the refectory
before looking over it herself. Sister Rosalie Peronne de
Farges, one of Margaret Mary's novices and devoted disciples,
was reader on the occasion of its completion and "stumbled
unexpectedly" upon a certain passage, the biographer records,
but as she would have prepared the reading, she more likely
had a playful intent. This passage was a manifest allusion to
the Saint of whom he speaks as "a person to whom God has
communicated Himself very intimately, and to serve whom
He has graciously pleased to make use of my weakness." He
then proceeds to give an account of one of the Revelations.
Sister de Farges glanced furtively at Margaret Mary, who sat
opposite her in the refectory. Her eyes were lowered; she
looked annihilated. The Community were stirred with emo-
tion. Rut the young reader was of a daring and merry spirit
and whispered to the Saint as she left the refectory : "Aha, my
dear, have you heard your manifestation in the reading today
to your heart's content." Then she added at the Deposition,
"Saintlike, she bowed her head and replied that she had great
cause to love her abjection."
1920.] THE PEARL OF PARAY 753
It is enough to read in Protestant histories and encyclo-
pedias any account of our Saint to realize the strange and un-
natural ideas connected with the devotion, which in some
respects lent itself to misunderstanding. But it was of Divine
origin and it spread swiftly, universally and in perfect accord
with its meaning. Rome, indeed, was slow to give the author-
itative recognition so ardently desired, but the flame became
a conflagration and after enveloping France and Spain spread
into the Orient. In 1733 it was in Constantinople; in 1740 in
Lebanon. The Saint's life, translated into Arabic, was cir-
culated through the plains of Coele Syria from the great
Hermon to the Baltic at Macao in Pekin, in the heart of the
imperial palace.
But nowhere is its history so poignantly interesting as in
the very centre of French pride and licentiousness, the palace
of Versailles. The fall of two English kings, one by decapita-
tion and one by exile, brought the widow of Charles I. and the
banished wife of James II. to Paris, and these two women,
with the Duchess d'Orleans and the neglected Queen of Louis
XV. were the first of those devoted souls who, as in the time
of Our Lord, gave Him hospitality and response. Henrietta
Maria laid the first stone of the Chapel to the Sacred Heart
erected by the Visitandines in Paris. The devotions of the
First Friday and Act of Reparation were there and then
established. Through the Princesse de Lorraine, Sceur Marie
Eleonore was a Visitandine, the court became educated in this
new expression of love the court, but not the king.
In the midst of the scandals of Versailles, side by side
with those infamous salons, there were little oratories of the
Sacred Heart where the devout members of the Royal Family
could hide and pray. One of Margaret's difficult missions had
been to tell Louis XIV. that he must establish the devotion in
the Palace and throughout his kingdom and army. Through
Mere de Saumaise some part of her message must have reached
Versailles, but the king and his successor were not of the sort
to care for the things of the soul, and it seems to have glanced
on the royal family. Marie Leczinska and her daughters, of
whom one, Madame Louise, of France, entered Carmel, the
devout Dauphin and his saintly young wife found the Chapel
of the Sacred Heart, which the heir to the throne had erected
in the Palace itself, a place of refuge.
VOL. cxi. 48
754 THE PEARL OF PARAY [Sept.,
But the most pathetic part of this history of those royal
side issues, that which makes the most interesting reading, is
the manuscript confided by Louis XVI. to Pere Hebert while
in prison. The priest, himself in danger, made many copies
of it in case of its loss and it has been saved from destruction,
although Pere Hebert himself was executed. Overwhelmed by
misfortune, the king thought of the secret confided to his
grandfather by a Visitandine of Paray and remembering the
requirements ignored by two kings, he promised in writing
"to establish in canonical form a solemn Feast in honor of the
Sacred Heart of Jesus." And, in reparation for the profana-
tion and indifference shown It, "within three months, counting
from the day of my deliverance, to go in person to the Church
of Notre Dame in Paris or to any other principal Church of
the place in which I may be, and on a Sunday or feast, at
the foot of the main altar after the Offertory of the Mass,
pronounce a solemn act of consecration of my person, family
and kingdom to the Sacred Heart of Jesus with the promise
to give my subjects an example of the honor and love due this
Adorable Heart." He goes on to promise to erect and decorate
at his own expense a chapel dedicated to the Sacred Heart.
All during the Revolution, little pictures of the Sacred
Heart copied from those of Paray, were distributed in the
prisons: the Vendcans had them on their banners: Roche-
jaquelcin, Lescure, Charette bore them on their breast to
battle.
No account of this great Devotion would be complete
without a passing allusion to the Enthronement of the Sacred
Heart in the family, which indeed took its rise in the Novitiate
of Paray itself under the auspices of the Saint in her lifetime.
In 1907 Father Matthew Crawley-Boevey, the son of an Eng-
lish convert father, born in Peru, was cured of a violent form
of heart disease at Paray-lc-Monial. He received the inspira-
tion of more and more winning society to the Sacred Heart by
beginning with the unit of society, the family. Pius X. blessed
and encouraged the undertaking, and little by little at the cost
of almost superhuman labor and devotion, thousands and
thousands of families, of schools, of assemblies of all kinds
have been the witness of the solemn enthronement of the
authorized picture.
I was present once at one of these ceremonies
1920.] THE PEARL OF PAR AY 755
in the recreation room of a Convent school, and was deeply
impressed with its significance. Here the children studied and
romped and lived; here they said their night and morning
prayers; it was the assembly room of their school home and
there was Our Lord in the midst of them, not for formal wor-
ship, but as part of their life. Far more impressive must be
the same ceremony in the home, where Jesus Christ is part of
the natural life of the family; of its joys as well as of its sor-
rows, so that He shall be excluded from no phase of our
human existence. Deliciie mete esse cum filiis hominum. This
is the raison d'etre of the devotion. Our lives need not be
externally altered as to state and profession, but by this focus
of love and Attention as the central point of the household,
they will become deeper, richer, more significant to ourselves
and others.
The essential meaning of the Divine request is that Christ
may, by our own volition and conduct, be inside our life
all life not just that of the cloistered and consecrated, but of
every condition of humanity. He came not to destroy but to
vivify. Laughter and joy and human love are His as well as
tears; a child is as near Him in his game as in his study, be-
cause of the deep bond between them. He begs to be shut
out of nothing that belongs to the innocent life of His creature
not as restraint, but as inspiration, stimulus and repose. He
is the divinely Adaptable One, but he is something more: He
is the Inexhaustible Lover. It was St. Margaret Mary's Mis-
sion to make "L'unique Amour de son Ame" ours. Gloriously
has it prospered. It is for each of us to see to its intimate con-
summation.
THE CITY OF TOO MANY CALIPHS.
BY EDWARD FRANCIS MOHLER, LITT.B.
HE living Homer begged his bread; six Grecian
cities fought for Homer dead." Thus runs the
ironic caption on the vaingloriousness of the
world's praise, on the sloth with which it gives
merit its laurel. Since the world began it has
been the fortune of the artist to attain fame and moneyed
leisure when he has passed beyond the love for or need of these
things. Death strikes and the fulsome eulogy is spoken.
Homer agonized away his precarious, mendicant life in a
vain strife for bread to revitalize his poor bones, for raiment
to drape his nakedness. Death visited him and that which he
could not have in life was there abundantly when he needed
it not. Blakelock, the needy, the distracted, lived 'tis true, to
witness the anomaly of success which he could not grasp.
His family starved while he painted his very heart out un-
remunerated. Then came the distressing sight Blakelock's
pictures changing hands in New York auction rooms where
the unsympathetic elite foregathered to bandy lofty comment
and perchance purchase. But in the stressful interval Blake-
lock's travail of mind had sent him to a madhouse. The
hiatus between Homer and Blakelock could be filled with
thousands of instances illustrative of the merry-andrew antics
of life with the artist and man of genius.
In the year nineteen hundred and ten there passed William
Sydney Porter, the author of two hundred and fifty-one short
stories, whose large merits were little esteemed then, but
which are now the concern of belated literati. Life to O.
Henry was a curious hodge-podge, a wandering, an odysscy.
At times it was as prosaic as his nom de plume; at others it
took on all the elements of drama. O. Henry knew almost
constant illness; he went down the hard ways of worry and
trouble; finances came to him slowly, and with seeming re-
luctance, to leave on speedy wings generally in aid of someone
more needy than himself. Portions of his life were tame, even
drab, a day after day round of inglorious duties such as each
1920.] THE CITY OF TOO MANY CALIPHS 757
of us runs through in the mechanics of living. Portions, too,
were of a high adventure, which none to this day may under-
stand because O. Henry shunned publicity. Though life denied
this writer many tilings which were showered plenteously on
less appreciative ordinary mortals, by way of compensation it
gave him the ability to enjoy in others that which he did not
himself possess, the power to appreciate for them that which
they took so much for granted.
Several of O. Henry's interesting literary blood-brothers
have told how he prowled the world's greatest city in a search
of the thousand and one nights' adventures; how he sought out
curious individuals and made his own their stories; how Poe-
like he excursioned after oddities of city lore, and made the
city's whimsicalities, its temperamcntalness his own; how he
stored away the curious heart stories, the little side lights on
the city dweller's soul. The enjoyment, which he experienced
in this vicarious venturing, he good-naturedly passed on to his
readers.
O. Henry's life makes a brief chronicle. Several inexpli-
cable incidents which quieted his early youth, moved him to
shun mankind and limit his heart acquaintance to a carefully
chosen few. He was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, in
1867. Always delicate, a visit to Texas added to his youthful
experiences, but seemed to bring him no greater strength.
While in Texas he attended school and worked on a ranch.
As a young man he became a reporter on the Houston Post,
and there his keen wit, his "nose for news" immediately
showed itself. Together with a partner, he bought the printing
plant of Brann's Iconoclast, which was on the market, and for
a year edited The Rolling Stone. The name of the paper, as
well as its sub-title or motto ("Out for the Moss") sound like
typical O. Henry labels. Venturing too far into a field with
which he was not familiar, in other words, taking sides in a
political squabble between local celebrities, brought The Roll-
ing Stone sharply against a barrier. Thereafter it neither
rolled nor gathered moss.
After the failure of this journalistic enterprise, O. Henry
betook himself to Central America, where he became a wan-
derer, somewhat after the fashion of his later New York days.
Here his memory stored away local color which was later to
be brought to the surface in never-to-be-forgotten stories. On
758 THE CITY OF TOO MANY CALIPHS [Sept.,
his return to America he worked for a brief period in a Texas
drug store, then moved to New Orleans to undertake writing
for the daily press. Fame touched him and beckoned him to
New York City, and there he passed the last years of his life,
known only to a few cronies, unappreciated by the reading
public and somewhat scorned by critics. While still per-
petuating in story form the wonders of America's great cities,
O. Henry, the apothecary of human nature (as he has been
styled by Christopher Morley) attained to some measure of
success and fame. His stories were in great demand and
highly remunerated. But ill health took toll of his time,
friends of his money, critics of his literary worth. Like many
who had gone the same way, to O. Henry death brought liter-
ary canonization. Whereas twenty years ago it would have
been gauche or anathema for any critic of standing to dilate
on the beauties of this American slang-user, today the critic
who neglects to give unstintedly of his appreciation is cither
undiscerning or unjust.
In the space of ten years O. Henry mounted from nobody-
ism to a station among writers whence he could speak thus:
"THE CALEDONIA."
MY DEAR COLONEL G :
If you've got $100 right in your desk drawer, you can
have my next story, which will be ready next Tuesday at
the latest. That will pay half. The other half on delivery.
I'm always wanting money, and I have to have a century
this morning.
I just wanted to give you a chance at the story At Sum-
mer Rates, if you want it.
Please give the bearer a positive answer, as I'll have to
know at once so as to place it elsewhere this afternoon.
Yours very truly,
SYDNEY PORTER.
P. S. Story guaranteed satisfactory or another supplied.
There may be those who would elevate their cold, clas-
sically chiseled, disdainful noses at the tone of this intimate
O. Henry letter. These are the small-souled creatures who
would be able to resist successfully the appeals of any human
genius to their appreciation. The most melting appeal would
lose its fervor when exposed to their icy correctness. And yet
1920.] THE CITY OF TOO MANY CALIPHS 759
this letter reveals the writer's inner life as not one of his
stories does. It shows us the large-hearted man who was
always ready to suffer the inconveniences of a friendship, and
reward even a whispered supplication with help, which he
needed more than the importunate one; it demonstrates that
there was truth in the flippant comment passed on O. Henry's
inextricably mingled business methods and generosity, that
when Sydney Porter died all his friends seemed to O. Henry;
it explains why in some of O. Henry's stories there is a lack
of continuity between the beginning, the middle and the end.
Pressure of circumstances, the drive of others' wants, the
drag of ill health account for any unevenness of development
in O. Henry's work.
It remained for O. Henry to discover "The City of Too
Many Caliphs," New York City. By right of discovery he
made it his own, named it, and Columbus-like brought its
denizens to the light, displayed its wealth for a hesitant and
wondering world to admire.
He comes with vaudeville, with stare and leer.
He comes with megaphone and specious cheer.
His troup, too fat or short or long or lean,
Steps from the pages of the magazine
With slapstick or sombrero or with cane;
The rube, the cowboy, or the masher vain.
They overact each part. But at the height
Of banter and of canter, and delight
The masks fall off for one queer instant there
And show real faces; faces full of care
And desperate longing; love that's hot or cold;
And subtle thoughts, and countenances bold.
The masks go back. 'Tis one more joke.
Laugh on!
The goodly grown-up company is gone. 1
Whatever may be said of him, O. Henry never descended
to a society story. The gentleman, the vagrant, the shop girl,
the ousted politician, the worn-out favorite, the holder of high
places, the clerk, the lavish, the niggard all were one to him
for he had the magic single answer to all. His wonderful
power of quick and telling observation, his inner sense of dis-
1 "The Knights In Disguise," by Nicholas Vachel Lindsay, from General William
Booth Enters Heaven, and Other Poems. New York: The Macmlllan Co.
760 THE CITY OF TOO MANY CALIPHS [Sept.,
cernment enabled him to worm out a human story where
others would have found nothing.
O brave apothecary! You who knew
What dark and acid doses life prefers,
And yet with smiling face resolved to brew
These sparkling potions for your customers
Glowing with globes of red and purple glass
Your window gladdens travelers that pass. 2
Many of O. Henry's stories scintillate with genius; their
titles are strokes every bit as happy as the themes they name.
But there is in O. Henry mediocrity which arose through his
endeavor to write on any occasion under the most vexatious
circumstances. Many critics have been asked to compile lists
of O. Henry's short stories; these selections show a wide
variety which we may take to be indicative of the wide appeal
of his work. A summary of his belief in the universal kin of
human nature and its tendency to react favorably to a high
plane when it must burst through the husks of passion and
prejudice, is evidenced in his titular retort, "The Four Mil-
lion," directed at those who affrontingly maintained that there
were but "Four Hundred" worth while people in "The City of
Too Many Caliphs." But better than his belief in the universal
kin of mankind, lowly and exalted, honored and despised,
sanguine or downhearted are the short stories in which he
demonstrated this belief in miniature and yet quite spaciously.
William Marion Reedy testifies: "As a depicter of the life
of New York's four million club men, fighters, thieves, police-
men, touts, shopgirls, lady cashiers, hoboes, actors, stenog-
raphers, and what not O. Henry had no equal for keen in-
sight into the beauties and meanness of character and motive.
. . . He always had a story."
William Sydney Porter served as a knight errant for the
rescue of two disowned types of American fiction. The slang
character sketch had degenerated into stagey brands, which
finally found their damnation in stage delineations of the low
character comedian type. Porter took unto himself the slang
story and made of it a glorious thing. With his artistic touch
he did more for slang than its habitual users could; to them
it was an end in itself, to Porter it was a means. His innocent
* O. Henry, Apothecary, by Christopher Morley. New York: George H. Doran Co.
1920.] THE CITY OF TOO MANY CALIPHS 761
and unconscious invention, which must have been the result
of weary, sweaty hours, is the unconsciousness of the highest
art, something of the unconsciousness of plot which may well
be compared with the unconsciousness of the style of Newman.
Upon O. Henry's success with the slang story there fol-
lowed a myriad of imitators whose work served but as a fit-
ting contrast, apprentices laboring to attain the heights of
the master. The periodicals of today abound in the O. Henry
type of story, but their turns are mechanical, their surprises
stereotyped, their solutions piffling.
The melodramatic story, too, found in O. Henry a saviour,
and it was restored to its own. The wild and woolly West, the
filibustering expedition, the effervescent South American gov-
ernment, the thudding fall of wealth all the romance of the
world which might have been climacteric and in turn anti-cli-
macteric, he treated in a new way. He found their romance,
their wonders, their awesome aspects, but he wound his cords
of story in a new way, and separated them after a fashion that
no one has been able to copy creditably. O. Henry dreaded
pathos, perhaps, because it so often turns to bathos and be-
comes insufferable. He delighted in whim, wit and inversion
and some of his high and mighty themes evolved into goodly
jokes. With a single, sudden whirl of the theme the story,
which a less agile hand would have humdrummed into
mediocrity, became a delightful combination of surprises.
The cap-stone has been put to O. Henry's monument in a
thirteenth volume of his collected stories. 3 Titled as the author
would have wished, it contains the final O. Henriana, the last
stories he wrote, and a series of comments by some who knew
him and others who loved him.
1 Waifs and Strays. Garden City, N. Y. : Doubleday, Page & Co.
'SALVE MATER" AND THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH.
BY C. G. MAC GILL.
HERE is, in the Book of Common Prayer, a col-
lect which has been in the past a source of stumb-
ling to many worthy people. It contains this
clause: "Give us grace seriously to lay to heart
the great dangers we are in by our unhappy di-
visions." Just what it means is debatable. Some have claimed
that the "unhappy divisions" exist in the seamless robe of
Christ, and the reference is to a three-fold division of the
Catholic Church, and a further division into the sects of
Protestantism. Another version is that the collect refers to
strictly intra-mural conditions of Anglicanism. On the whole,
the weight of opinion seems to be with the latter view. Thereby
it is a sincere and worthy prayer. But it has been little hon-
ored in fact. The Episcopal Church has gone on instead re-
joicing in its divisions, almost bragging about them, calling
them evidences of breadth and true Catholicity. They own
themselves divinely appointed to lead all others who profess
and call themselves Christians into the true and only fold of
Christ. Yet within their own ranks there is no manner of cer-
tainty as to where or what that fold is.
Father Ronald Knox has said there are not three but seven
parties in the Anglican Church. Why he chose seven is not
precisely clear, save from the traditions attached to it. One
can pick out a dozen parishes in either New York or Boston,
to say nothing of any other cities, and find no two agreeing
in vital matters. One parish outdoes its steeple in the
"height" of its services, defies its bishop by openly practising
Benediction, and confession. Another has a "sung Eucharist"
as the principal service of the day, hears confessions in a cur-
tained corner behind the organ, and boasts a "Lady Chapel,"
where the "Blessed Sacrament" is perpetually reserved, that
is a feast to the beauty-loving soul that often hungers in the
ancient stronghold of Puritanism. A third has likewise a
"sung Eucharist," but according to the "Sarum rite," which
chiefly means a different color-sequence, and often a genu-
1920.] "SALVE MATER" AND EPISCOPAL CHURCH 763
flection after the "Invocation of the Holy Spirit" instead of at
the Words of Institution. This one practises "reservation oc-
casionally" and is a bit uncertain on the subject of Eucharistic
adoration.
And so on in infinite variety, down to the uttermost limits
of the mixed broad and low, whose services arc hardly to be
distinguished from the high-church Unitarians, who use a
fairly close imitation of the Book of Common Prayer, and
even sometimes have lights on the "altar."
The ways of God are many and unsearchable. Who
knows that He did not answer the collect for unity, and by
means of the conversion of Dr. Kinsman open the way for
Anglicans "seriously to lay to heart" their great dangers?
Something like this has apparently taken place. Dr. Kinsman,
his letter of resignation, and his book, Salve Mater, have been
clearing the air mightily.
Probably no one in the American branch of the Anglican
Church could have affected it more profoundly by "going to
Rome" than Dr. Kinsman. Never a "party man," scholarly,
lovable, well informed and devout, he occupied a distinct po-
sition among his fellows. His book, too, is of far more conse-
quence than as a record of a soul's pilgrimage to the City of
God, wonderful as that must always be; it is the record of the
failure of the whole ecclesiastical concept for which he
stood.
A Bishop occupies a peculiar position in the Protestant
Episcopal Church, quite as anomalous a position as the name
of the sect would imply. One of the reviewers of Salve Mater
takes Dr. Kinsman severely to task for saying: "My notion of
a Bishop was that one of his chief duties was to keep cheerful,
to be on the lookout for good work, to approve and encourage
those who were doing it, never to find fault when it could be
avoided, and always to lay stress on the bright side of things.
In my previous work I had for the most part been a cheerful
sort of person, and for a time I was able to keep this up in Dela-
ware. I liked my surroundings, made the most of any signs of
progress, did not mind difficulties so long as there seemed to
be movement in a right direction, and was thankful to have
my place and post so long as I was confident of the especial
work I was set to do. But the optimism was oo/ing rapidly by
the end of my third year.
764 "SALVE MATER" AND EPISCOPAL CHURCH [Sept.,
"This was not due to any specially trying experiences or
diiUeult personal relations ... So far as I was personally con-
cerned, things went well enough; but I came less and less to be
satisfied with the actual accomplishments of the Church in
teaching and training." 1
On the basis of the sentence first quoted, the reviewer con-
siders that Dr. Kinsman's trouble was that he did not put
enough energy into the work of his diocese, that if he had
devoted himself properly to the task in hand, he would not
have found his work so fruitless. The remark is a peculiarly
unkind one, because the reviewer knew Dr. Kinsman, and his
work in the diocese of Delaware.
The truth is, that save for a really small minority, the bulk
of the Protestant Episcopal Church, including the laity, still
considers bishops to be of the bene esse of the church, not the
esse. Dr. Kinsman's conversion has stirred up the troubled
waters among Anglicans mightily, but in no case perhaps
more strangely than on this very subject.
To show that Dr. Kinsman was not the only Bishop of the
Protestant Episcopal Church who felt the emptiness of his po-
sition, there is a striking article in the Churchman, the leading
organ of the low-broad party. It was published on July 26,
1919, about three weeks after Dr. Kinsman's letter of resigna-
tion was given to the press, and therefore could not have been
a direct result. In fact, it was one of a series of articles bear-
ing on the work of the coming General Convention of 1919, and
intended to set forth some of the difficulties and problems be-
fore the church. It is entitled, "The Episcopate in a Democ-
racy," an oddly significant title. Its author is the Rt. Rev.
Irving P. Johnson, Bishop of Colorado. Now Dr. Johnson is
a very brilliant man, an unusually good preacher, a man suc-
cessful in three different lines of work in which he has been
engaged in the last ten years. The writer has a grateful
memory of his sermons and the friendly atmosphere he created
around him in the large down-town parish of Gethsemane
Church, in Minneapolis. He ministered wisely and generously
in a beautiful church, to a shifting and mixed congregation,
in a section of the city once filled with fine residences, but
then given up largely to boarding houses. Gethsemane, al-
ways an "open" church, was a city of refuge to hundreds of
Salve Mater, p. 81.
1920.] "SALVE MATER" AND EPISCOPAL CHURCH 765
lonely souls. At the same time Dr. Johnson was lecturer on
church history at the Scabury Divinity School, in Faribault,
some twenty miles distant. Eventually, he resigned Gcthsem-
ane parish, and gave his work entirely to the Divinity School.
At the time, we wondered why. Gethsemane seemed to need
him. Now we wonder if the reason he left was not the same,
in miniature, which caused Dr. Kinsman's resignation. There
was a hint to that effect at the time. Perhaps Dr. Johnson
thought in the Divinity School he could make things move
faster. There is an objection to this interpretation, however.
Dr. Johnson was not, so far as one could discover, in the least
"high church." Perhaps one might most closely classify him
as a "moderate low." No ritualist, certainly. High matins
and low communion were the order in Gethsemane, but his
preaching was always sound, simple, and spiritual, that is,
he avoided the vice of lecturing to his congregation upon
economics, politics, or sociology.
After a few years at Faribault, he was elected a Bishop,
if memory serves, first to the missionary diocese of Western
Colorado. Affairs in the two Colorado dioceses were pretty
mixed, at the time, and it took a man of great good sense and
administrative ability, as well as of Christian courage, to go
there. Later, the two dioceses were reunited, under his leader-
ship, and he has well accomplished what was expected of him,
in his place. So much for the man, and the external aspects
of his ministry, his episcopate. But this is what he says of it,
after some years of apparently striking success: "(It) is still
true, that so far as actual authority goes, a bishop is more or
less of a figurehead, set up between two imposing ceremonies,
his consecration and his funeral; and if he attempts more he
is apt to find that he is a sign that is spoken against. As he
becomes more familiar with his oilice, he learns that so far as
self-supporting parishes are concerned, they are like self-sup-
porting sons, more or less of a law unto themselves."
From this, he goes on to show that a bishop is merely a
symbol, of what is uncertain, and ends with these tremendous
words: "Dressed up in the livery of Elizabethan England,
slaves to the atrocious tradition of a thoroughly secularized
episcopate coming down through the Georgian and Victorian
eras of bad taste, bad theology, and bad manners, elected to
be a sort of puppet ruler with many mayors of the palace,
766 "SALVE MATER" AND EPISCOPAL CHURCH [Sept.,
committed by our traditions to theories of power that are
purely fictitious, who will deliver us from the emptiness of
this bondage?"
There is nothing in Salve Mater so trenchant, so preg-
nant with the bitterness of failure.
The year preceding a General Convention of the Prot-
estant Episcopal Church is always a year of much troubling
of the waters, and deep searching of hearts, also, it must be
confessed, of much acrimonious correspondence in the church
papers. General Convention, be it known, is the court of last
resort in the Episcopal Church, in theory a lesser variety of
Ecumenical Council, or perhaps better, a body functioning in
place of an Ecumenical Council, because of the divided con-
dition of Christendom. In fact, it is mostly a junket of sundry
clergy and laity, who are pleasantly entertained in the con-
vention city, hear some more or less good addresses on as-
sorted topics, do a little squabbling in the so-called convention,
and accomplish practically nothing. On the few cases when
decision has been rendered, it has distinctly taken the Prot-
estant point of view. 2
It is perhaps worth while to cite here one of the most
recent refusals, that of the Convention of 1916, to allow the
inclusion of the Benedictus Qui venit in the Communion
Office, lest it lead to beliefs concerning the Sacrament which
General Convention was not prepared finally to accept.
Dr. Kinsman's resignation, coming as it did in a year al-
ready stirring with controversial life, pointing, as many rightly
guessed, to but one conclusion, brought the Anglican Church
up against the realities of its life as probably nothing in its
history has ever done before at least in America. A new
note is instantly perceptible. Dr. Kinsman becomes in verity
a touchstone, by which the church is led to test itself. Inevit-
able are the results. His letter to the Presiding Bishop, touch-
ing as it did on the fundamentals of the life of the church, and
hence its claim to be a true part of the Catholic Church, clove
deep, and laid bare the hollowness of the heart of Anglican
pretensions. Defenders of the Anglican position arose, of
course, especially and primarily the superior of one of the re-
ligious orders of men, Rev. S. C. Hughson, O.H.C., a man
2 This is a controverted statement, of course, but the one case cited to the
contrary, that of the "Reformed Episcopal" schism, is curiously inconclusive.
1!)20.] "SALVE MATER" AND EPISCOPAL CHURCH 7(57
whose hope and faith in the real catholicity of the Anglican
Church have been as fine and brave as they arc now pathetic.
But others of the mighty have fallen. One after another
they have abandoned the Catholic position. Ostensibly, this
change has been wrought by the proposed Concordat with the
Congregational Church. So we find the man who resigned his
place on the Board of Missions over the issue of the Panama
Conference, staling that the proposed arrangement with the
Congregationalists violates no principle of Faith or Order!
It takes a curious sense of logic to see how it fails to violate
every principle, but Dr. Manning says it does not!
The editor of the American Church Monthly, once dean of
the very "high" cathedral of Milwaukee, author of an excel-
lent booklet on the usefulness of confession in the Anglican
Church, writes an editorial on a "Pan-Protestant" Church, of
which he evidently approves, and from which he does not
clearly exclude the Protestant Episcopal. The editor of the
Living Church, the leading "high" weekly, goes over to Dr.
Manning's side on the Concordat, and when he sees the horror
in the eyes of his followers, defends himself with a smile, and
says that although it looks so he hasn't gone over to the
Protestant camp.
It is characteristic of General Convention that the Con-
cordat was not accepted, but postponed, because it was not
at the time expedient. The real questions it raised were simply
shelved.
To trace the effect of Dr. Kinsman's letter, and its results
in the Anglican papers, reveals this curious state of things.
Two of those journals may be taken as fairly representative
of the church at large, for the reason that, while taking each
its distinctive stand, neither excludes entirely articles favoring
the other party. A third, a monthly, is worth considering for
the eminence of its editorial staff, and its contributors. There
are others, like the Sewanee Review, rather ultra scholarly,
and the Holy Cross Magazine, which took the place of the
defunct American Catholic, when its editor, after the Conven-
tion of 1916, sought the True Fold. Knowing the "state of the
church," one can tell in advance what the Holy Cross Magazine
will say. There is also the Chronicle, violently anti-Catholic
in every way. This likewise will run true to form. There re-
main three whose attitude will embrace considerations by both
768 "SALVE MATER" AND EPISCOPAL CHURCH [Sept.,
sides, if necessary. The first is the American Church Monthly,
edited by Rev. Selden P. Delany, Associate Rector of the well-
known Church of St. Mary the Virgin, in New York. Of late,
it has been full of articles on the question of the real nature
of the Sacrament of the Eucharist. This magazine tries to
typify the inclusiveness of the Anglican body.
It is a monthly, which doubtless accounts largely for the
fact that no comment is made upon Dr. Kinsman's resignation
until the issue of February, 1920. This contains an article,
"Was Bishop Kinsman Right?" by Rev. Francis J. Hall, of the
General Theological Seminary, the one "official" seminary of
the Protestant Episcopal Church. His arguments are negli-
gible, may be read in any work of Anglican apologetics, and
he contributes but two items to the general condition of things.
One is his statement that the famous Thirty-nine Articles were
put forth as a peace-making platform. Unfortunately history
will not bear out Dr. Hall's attempt to thus belittle the Articles,
and their ultra-Protestantism and anti-Catholicism.
The second remark is hardly worthy of Dr. Hall, but of
course in the heat of battle men will say strange things, espe-
cially if they feel the sting of approaching defeat. He sums
up by saying that the substance of the matter is that Dr.
Kinsman was temperamentally unfitted for the strain of the
warfare between Catholic and Protestant, resulting from the
peculiar position of the Protestant Episcopal Church, and so
had fled from the field.
The Churchman is perhaps the most widely known of
Anglican papers in this country. Its editor is a clergyman, the
Rev. William G. Smith, and its position rather inclines to-
wards the low church position. However, it does not lean
heavily to any party, but tries to stand impartial towards all.
On July 19, 1919, it published Dr. Kinsman's letter, under the
title, "Bishop Kinsman's Apologia." In August two letters fol-
low, one quoted from a Wilmington paper, averring respect
for Dr. Kinsman, for his frankness, but saying that his state-
ments are misleading and inaccurate. The second letter is one
giving instances in support of Dr. Kinsman's contentions, such
as a case of the denial of regeneration in baptism, and the
Unitarian minister, an ex-Roman Catholic, who preached in a
certain Episcopal church in Holy Week.
It is manifestly appropriate that such a book as Salve
1920.] "SALVE MATER" AND EPISCOPAL CHURCH 769
Mater should be reviewed by one of Dr. Kinsman's former
colleagues. Bishop Hall, of the small and moderately pros-
perous diocese of Vermont, does so for the Churchman of
May 8th, in an article entitled "Vale and Salve Mater." The
aged Bishop, once a member of the Society of St. John the
Evangelist (Cowley Fathers), is peculiarly lilted for the task.
Only a bishop, and a bishop of a diocese not too unlike Dela-
ware in size and condition, could adequately cover all the
points in Dr. Kinsman's book, from the Anglican point of
view. Bishop Hall has for many years been a leader in the
"Catholic wing" of Anglicanism, a prolific writer, and much
beloved man. Until the last few years, Bishop Hall has been
a valiant champion of Catholic principles: of late he has
pained some of his friends by seeming to recede from his old
positions, especially in regard to the nature of the Eucharist.
Bishop Hall considers Dr. Kinsman's episcopate as a rather
continuous process of disillusionment. "Delaware, though
he (Dr. Kinsman) speaks most appreciatively of the kindness
he there received, seems to have exerted a most depressing in-
fluence. Doubtless he did not find as much response as he
looked for to his teaching. Perhaps he might have thrown
himself more thoroughly and perseveringly into the work
of spiritual leadership, instead of allowing himself to be chilled
by a complacent apathy. Instead of fighting irreligion, care-
lessness, and misbelief, he seems to have shrunk into an atti-
tude of critical if not cynical aloofness, than which nothing
can be more fatal to sanity of spiritual and intellectual judg-
ment."
To one who remembers Dr. Kinsman as an Anglican
chiefly for his courageous leadership, this hardly seems a fair
judgment. And considering Bishop Johnson's article, quoted
above, and that gentleman's own energetic disposition, still
further question is possible.
Dr. Kinsman's remarks on the subject of the Sacrament of
Penance and the Episcopal Church seem to Bishop Hall very
unfair. To others they will seem most temperate, and to state
the case with almost over-scrupulous charity. Most Anglicans
who have adopted the practice of confession possess a stock
of stories about their experiences in attempting to approach
the sacrament away from their accustomed confessor. They
range from many instances of flat and even indignant refusal
VOL. cxi. 49
770 "SALVE MATER" AND EPISCOPAL CHURCH [Sept.,
to incidents where the penitent longed to give the confessor
pointers on the proprieties of the matter! And this latter in a
case where the "priest" was ostensibly in the church for the
purpose! In this matter, Bishop Hall is certainly not on as
secure ground as Dr. Kinsman, who rightly says that "there
is a degree of doubtfulness about a representative and official
act, not officially provided for, but left to the individual
agent's discretion or whim."
An odd condemnation, considering the actual state of
affairs, is that in Dr. Kinsman's statement that he should have
felt obliged to admit to ordination a man whose views he felt
were doctrinally unsound. It is only a few weeks since one of
the most prominent members of the Anglican episcopate said
in a public address that he did not care in the least what a
man's views were, that he would rather ordain a man who had
no special beliefs, so long as "his heart was right." That is
the sort of thing, of course, that Dr. Kinsman was "up against,"
like a brother of a western diocese who refused to admit to
the diaconate a young man not only unsound in faith, but also
doubtful in morals. The youth merely transferred his affec-
tions to another bishop, less nice in such matters.
At the end of his review, Bishop Hall sounds what every
Anglican considers the most telling note in the whole defence
Is Rome right because there are some faults, even grave
ones, in Anglicanism? The educated Anglican at this point
will bring out a vast array of miscellaneous heresies claimed
to have been held by all sorts of learned men, chiefly in the
fourth and fifth centuries. The more sensible apologists rest
their case upon what they term "modern abuses," like indul-
gences, infallibility, "mariolatry," and the "pagan cult of the
Blessed Sacrament." Low churchmen will include celibacy
of the clergy, and the Immaculate Conception. (A few still
confound that with the Incarnation.) Probably also they will
add confession, but the old horror of the "mutilated sacra-
ment" has now to be laid aside, since the "Massachusetts use"
has become so popular. Indeed, among the laity the common
chalice has long been an object of fear and dread, so much so
as to furnish an instructive comment on their real faith.
This type of argument is the court of last resort. It is
invariable, and forms an impasse between the mind illum-
inated by faith, and the one still outside. Once that gift is
1!)2().] "SALVE MATER" AND EPISCOPAL CHURCH 771
received, the force of such "proofs" disappears like dew before
a July sun. For, of course, such considerations have little to
do with the real fact of conversion. Those who use that kind
of an argument on Anglicans who are beginning to seek the
light are likely to defeat their own ends. Two wrongs never
yet made a right, and the inquirer is going to say next, if that
is all you can offer, I don't think your accusations in them-
selves can be worth much. As Father Maturin once said :
"Nothing would justify one's leaving the English Church but
a belief that it was no true part of the Church of Christ." And
nothing ever does. But to this end, the facts about the An-
glican Church are rightly used.
The editor of the Churchman sums this up to a nicety in
the same number, when he says, in an editorial entitled "The
Protestant Strand," that the most significant thing about Dr.
Kinsman's defection "is not that we lost him through his lack
of understanding our virtues; it is that he did understand them,
but that they did not satisfy him. His temperament requires
that non-ethical and magical view of grace which Rome is best
fitted to serve.
"The Protestant Reformation did something to the Church
of England. In Dr. Kinsman's estimation it maimed it for
keeps. We think it saved it, and what saved it was not some-
thing imported from Germany. So much Protestantism as the
church contains was evolved within the Church of England
itself by the Holy Spirit. Those who accept this Protestant
strand in Anglicanism are not made unhappy by the defection
of Dr. Kinsman, nor do we trouble our minds greatly over his
difficulties except by way of sympathy for those whose con-
sciences bid them do hard things. His type of Christian can-
not get what he wants in the Episcopal Church because the
Episcopal Church does not teach that kind of Christianity.
You cannot make it teach that kind of Christianity without
fundamentally changing the nature of the church. The argu-
ments needed to appease men of that type seem to the or-
dinary Episcopalian so metallic, so far-fetched in spiritual
interest that he cannot bring himself to delve into ecclesiastical
history for balms to sooth Dr. Kinsman's wounds. We really
can't soothe them. He ought to go where his wounds can be
permanently healed and not reopened again and again, as is
bound to be the case in the Episcopal Church.
772 "SALVE MATER" AND EPISCOPAL CHURCH [Sept.,
"Those who protest that we really are the kind of a
catholic church which ought to have satisfied Dr. Kinsman
may find comfort in the thought, but again and again they will
see their theories bruised by facts facts colored irrevocably
by something that happened to the world during the Ren-
aissance."
Is comment necessary, upon the condition which per-
mitted these words and Bishop Hall's review to appear in the
same number of the same paper?
The Living Church was the iirst paper to review Salve
Mater, on April 17th, but for reasons which will be apparent,
we have left it till the last. The editor is Mr. Frederic More-
house, a layman, and a high churchman. His paper has been
cordially disliked by the low and broad wings, not only be-
cause he represents the opposite points of view, but because
he is a trenchant writer, and a well-armed combatant. To him
Dr. Kinsman's loss was, of necessity, a personal matter. Hence
probably the fact that all through his editorial he sounds the
personal note. At the outset, therefore, he finds it "easy to
sum up Dr. Kinsman's difficulty in a single sentence; Delaware
church life did not illustrate to him the Catholic conception of
the Church which he had taught in the seminary and accepted
in the study."
The statement may seem somewhat invidious in regard to
Delaware, and is still more so when it is noted that Dr. Kins-
man was not the first "high" bishop of Delaware. He inherited
the work and teachings of twenty years of Bishop Coleman's
episcopate. Mr. Morehouse would not have to leave his own
diocese, nay hardly his own city of Milwaukee, to find facts in
support of each of Dr. Kinsman's experiences.
Mr. Morehouse admits the force of the argument from
observations upon Anglicans, but insists it is false, nor will he
admit that Dr. Kinsman proves any of his contentions. In
fact, Mr. Morehouse goes so far as to call Dr. Kinsman's criti-
cism of the ordinal preposterous, in spite of the fact that many
of the Anglican clergy inclined to high pretensions studiously
evade discussion upon the subject, and many writers, from the
days of the Elizabethan settlement down, have denied any in-
tention on the part of the church in her formularies to create
"mass-priests." So grave is the doubt, indeed, that we have
heard a suggestion seriously made that the Anglican Church
1920.] "SALVE MATER" AND EPISCOPAL CHURCH 773
should seek a sort of uniat relation with the Roman Catholic
Church on the basis of the conditional reordination of her
clergy. And this, in the diocese of Milwaukee.
One phrase of Dr. Kinsman's especially catches Mr. More-
house's eye. This is what might he called the myth of the
superior education and learning of the Anglican clergy, espe-
cially as contrasted with the Roman Catholic. It is almost a
dogma with Anglicans. He who is suspected of Romeward
leanings is assailed by the subtle suggestion : "Oh, but the
Roman priests are such dreadfully uneducated men." New-
man, in his Loss and Gain, and Benson, in the Papers of a
Pariah, refer to the same odd conception. Dr. Kinsman found
how mistaken it was through the Catholic Encyclopaedia.
The personal equation again appears in Mr. Morehouse's
reference to Dr. Kinsman's introduction. He says of it : " 'A life
that has ended.' What a comment on what has gone before!
... 'Received into the Communion of the Roman Catholic
Church.' What is involved in the way of renunciation and re-
pudiation Dr. Kinsman does not say. Perhaps again his intel-
lect refused to do his bidding.
"Be that as it may, we desire to pay our tribute to him at
the close of 'a life that has ended.' Bishop Kinsman was one of
the finest characters that have adorned the American episco-
pate. With few of our fathers in God has the editor of the Liv-
ing Church seemed to have so much in common. His leader-
ship we always welcomed. His learning we always respected.
Scarcely a person, withdrawing from the communion and fel-
lowship in which he had played so fine a part, could admin-
ister such a blow as he, could wrench the ties of affection so
effectively.
"We part with no word of condemnation, and with criti-
cism only of the things he has written. The 'life that has
ended' was a life of uniform beauty, of much service, of great
promise for still greater opportunity."
But the most significant thing in Mr. Morehouse's review
is not the pain in these words of farewell, which must be
echoed in the breasts of thousands of other troubled and be-
wildered Protestant Episcopalians whose souls have caught
glimpses of the Lord in His beauty. Rather it is this, a verity
that many Catholic-minded Anglicans have found for them-
selves, and followed also to their peace. "Dr. Kinsman's fate
774 "SALVE MATER" AND EPISCOPAL CHURCH [Sept.,
is that of a man who lives only among books, who is suddenly
forced to live among men, and who finds, then, that he had
not prepared himself for the actual world of people as they
are."
Herein lies the sum and substance of the whole matter.
As Dr. Kinsman himself says, most "Catholic" Anglicans con-
sider that their ways and their party represents the truth of
Anglicanism, and that the rest of the church is but a "low
and lazy" lot towards whom he has missionary responsibil-
ities. Brought up under a certain type of clergyman, devout
rather than ritualistic, and choosing, on travels, only churches
of the "high" type, a most sincere soul may easily never real-
ize the truth about Anglicanism at all. Dreadful stories will
come his way, of course, about wine remaining in a chalice
after communion being turned back into a cruet, for why, no
one can tell, since the rubrics distinctly direct otherwise; of
Unitarian ministers assisting in the giving of communion, and
so on, stories that may easily be put down to exaggeration,
and careless retelling. But, by the mercy of the Holy Ghost,
let such a soul be put into a situation where he must face the
facts, and he is on the horns of the dilemma.
If the Anglican Church be Catholic, these people are
guilty of the most horrible sacrilege, for they cannot be held,
at least the clergy, to be ignorant of the law as expressed in
the formularies of the church. Certainly the "priest" who does
or permits such things docs not discern the Lord's Body. On
the other hand, such men are truly justified in their acts by
their interpretation of the church and her formularies, which
say, according to their view, that "the sacrifices of masses, in
the which it was commonly said, that the priest did offer
Christ for the quick and the dead, to have remission of pain
or guilt, were blasphemous fables, and dangerous deceits." If
the real Body and Blood of Christ be not present, then truly it
is idolatry to pay such respect to the elements as Catholics
do to the Sacred Species. But, if there is a real absence rather
than a Real Presence, then it is no part of the Catholic Church,
and the soul who believed itself to be in communion with the
Catholic Church finds its faith vain. The facts have come full
circle, and there is but one thing to do, accept the fact of the
Protestantism of the church, or seek the True Fold at once,
on the peril of one's salvation.
1920.] "SALVE MATER" AND EPISCOPAL CHURCH 775
Dr. Kinsman faced these facts, as he says himself, not only
in Salve Mater, but elsewhere, from the day of his consecra-
tion as bishop. As rector of a parish, under the real Congre-
gationalism prevailing, he had such control of conditions as
would prevent mishaps. In his previous school experience,
and later seminary teaching, he dealt with a world of his own
choosing. It is easy, under such circumstances, being of a
charitable nature, to believe the best of the rest of the world,
and to hold things by no means so bad as they are painted.
That he tried honestly, long and earnestly, to fulfill his epis-
copal oath, and square his theory with the facts he met, is
much to his credit, as a man full of long-suffering, and pro-
found love and loyalty to her whom he held for his spiritual
mother. Is it any wonder that in his relief and gladness, and
joy, that he should name his book in a very shout, Salve Mater?
Did Mr. Morehouse realize all he said when he wrote
those words? The "ornaments rubric" is not the touchstone
of faith, but these vital matters, of the substance of the faith
itself.
Dr. Kinsman and his book have become indeed a touch-
stone for the Anglican Church. Bishop Hall calls it the best
presentation of lax conditions and failures in the Anglican
Church, in existence. Another reviewer calls it a mass of
details. It is a book that no one but a man who had Dr.
Kinsman's complete knowledge of the life of the Protestant
Episcopal Church could have written. Yet there is really very
little detail. It is a picture on a broad canvas, of masses of
light and shade. And as Bishop Hall points out, it is a warning
that the Protestant Episcopal Church can no longer drift. She
must make up her mind.
That this opinion is by no means confined to Bishop Hall
has been shown by an examination of the church papers since
the announcement of Dr. Kinsman's resignation. One writer
states in so many words that the church is in a state of up-
heaval. A plea by a prominent clergyman in the General
Convention of 1919 that the church should incorporate into
the Book of Common Prayer a statement of the principles for
which it stands, was refused, on the ground that such attempts
in the past to define doctrine and state principles had caused
schism. The editor of the Living Church questions whether
any such definition made by General Convention would have
776 "SALVE MATER" AND EPISCOPAL CHURCH [Sept.,
power to bind the Protestant Episcopal Church. Here he is
doing a bit of special pleading, for in the state of opinion
represented in the General Conventions since that of 1910,
any such definition would inevitably go against the "high"
party. He is in perfect agreement with that militant "high"
rector who, in September, 1916, on the eve of General Conven-
tion, told his parish that if, as many felt there was cause to
fear, General Convention should declare the "Reservation of
the Blessed Sacrament" to be illegal, they need not dread the
loss of the presence of their Sacramental Lord among them,
for the custom of the parish would be continued in spite of
General Convention. Could Protestantism go further?
Another clergyman, writing on the rubrics, says that no
one pretends to obey them all, and that the church must move
in a direction of elasticity and broader tolerance and liberal-
ization. The revision of the Prayer Book calls forth protests
on account of alleged attempts on the part of the Commis-
sioners to introduce sacerdotalism, and an episcopal member
replies hotly that no such thing is intended, in fact that so
long as confirmation is practiced, all are made priests.
The high churchmen have not lacked voices. The Holy
Cross Magazine has been full of articles advocating and de-
fending the adoption of Catholic practices. The Superior of
the Order of the Holy Cross has drawn the wrath of many
opponents upon his head, and has been frankly told to get out
and go where he belongs. In fact, in the Churchman of De-
cember 27th, commenting on one of his articles, the statement
is made that Reservation for the purpose of adoration is
illegal in any branch of the Catholic Church.
Dr. Kinsman has not been the only leader of the "Catholic
wing" to throw consternation into the ranks by his defection.
Two others, influenced doubtless by his act, have declared
themselves. But they have both been on the other side. The
proposed Concordat with the Congregationalists has been
fathered by the Rev. Dr. Manning, once willing to give up his
place and power in many important posts in the Church, in
order to bear witness to his indignation over the Panama Con-
ference. He has also declared himself against the legality
as well as the propriety and desirability of the reservation of
the Blessed Sacrament. Unfortunately, there is a measure of
dubiety and disingenuity in his attempt to involve the Society
1920.] "SALVE MATER" AND EPISCOPAL CHURCH 777
of St. John the Evangelist, through a letter written by an Eng-
lish member, for an English paper, but promptly repudiated
by the Father Provincial in America, and by the Father Su-
perior General in England; and in certain statements of prac-
tices in Dr. Manning's own parish and its many chapels. Dr.
Manning is entitled to a change of opinion, as well as Dr.
Kinsman, without such adventitious aids.
The second is the editor of the Living Church himself.
He has not yet admitted it fully, and even expresses wonder at
those who were amazed at his eleventh hour conversion to the
Concordat. But the fact remains, that his trenchant pen has
weakened, and he can no longer write as he once did. As he
said in his review, Dr. Kinsman dealt him a personal blow,
than whom no one could have dealt a heavier. And for his
hurt there is but one healing. Neither he nor the editor of the
American Church Monthly longer hope or perhaps desire
the "change of name" to "American Catholic Church" for
which both once fought. The best they can offer now as a way
out of the hated "Protestant Episcopal" is "Protestant Catho-
lic" church!
The truth, historically and actually, in the light of the
present day, is that the Church of England-by-law-estab-
lished, and her daughter, the American Protestant Episcopal
Church, and other related bodies, is thoroughly Zwinglian and
Congregational, dressed up in some old clothes adopted and
inherited from various sources. The vast bulk of the laity
and great majority of the clergy have always accepted this as
fact, and do today, whatever a few writers like Laud and
Pusey may have said. And official action has quite uniformly
been on their side. Dr. Kinsman has done a great service in
drawing the issues so clearly that the church must take pause
to consider her ways, and even of more importance, that the
clear of thought and devout of heart must see themselves at
the cross-roads of faith, and ask, in humility of heart, "Lord,
what wilt Thou have me to do?" God grant that neither pride
nor prejudice may dull their hearts to His answer.
THE HOLY HOUSE.
BY ELIZABETH BARNETT ESLER.
IF you can bring yourself to leave
Ancona by the sea,
Then go upon a fete day
The Holy House to see.
Be sure to take the white highroad
As 'twere a friendly hand,
'Twill lead you with a kindly grace
Through that most lovely land.
There will be pilgrims going
Up with you all the way,
Some gentle folk and peasants,
Grave priests and lovers gay.
You'll see the little children
And hear their calls of glee,
As they dance up from Ancona,
Ancona by the sea.
They'll be veiled and crowned with flowers
Like may-trees in a mist,
And the sweetness of their faces
Your heart can not resist.
White rings of bread they'll carry
To be from hunger free,
For it's far from Ancona,
Ancona by the sea.
That little house was never built
In the garden where it stands,
Nor was it brought from Palestine
By any human hands.
1920.] THE HOLY HOUSE 77<>
The holy angels carried it
At night time on their wings,
And now it's full as it can hold
Of many precious things.
It was Our Lord's first temple
Where he was worshipped free,
Mary the first adorer,
Her God upon her knee.
When they lived in old Nazareth
Down there in Galilee
Far, far from fair Ancona
Upon her azure sea.
So enter now all chastely
And reverently see,
Pray first for your immortal soul,
But also pray for me.
Observe the holy quiet
Of the dim and sacred place,
And when you leave, may God bestow
Upon us all His Grace.
But I wish I might go with you,
Whoever you may be,
When you journey to Ancona,
Ancona by the sea.
THE BAPTISM.
BY L. MAC MANUS.
HE tinker's wife held the week-old baby under her
shawl. She had youth, a face slashed red-brown
by the winds, and hair whose weight and length
made her desire at moments to tear it from her
head. Her right hand clenched, was pressed
against the child. The fingers clutched the shilling her hus-
band had made.
He was on ahead with the tribe and the donkeys. And
his command had begun and ended with an oath. She was to
linger on the way; pass the counterfeit coin and bring him ten
true minted coppers. As she walked she weighed her chances;
it was night; shop-lights were dim; she could tell those easy
to deceive. Other people were on the moonlit road; well-
dressed groups, their faces set one way, all hastening to the
Mission. She caught glimpses of prayer books; of serious ex-
pressions as if many had fixed their thought upon the soul-
worlds and sins that hooked into the memory. Then one
woman looked back, "That's likely to be a tinker's wife," she
said.
To be labeled would have been nothing at another time to
the tinker's wife. The words would have passed her ears as
lightly as the wind. But there was the coin. If she and her
tribe appeared to have no connection it would be easier to pass
it across Pat Vahy's counter. She worked it up her palm till
she got it between her finger and thumb. She could feel the
rough edges of the letters; the English king's head. The touch
gave her confidence. It had been made in a good mold and
had the shining whiteness of silver; Teige was clever.
The child mewled under her arm: and at the sound she
worked the coin back again to the palm, and tightened her
clasp on the flannel-wrapped lump. On ahead she saw the
spire of the church, standing among the lower stars, and the
halves of the roof, white on one side and black on the other.
Her eyes roamed among the groups. The women, in all the
fashions, were going to the church in their pride, and the men
1920.] THE BAPTISM 781
in suits that Tcigc could never have the like of they were
going, the lot, to listen to the missioncrs, and hear the judg-
ments. She felt a stirring like the hard flapping of wings
within her.
The heat of the child's body seemed linked with the heat
of her heart; and its wail a demand that a wide place should
be made for it, too, in the world. For a minute the mother
felt as if she could have torn the hats from the women's
heads, the fine clothes from their bodies. Her unchristened
child was to go ragged and barefoot, sleeping in the wind-
bent hut, or beneath a cart if it rained, cursed and beaten,
cursing and beating back again. Then her gusty rage passed.
It was a grand free life after all, with fun in it and fresh air,
not like the choking lodging houses, and good food and drink
when the men had luck. And she herself was clever at getting
a hen when the farmer's wives were not looking, and at snap-
ping up a thing here and there. And the tinker lads had
praised her hair when she was a cailin, and many had wanted
her for a wife. She had had the choice of ten, and she had
taken the best; a man in his strength; with the craft of a
coiner. And it was she who came out first in the fights with
the women. It was not a month since she had torn the hair
from Nancy Ward !
Then again she seemed to feel the heat of the child's body
kindling lights on its way to her heart. Little tapers of love;
and the woman sp near the earth as her soul walked along
that dim path felt its immortality. Her soul met the child's
soul. She looked once more towards the church. When she
had passed the coin, she would have the baby baptized.
Pat Vahy's door was closed. But it went a little back as
she touched it, and the opening widened to her pressure. A
purple-faced man behind the counter was turning down the
lamp. His best hat and coat were on. His hand paused on the
screw at the sound of her entrance.
She went with a sidling step and eyes washed of their
fire to the counter. "Would you give me a grain of salt, sir,
twopence worth will do." Her voice was throaty as it sought
among the strings of sound for a note polite and soft.
His protruding eyes fixed her for a moment. "I'm closing
the shop. Be off now, I've no time to attend to you and your
salt."
782 THE BAPTISM [Sept.,
"It would not take you the half of a minute handing it
down to me there from the shelf, sir. I've the money here
ready to pay for it. I'm badly in need of the salt."
A woman with iron gray hair, a beaded velveteen cloak on
her fat shoulders, a feather flat as a palm leaf in her bonnet,
came in from the room behind the shop. "Hurry now, Pat, or
we won't get a good place," she said.
The tinker's wife turned to her. "I'm going there myself,
ma'am. They're grand, the missioners. You'd be trembling
to hear them, and there will be few drinking in the parish
after them but those that must, the old and the weak. It's what
I'm asking for a grain of salt, ma'am, for fear the shop will
be closed on me when I get out of chapel, and I've a shilling
here to pay for it."
"Ach! we can't be bothered with you, woman. Turn out
the light, Pat, and let us be going. Father Dominick is preach-
ing tonight, and there won't be a seat if we don't foot it now."
"Hurry out now, you woman!" Vahy ordered.
But the tinker's wife lingered. "Will you give me the
change of a shilling?"
"Be off with you, I tell you!" His hand moved; the lamp
went out. Upon the sudden darkness the moonlight leaped in
through the doorway and window.
The woman poked a finger and thumb forward. "Here's
the shilling. It won't take you but the counting of the coppers."
"Get out! or I'll make you!" Vahy roared.
"May the devil be in the same hurry with you when he's
taking you to hell," she answered.
He put one leg across the counter. "Be out of that!" his
voice was thick with threats.
"Get out of that, ye tinker's wife!" his wife cried.
Baffled, and cursing, the woman retreated. The few
houses in the village were closed, and she moved on slowly by
the edge of the church-going stream of people. The road
wound a little before it reached the gateway to the church.
On the footpath the row of booths by the wall were lit up by
paraffin lamps, and she saw the traders, sober elderly women
and sacristan-looking men, standing by their wares. She
turned the shilling for luck, and smoothed her face. Hitching
the baby closer to her breast, she walked on with blue preda-
tory eyes.
1920.] THE BAPTISM 783
She chose the last booth. There was a ditch she knew of
where she could lie should the boothman's suspicion awake
after she had passed the coin. He was busy with two girls
who were buying beads. There was scent on their handker-
chiefs, and their white necks in the lamplight had the white-
ness of two white clouds, or the white breast of the sea-gull.
She pressed in behind them, and stretched her hand across
the shoulder of one.
"Give me change of a shilling, sir, I'm in a hurry into the
chapel," she said.
"You'll get change at the door," the man answered. "Don't
be pressing on the young ladies."
The mewl came again from the child. She drew back and
lifting the shawl, shifted the child to her left arm. Its week-
old face had the look of a skinned rabbit; its eyes were sealed
like the young of a cat. The mother's gaze rested on it. "I'm
going to give you a christened soul, cigra," she muttered. "I'll
have the door of heaven left open for you."
Sudden soul-emotions mingled with the instinct of the
animal mother hell, heaven and purgatory took the shapes
of great commons in her mind, with the lights from the church
windows thrown upon them and the missioners giving passes
to the souls. The hedges of heaven had the smell of the beau-
tiful scent on the girl's handkerchiefs; and the fields of red
heather were as soft as blankets; and the white angels went
tripping by with closed wings, counting the children playing
about. Out beyond was the black bog of hell, with fire-lights
dancing over the bog-holes, and a mist of little unbaptized
babies hanging by the dyke. She saw the edges of purgatory,
gray like ashes, and many moving no thicker than shadows
in a purple fog behind. The scent seemed to go to her head
swifter than the whisky Teige had given her that day. She
touched one of the girls.
"I have a little one here I want to christen," she said,
"maybe you, or the other girl, would stand for him. I'll wait
in the church till the Mission is over."
The girl drew aside. "I'll take these beads," she said to
the man.
She wrapped her handkerchief around them, and the per-
fume went again to the woman's head. Her eyes dilated, and
wandering through the wares of the booth, rested upon a pic-
784 THE BAPTISM [Sept.,
ture of the Virgin and Child. The girl Mother walked lightly on
the clouds, carrying her Boy. She wore a skirt and bodice of
pink; a brown veil on her head; a blue mantle about her.
"What is the price of that picture of the Blessed Virgin,
sir?" she asked in the treble that her voice took when drink
was in her head.
The man was counting the change the girl had given. He
looked up.
"It's a shilling," he said.
"Hand it down to me. Here's the shilling."
He took the picture from the canvas wall. She pushed
Teige's coin among the silver on the counter, and he swept
all the pieces into the till.
She turned away, and went along the path, and her feet
seemed to go as lightly as the Virgin's over the clouds. The
picture flapped in her hand in the speed of her pace. Then
in a turn in the road she saw Teige. He stood with his back
to the white wall, a young man with brute lines by the mouth,
and the brow and eyes of an artist. The reek of stale tobacco,
of recent drink, filled the air about him.
"Did you pass it?" he asked.
She stopped short as if a slough had opened in her path.
"Pat Vahy wouldn't change it," she answered.
"Did he look at it?"
"He did not. He closed the door on my face."
"May the devil take you. You weren't quick enough."
An oath sprang to her throat, reached her lips, and stayed
there. "Sure, Teige, I haven't my strength yet. How could I
keep him from shutting the door."
"Go back now with you and try the booths, or the men
at the chapel door. There's a crowd passing in, and they
wouldn't notice."
"I will not. It would be stealing from God."
He left the wall. "Get me the money," he said.
"It's gone from me. It's what I bought this picture with
the shilling to bring luck to the child."
He came slowly off the grass. She looked up, saw his
face, and accepted her chastisement. Admiration mixed with
fear in a corner of her heart. His terrible eyes, like a blue
corpse-light in the churchyard, gleaming under his tangled
yellow hair, were the eyes of one fit to be the king of tinkers.
1920.] THE BAPTISM 785
She gave a cry as he tore the picture from her hand, and at
the first blow sank by the roadside.
When she raised her head she was alone. Her hands
groped for the baby. Then she felt it warm at her breast.
There was no life but her own and the child's on the moonlit
road. Her eyes climbed up the shadow of the opposite bank,
went vacantly between the stalks of the ragworth, and out to
the misty reaches of the night. A good night for the dogs to
catch rabbits, or overtake a hare. She listened for their cry;
for the feet of the men. There were specks of light up and
down, here and there, on the side of the Mountain of the
Cairn. She could see the misty houses. A star rode on a
trailing wisp of cloud, white as an old woman's hair stretched
in the wind. It would be well for her if her own hair were as
white and she had done with Teige.
She sat upright, and drew the shawl from the child's face.
There were footsteps on the road, light steps that drew near.
She looked up; a young country woman with a child in her
arms stood beside her.
"Come with me," she said.
"And where would I be going, young woman, with you
and the night growing on us?"
"To your child's baptism."
"And who will stand for my child? There's none to do
it. And who are you, out walking the road with a baby in
your arms?"
"My Son and I had to pass this way. Follow us."
The tinker woman rose and followed. The Child in front
leaned over its mother's shoulder and stretched out its arms as
if to the baby.
"It's a light load you're carrying, young girl," said the
tinker's wife, "for your feet go like the wips of the ceanawan
blown about the bog in the wind."
"I am carrying the greatest load in the world."
"See, now, young woman, light as my child is a week
old yesterday light as it is, with the giddiness in my head
from the blow, I feel it as heavy as with three stones in my
arms."
"The weight of the world is on my arm."
And the young country woman went on quickly, going
by the closed booths, in at the gate, up the porch steps, into the
VOL. CXI. 50
786 THE BAPTISM [Sept.,
church. The Mission was over; the crowd had gone. The
candles on the altar were still alight; a priest stood by the
chancel rail. A girl knelt at his feet.
"It was a tinker's wife and child," she sobbed.
The font, near the end of the nave, was in shadow. The
young woman led the way to it. She signed to the tinker's
wife to stand before it.
"Will the priest see me here, girl? Will he come? The
light is weak."
"He will see you. He will come."
"Will yourself be back to tell him? And will that girl
stand? She had the finest scent on her handkerchief."
"She will stand, for my Son spoke to her."
"Ah, ma'ead, young woman, and how could your Child
speak. Would he be five months? But see now, they've seen
us, and they are coming from the altar."
When the tinker's wife went into the moonlight again,
carrying her baptized child, she paused on the path.
"Agradii," she called to the girl as she passed, "did you see
where the young country-woman went with her Son that were
in the church?"
"I saw no woman and child in the church but you and
your baby," the girl answered.
"They were by the font, agradh, I seen them when the
priest took my little boy."
"I saw no mother and child there but you and my godson."
The woman's knees trembled. She held up her baby to
the skies. Her eyes ranged the stars. Then she knelt on
the path.
THE SILVER MAPLE.
BY CHARLES PHILLIPS.
I REMEMBER the silver maple. I never can forget it!
It grew on the sunset side of the old white house. (It grows
there still
But that is my story my story and the story of the silver maple.)
I remember the first time I saw it, and I but a boy
Thrilled with the sight of it, hurt quickly in a way I could not
understand, by the beauty of it
So touched, so hurt, that I never, never could forget!
A queer lad I must have been to be noticing such things, in such
a way,
And remembering them
How the young tree seemed to tremble in the breeze,
And be shaken and turn pale in the wind,
Showing the silver underside of its leaves
As if the breath of a swoon were passing through it and over it.
Mostly when a storm was brewing,
And all the West grew thunderous black,
And the hush before rainfall made the air stand very still
Mostly then did it seem alive, that tremulous silver maple,
So timid, so young, so slender,
Such a lovely sapling,
So unused to the rough fingers of the wind,
So afraid of the darkness of clouds in the West, or the whisper
of storm on the wind
And always so full of bright wonder at the caress and music of
the new April air
So young, so virginal, so beautiful !
But it was beautiful in the sunlight, too
O, doubly beautiful in the sunlight !
On still mornings, when the dew was yet on the grass,
Or in the quiet evening,
It seemed to leap in the light like a silver fountain playing,
Whose waters rose irradiant in the air,
Yet never fell save to vanish on the wind
In veils of green invisible mist;
Or in the windy sunlight of bright Summer afternoons
788 THE SILVER MAPLE [Sept.,
How all its being seemed to vibrate then with inner beauty,
inner light,
Flashing to its tips
As music and emotion flash and glow
Through human bodies halted in their running,
Naked and laughing in the light,
Speechless and lovely in the light!
I never forgot that tree,
Though years and distances and many wanderings
Swept me further from its ken
Than ever the wildest of its own leaves caught in the roving
wind;
No, though I went far,
I never, never forgot.
And then, one day, after many years had passed,
Long years away from home and all its familiar sights,
I returned to the old town, to the old house.
O, I cannot forget that day!
For, as I passed up the street,
The drowsing village street, with its wild, tall grass like a meadow,
Its paths and its flowery yards,
Marking how strangely, how uncannily unchanged seemed every-
thing, look where I might,
As if life had stood still there through all the passing years
Suddenly I beheld the silver maple trees!
The silver maple the one tree of my memory the sapling the
leafy fountain!
A great gray-boled giant, topping the roofs,
Whose friendly shadow used to lean out in the morning to
shelter it;
A great knotty tree rising over the eaves,
Reaching gnarled arms above the old white house,
As if it would shield it from the stormy West,
Giving to its windows, for the darkness of clouds, the soft light
of its thousand silver breasts,
And for the sound of storm on the wind, or the sorry voice of rain,
The music of its tuneful leaves.
The silver maple! the sapling gone grown great, grown gray,
grown old!
Yet beautiful, beautiful still, in the wind and sun;
Mighty and more beautiful than ever I had remembered it :
Beautiful, mirroring the soul of every passing air,
Arching the generations of the old white house,
1920.] THE SILVER MAPLE 789
Faithful and beautiful, lifting its million hands, its arms, its
body, its whole being
To God, to Heaven, to the skies, the stars;
Enduring storms, and in wind and weather growing mighty,
And from the very tempests that harrassed it wresting its
strength;
And for the sunlight of bright days and the still peace of moonlit
midnights
Giving back light and laughter, or the pure joy of trysting
shadows
The silver maple, grown great, grown old, in its appointed place,
Faithful and beautiful!
And "O, the silver maple!"
Involuntarily I cried out!
"I remember when that tree was young;
I remember the day it was planted, a tender sapling trembling
in my father's hand;
I remember . . ."
*
Then suddenly the sunlight seemed to darken down the roofs,
And a shadow passed over the quiet street
And over the tall quiet tree,
The silver of its leaves suddenly flashing before me like a wave
of light,
Like light from some unseen height, some far off inaccessible
hilltop;
A shadow and a wind,
A wind that stirred the tree to its innermost secret leaf,
Yet left the hushed grass at its feet untouched, unstirred;
A wind whose swift invisible fingers swept through my being
Making a vast clamor in my heart,
Waking a thousand sleeping echoes in my soul . . .
And then I looked upon myself
To see what the years had done to me.
ON THE ABOLITION OF CRITICS.
BY JOHN BUNKER.
ATE one night my friend, the poet, dropped
in. He looked somewhat excited, and as he
usually talks well when in that condition, I was
glad to see him and waved him towards the sit-
ting-room, where there was a fire and an easy
chair and a brand of tobacco I know he likes. However, you
can never tell about these things about poets, 1 mean. That
is, you can never tell from a poet's appearance what is his
spiritual temperature he may look as bright as a dollar and
be as dull as a piece of cheese, or on the contrary he may seem
as flat as dish water and yet be in a high state of cerebral
activity. As Francis Thompson says:
From stones and poets you may know
Nothing so active is as that which least seems so.
As to the present state of mind of my visitor I was not left
long in uncertainty.
"Listen to this," he said as he slid into the easy chair and
drew from his pocket an envelope, from the back of which he
read : " 'It is the vice of lawyers as a class that they think in
grooves, that they will never venture beyond precedent, and
that all reforms of the law have come from without.' "
I had never known him to be interested in the law before,
but I felt this was merely the peg for his coming discourse,
so I simply said: "Well?"
"Well," he continued, "I ran across this statement in a
book the other day and it set me to thinking. The question
that occurred to me was, What about the law-givers, or rather
the law-interpreters of literature? Couldn't the same accusa-
tion be leveled against them?"
"You mean," said I, "the critics?"
"Yes, the critics. Aren't they, too, upholders of a musty
code and rigid advocates of worm-eaten tradition, believing
that a rule is a rule 'and having been, must ever be?' Don't
they also require a cataclysm, a stupendous outburst of natural
1920.] ON THE ABOLITION OF CRITICS 791
power, to give them new and enlarged views of the matter
in hand? Isn't it likewise true of them that they are filled with
a great wisdom after the event?"
"I suppose you have your instances," I interposed.
"Instances? Instances? Why, literature is full of in-
stances. Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Whitman, whom you
will the record is running over with such cases of critical
hindsight. Or take the matter of the critics' attitude toward
a change in artistic method, in technique. Take, for example,
the introduction of blank verse into non-dramatic poetry in
Paradise Lost. Or consider the row kicked up at the very
start of English literature when alliteration began to give place
to rhyme. Or listen to the sagacious Gabriel Harvey laying
down the law to his friend, Spenser, on the subject of English
metrical rules."
"It seems to me," I replied, "that you are overlooking one
or two. Where are our old friends, Gifford and Jeffrey? And
I should feel much more comfortable if you would mention at
once Dr. Johnson's dicta on the poetry of Gray or on the
sonnets of Milton."
"Yes, and I might bring in whole droves of critical asses
from the Augustan era on the works of one Shakespeare. But
why stress the obvious? . . . You remember what Shelley
said, 'as a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair, so an
unsuccessful author turns critic.' "
"And no doubt one might reverse the parallel and say
that by the same token a successful author who does not turn
critic is in much the same case as a prosperous thief, who
laughs at all thief-takers."
He seemed lost in reflection.
"Here's another thing," he suddenly remarked. "Whence
do critics derive that body of doctrine to which they are fond
of referring as critical principles, and by which they profess to
judge the work of art before them? To hear the critics talk
one would think that these principles are a coherent set of
rules, a philosophical system, which the critics had discovered
and laboriously pieced together ab initio; whereas the truth is
that it is the artist, the practitioner of an art, who makes the
laws of that art, and all that the critic does is merely to
formulate them."
"In other words," I said, "you hold that aesthetic laws are
792 ON TflE ABOLITION OF CRITICS [Sept.,
simply the critics' more or less loosely ordered observations on
the works of great authors."
"Precisely. The great author produces his great work,
and then fifty or a hundred or five hundred years later, when
the rough and blundering world has definitely placed its ap-
proving seal upon it, along comes the critic and from a diligent
study of the masterpiece proceeds to tell us how the trick has
been turned. The devil of it is that often he won't rest there,
but goes on and with perfect assurance proceeds to tell us how
the trick shall be turned again."
"There," I replied, "you have hit upon the root of the
quarrel between critics and authors. I'm afraid it must be
admitted that your typical critic is a bit hide-bound. From
much dwelling among established forms he is habitually
averse to any other kind or manner. He looks with a crooked
eye on all innovation, and the mere fact that the poem, the
play, the story, the essay, is different from what went before
is apt to be with him a presumption against it, and of course
the greater the difference, that is, the more the work is original
and the less a reflex of an earlier mode, the greater and more
powerful his presumption."
"Yes," he responded, "that is the hard part of it. The
misery is that he is the typical critic. And consider the sequel.
Before this tribunal conies the original mind, the creative intel-
ligence, shaken by a new idea, dazzled by a fresh vision, and
thrilled with a certain divine power of which neither he nor
another can tell the secret. In joy and desire, in travail and
stress, with weariness often and often with despair, he brings
back his tidings, his glimpse into the great mystery. No need
to tell him no man knows better! how inadequate his report
and how fragmentary his evidence. The fact is that his real-
ization of this is, as Keats pointed out, the artist's fiercest hell
his keenest sorrow, his most intimate pain. The important
thing is that his feet have explored strange paths and his eye
known remote wonders. Lucky for him if he be not reminded
that his ways are not as those of other writers, and if his
wanderings in unfamiliar places be not accounted the very
head and front of his offending."
This I thought was rather a large gesture on my friend's
part, somewhat in the Cambyses' vein; but then I saw he had
in his mind's eye an exalted figure.
1920.] ON THE ABOLITION OF CRITICS 793
"Of course," he went on, "I am thinking of the transcend-
ent, the really great writer. Nevertheless, the fact remains that
high or low, minor or great, every imaginative worker has
passed each in his degree through a unique experience. The
question is, can one who has not passed through that expe-
rience rightly interpret it, actually apprehend it, authorita-
tively judge it? Can a primary mind ever be understood,
grasped in its instinctive and characteristic movements, by a
secondary mind? Is it not true that for the ultimate compre-
hension of a primary mind a primary mind is required deep
answering unto deep?"
"Well," I replied, "that is a question. But I suppose dis-
crimination should be practised even with critics. Of course,
one would prefer Coleridge on Shakespeare, or De Quincey
on Wordsworth, or Francis Thompson on Shelley, or even
Chesterton on Shaw; but when it comes to throwing down the
critical bars to all comers, why, think of the flood of
rubbish. . . ."
"No," he rejoined, "not perhaps exactly that But there is
an aspect ... I have been thinking ... let us get down to
fundamentals. What after all is an author? and what, pray,
is a critic? An author, let us say, is one who writes books;
a critic is one who writes about them. Thus we see at once
that there is necessarily about the work of the latter a sort
of clinging-vine, parasitical quality. Whatever of his own
the critic may bring to his task, in the last analysis, his work
has its roots in alien soil in fact, isn't the very seed furnished
him? and drapes itself about an independent existence. Be-
move the original work, and the very life of the critic is
withered up and destroyed; whereas the author may have a
vigorous existence with reference to critics or criticism."
"Except," I interjected, "self-criticism."
"Yes, of course, always excepting that. But this is the
conclusive argument against criticism as an independent form,
as an art that being neither self-generated nor self-sufficient
it lacks the two chief elements of artistic life."
"It seems to me," I said, "that you are rather hard and
intolerant; you would almost confine the critic's functions to
the making of exclamation marks, with here and there per-
haps a curley-cue to denote a question. I think the critics
deserve better than that. They have rendered some good serv-
794 ON THE ABOLITION OF CRITICS [Sept.,
ice in their time. Take your own province of poetry. Con-
sider in our own day, for instance, the long years of loving
labor that went to the making of Colvin's Life of Keats."
"That's just it," he rejoined brusquely. "That's just what
I was referring to before. Now that Keats' reputation is es-
tablished every critic brings forward his meed of superfluous
regard, whereas when Keats was alive there was a far different
story to tell. On the other hand it would be a much more
significant action and of much more benefit to letters, if the
critics gave similar intelligent appreciation to contemporary
movements in art and to the men and women behind them; if
they would only approach living art and artists with one-half
the critical judgment and one-half the openness of mind which
they lavish on authors who are dead and gone. But that is
precisely what the critics won't or can't do."
"What have you in mind?" I asked, " free verse? Do
you want Colvin's dissertation on Carl Sandburg, or Edmund
Gosse on James Oppcnheim, or perhaps Georg Brandes on the
genial Edgard Lee Masters?"
"Exactly! and a much more lively, and living, thing criti-
cism would become as a result. However, it's idle to look
for these things. Anything like wise appreciation of vital and
contemporary literary movements has never been a charac-
teristic of criticism, and that is a sufficient reason with critics
why it never should be."
"In spite of Spoon River," I ventured, "there are still
some of us who dare to think or to hope that the art of
poetry in these States has not yet been fully mastered."
"Living poets," he observed sadly, "have never yet had
their deserts and no doubt they never will."
"Well," I replied, " I don't know about that. They seem
to be getting a rather fair measure of attention these days.
There is, for example, the annual Necrology of Magazine
Verse. Moreover, in spite of all you can say about them, the
critics are, as a matter of fact, standing pretty thickly about,
each eager to exercise his power and indeed actually exer-
cising it."
"As to that," he said, "authors must make the best of a bad
world. Happy the author who realizes the definite limits of
that power which, as you say, the critics are so eager to exer-
cise. For after all what can the critic do? Can he, for in-
1920.] ON THE ABOLITION OF CRITICS 795
stance, breathe life into a dead thing galvanize, not into
specious activity, but into actual, palpitating existence a work
which does not already and of itself possess the vital principle?
And, on the other hand, is the critic, whether by means of
abuse or contempt or by any process of judicial condemnation,
or even by silence, able to withhold recognition from a work
which has the real root of the matter in it? Let the records of
literature bear witness."
"And yet," I said, "I suppose you will hardly deny that
critics have considerable capabilities for mischief. Think of
Keats. They can certainly irritate, certainly annoy if not
worse."
"Pooh! Mere temporary tricks, a flash in the pan, antics
to amuse the passing hour. Time has a way of disposing of
such gear. As for Keats languishing away under critical dis-
favor, that legend has been exploded long ago. He had too
much pluck. Moreover, Keats knew very well the work he
was given to do, and he knew also that that work, independent
of all external aids or props whatsoever, must stand or fall by
its own intrinsic quality. Nature is too economical a hand
not to provide for such contingencies. There is a certain pro-
tective law of an artist's being in these things; and one of the
very first signs of a writer of original genius is a healthy dis-
regard of critical opinion."
"Well," I said, "I suppose that about finishes the critics.
There doesn't seem anything more to be said."
"Only this, that despite all the noise and fuss, the critics
make among themselves, the world at large has its own method
with them and the judgment of the world, as the critics
themselves will tell you, is not only final, but correct. 'Securus
jadicat orbis terrariim.' The judgment of the world may be
safely relied upon. Things are eventually put in their proper
places, and here, too, we have an instance of natural economy
at work; so that in their lifetimes for one who reads the critic,
ten, or ten times ten, will read the author; and after they have
both died and gone to the worms, as compared with the author
that critic is rare indeed who survives and has influence."
"That," I replied, "must be a consoling thought for the
author. But what is your conclusion? What would you have
critics do?"
"There are many things I would have them do," he said
796 ST. FRANCIS OF ASSIS1 [Sept.,
slowly, "but perhaps the first would be that they take them-
selves a little less seriously. I would commend to them the
practice of a virtue ill observed in these days humility. For
humility is not only the last step in the spiritual life but, as
Socrates showed, the first step in the intellectual career as well.
Nor should it be a virtue difficult to acquire not, at any rate,
by a critic at all acquainted with the history of his trade."
"Medice, cura te ipsum," I murmured to myself as he arose.
"What's that?" he asked.
"Oh, nothing," I replied; "I was only thinking what a
pleasant evening we have had."
ST. FRANCIS OF ASSIST.
BY JANE C. CROWELL.
"Who went to meet death singing" (Thomas of Celano).
HE went to meet death singing
That saint of bygone years,
Who held the purest laughter
As much divine as tears.
He went to meet death singing
And all the way he trod
Proved courtesy unchanging
A quality of God.
He went to meet death singing
His life of joy outrun
Whom Dante for his fervor
Did liken to the sun.
He went to meet death singing
And to the blessed throng
He soared with Christ triumphant,
Himself a soul of song.
He went to meet death singing
And still his voice today
Rings down across the ages
To gladden those who pray.
THE LOYALIST.
BY JAMES FRANCIS BARRETT.
CHAPTER IX.
OME!" said Stephen in response to the soft knock
upon his door. "Just a minute."
He rose from his knees beside his bed.
"Come in!" he repeated as he slipped back the
bolt and opened the door. "Oh! Good morning!
You're out early. How are you?"
He shook the hands of his early morning visitors warmly.
"Fine morning!" replied Mr. Allison. "Sorry to have dis-
turbed you, but Jim was around early and desired to see you."
"No disturbance at all, I assure you. I was on the point of
leaving for breakfast."
"Go right ahead. Please don't delay on our account. We
can wait. Go ahead," expostulated Mr. Allison.
"We want'd t' be sure an' git ye, thet wuz all," remarked Jim.
"Eat first. We'll be here when y' git back."
"Sit down and make yourselves comfortable, then." He ar-
ranged several chairs about the room. "I overslept, I fear. Last
night taxed me."
"You did justice to yourself and to us last night. The splen-
did result was your reward."
They were seated, Jim by the window, Mr. Allison at
Stephen's desk. Disorder w.as apparent in the room, the furniture
disarranged, and clothing, bed covering, wearing apparel, towels,
piled or thrown carelessly about. No one seemed to mind it, how-
ever.
"It wuz a big night. Tell us, how did ye git along with "em?"
asked Jim.
"Much better than I had anticipated," Stephen replied. "I
thought that Anderson's talk had won them entirely, but when I
asked for the floor, I saw at once that many were with me. Had
you instructed them?" This question was directed towards Jim.
"I did. I saw a doz'n at least. You know they had no use
fur th' thing and were glad o' th' chance. I made a big secret out
o' it, and they watch'd fur my ol* clothes."
"I thought I felt their glances. They stuck true, you may be
798 THE LOYALIST [Sept.,
assured. I knew, too, that I possessed a reserve blow in the affair
of the Isis. The mention of Arnold's name inflamed them."
"I am sorry to have missed that," Mr. Allison said.
"How did they avoid you?" Stephen asked.
"I don't know. I was never approached, although I had been
acquainted with the rumors of the thing right along. I suppose
they figured that I would threaten them with exposure. They
knew where I stood; and then again they knew they could not
threaten me with debts. For some reason or other they thought
best to avoid me."
"I guess we killed it for good."
"Kill'd it?" exclaimed Jim. "It's deader 'n a six day corpse.
An' there's great talk goin' on t'day on all th" corners. We're
right wid th' peepul y' kin bet, and they're ready t' eat Arnold."
"Have you noticed any agitation?"
"There has been a little disturbance," Mr. Allison admitted,
"but no violence. It has been talk more than anything. Many
are wondering who you are and how you obtained your informa-
tion. Others are considerably taken back by the unveiling of
Anderson. The greatest of respect is being shown to us on the
street, and congratulations are being offered to us from all sides."
"I am glad the sentiment has changed. It now looks like the
dawn of a better day. We should be spurred on, however, to
greater endeavor in the manifestation of our loyalty, especially
among the minority Tory element."
Outside, the street was beginning to feel the pulse of life.
Over across, the buildings shone with the brightness of the morn-
ing sun which was reflected mildly from the glassy windows.
There was a silent composure about it all, with no sound save the
footfalls of the passing horse or the rattle of the business wagon.
Somewhere across the street the man with the violin continued his
fiddling.
"Does that keep up all day?"
"Almost! It is amusing to hear Griff swearing at him. The
humorous part of it is that he plays but one tune, 'Yankee
Doodle.'"
"Can't ye steal it some night?" asked Jim, "an' bust it over
's head."
"I don't care," laughed Stephen, "he doesn't bother me."
The door opened and shut. Sergeant Griffin entered, saluted
Stephen and took the hands of the visitors.
"Well, what do you think of the boy?"
"I alwa's said he wuz a good boy."
"The fun hasn't begun yet," announced the Sergeant. "I
1920.] THE LOYALIST 799
have just learned that the City Council has met and is about to
issue formal charges against General Arnold."
Stephen whistled.
"They are glad of this opportunity," he announced quietly.
"Reed never got on with him, not from the first day," declared
Mr. Allison.
"Well, if Reed gits after 'm he'll make the fur fly. He's a bad
man when he gits goin'."
"Did you say they had met?" Stephen inquired.
"I understand they have. The affair of last night is being
talked of freely on the street. And they are talking about you
most of all and wonder if you had been sent by Washington to un-
cover this. One thing is certain: Arnold is in disgrace and the
sooner he gets out of here the better it will be for him."
"The General likes 'im and p'rhaps '11 give 'im a transf'r."
"By the way!" interrupted Mr. Allison. "My daughter wants
to see you."
"See me?" Stephen quickly repeated.
"She told me on leaving to tell you."
"Very well. Is it urgent?"
"No. I guess not. She didn't speak as if it were."
"Tell her for me, I shall go as soon as I can."
"What's th' next thin' t' do?" asked Jim.
"Matters will take care of themselves for awhile," Stephen
replied. "Anderson, I suppose, has left town together with Clif-
ton and the others. If the City Council has met to publish charges
against Arnold, there is nothing to do but await the result of these.
The people, I presume, are of one mind now, and if they are not,
they will soon be converted once the news of last night's affair has
reached their ears."
"Are you going to remain here?" asked Mr. Allison.
"I am going to take some breakfast, first; then I shall busy
myself with a report. I may be busy for several days away from
the city. In the meantime I would advise that the whole affair be
aired as much as possible. There is nothing like supplying the
public mind with food. Meet me, Jim, at the Coffee House; or are
you coming with me?"
"Guess I'll go. This man wants t' eat."
The City Council did meet, and immediately published
charges against David Franks, the father of the aid-de-camp of
the Military Governor, charging him with being in correspondence
with his brother in London, who was holding the office of Com-
missary for British prisoners. He was ordered to be placed under
800 THE LOYALIST [Sept.,
immediate arrest. At the same time formal charges, partly of a
military nature, partly of a civil, were preferred against the Mili-
tary Governor. Copies of the indictment were laid before Congress
and before the Governors of the States, who were asked to com-
municate them to their respective legislatures.
The press became wildly excited. Great headlines announced
the startling news to the amazement of the country. For, it must
be remembered, Philadelphia was the centre of government and
colonial life, and the eyes of the infant nation were turned con-
tinually in its direction. General Arnold's name soon became a
subject for conversation on every side.
None took the news more to heart than the General. He sat
in his great drawing-room with a copy of the evening's news sheet
before him. Being of an imaginative, impulsive nature it was nat-
ural for him to worry, but tonight there was the added feature of
the revelation of his guilt. Reed had always pursued him relent-
lessly. Now the public announcement of his participation in the
attempt to form this detestable regiment had furnished the Pres-
ident of the Council with the opening he had so long desired. He
re-read the charges preferred against him, his name across the
front in big bold type. In substance they were as follows :
First: That the Military Governor had issued a pass for a
vessel employed by the enemy, to come into port without the
knowledge of the State authorities or of the Commander-in-Chief.
Second: That upon taking possession of the city he had
closed the shops and stores, preventing the public from purchas-
ing, while at the same time, "as was believed," he had made con-
siderable purchases for his own benefit.
Third: That he imposed menial offices upon the militia
when called into service.
Fourth: That in a dispute over the capture of a prize
brought in by a state privateer, he had purchased the suit at a low
and inadequate price.
Fifth: That he had devoted the wagons of the state to trans-
porting the private property of Tories.
Sixth: That, contrary to law, he had given a pass to an un-
worthy person to go within the enemy's lines.
Seventh: That the Council had been met with a disrespect-
ful refusal when they asked him to explain the subject-matter of
the fifth charge.
Eighth: That the patriotic authorities, both civil and mili-
tary, were treated coldly and neglectfully, in a manner entirely
different from his line of conduct towards the adherents of the
king.
1920.] THE LOYALIST 801
A further account of the Council meeting was then given,
wherein it was stated that a motion had been made to suspend
General Arnold from all command during the time of the inquiry
into these accusations, but it had been voted down. Congress was
asked, the story went on, to decide on the value of these charges
and refer them to the proper tribunal, the necessary evidence
being promised at the proper time.
"The fools!" he muttered. "They think that these can hold
water." Holding the paper at a distance from him, he gazed at it.
"What a shame! Every paper in the country will have this story
before the week is out. I'm disgraced."
His brows contracted, his eyes closed, his face flushed indi-
cating the tumult that surged within him. His mind was en-
gaged in a long process of thought, beginning with the memories of
his early campaigns down to the present moment. There was no de-
cision, no constancy of resolution; no determination; just worry,
apprehension, solicitude, and the loud, rapid beatings of his
temple against his hand.
"Suspend me! I'll forestall them, d 'em. I'll resign
first."
He wondered where Anderson had gone or what fortune he
had met with. The morning brought the first report of the dis-
ruption of the meeting, and of the unknown person who single-
handed had accomplished it. There must be a traitor somewhere,
for no one save Anderson and himself had been initiated into the
secret. Margaret knew, of course, but she could be trusted.
Perhaps after all the man had escaped that night. Perhaps it
was he who had created the furore at the meeting. Who was he?
How did he get in? Why were proper steps not taken to safe-
guard the room against all possibilities of this nature? Bah!
Anderson had bungled the thing from the start. He was a boy
sent on a man's errand.
The regiment was defunct. To speculate further on that
subject would be futile. It never had existed as far as he could
see except on paper, and there it remained, a mere potentiality.
The single-handed disruption of it proved how utterly it lacked
cohesion and organization. That one man, alone and in disguise,
could have acquainted himself thoroughly with the whole pro-
ceeding, could have found his way with no attempt at interference
into the meeting place, and, with a few well-chosen words, could
have moved an entire audience to espouse the very contrary of
their original purpose, indicated the stability and the temper of
the assembly. To coerce men is a useless endeavor. Even the
Almighty does not so interfere with man's power of choice.
VOL. CXI. 51
802 THE LOYALIST [Sept.,
They might be led or enticed or cajoled; but to force them, or
intimidate them, or overwhelm them is an idle and unavailable
adventure.
Anderson had failed miserably, and his conspiracy had per-
ished with him. Not a prominent Catholic had been reached in
the first place; not a member of the poorest class would now leave
the city. The affair with its awful disclosures only added strength
to their position, for whatever aspersions might have been cast
upon their loyalty in the event of the successful deportation of
the company, were now turned like a boomerang against the very
ones who had engineered the scheme. The community would re-
spect the Catholics more. They would profit by his undoing.
They would be valued for the test that their patriotism had stood.
There was another consideration, however, which wore a
graver complexion and tormented him beyond endurance. This
was solicitude for his own safety. The people had hated him for
years, and had proceeded to invent stories about him to justify
their anger. It had been a satisfaction for him to reflect that,
for the most part, these stories had not been the causes, but rather
the effects of public indignation. But what answer could he make
now, what apology could be made for this late transaction, this
conspiracy at once so evident and palpable? As far as the ques-
tion of his guilt was concerned there would be little conjecture
about that. Ten or twenty accounts of the venture would be cir-
culated simultaneously. Of that he had no doubt. People would
neither know nor care about the evidence. It was enough that
he had been implicated.
He would ask for a court-martial. That, of course. Through
no other tribunal could a just and a satisfactory decision be
reached, and it was paramount that another verdict, besides that
pronounced by public opinion, be obtained. Unquestionably, he
would be acquitted. His past service, his influence, his character
would prove themselves determining factors during his trial.
Fully one-half of the charges were ridiculous and would be thrown
out of court, and of the remainder only one would find him tech-
nically culpable. Still it were better for a court to decide upon
these matters, and to that end he decided to request a general
court-martial.
"You have removed your uniform?" Peggy asked in surprise
as she beheld him entering the doorway of the drawing-room.
"Yes," was the solemn reply. "I am no longer a confederate
of France."
He limped slowly across the room, leaning on his cane. He
1920.] THE LOYALIST 803
had hiid aside his bufT and blue uniform, with the epaulets and
sword knots, and was clad in a suit of silken black. His hose and
shoes were of the same color, against which his blouse, cuffs and
periwig were emphasized, a pale white.
"But you are still a Major-General," she corrected.
"I was; but am no longer. I have resigned."
She started at the announcement. Obviously she had not
anticipated this move.
"You have resigned? When?"
"I wrote the letter a short time ago. I precluded their de-
signs."
He sat in his great chair, and reaching for his stool placed
his foot upon it.
"But ... I ... I don't understand."
"I do perfectly. I shall be tried by court-martial, of course;
they have moved already to suspend me pending the course of my
trial. I want to anticipate any such possibility, that is all."
"But you will be reinstated?"
"I don't know nor care," he added.
"And what about us, our home, our life here," she asked with
a marked concern.
"Oh! That will go on. This is your house, remember, if it
comes to the worst, you are mistress here. This is your home."
"If it comes to the worst? To what?"
"Well, if I should be found guilty . . . and . . . sentenced."
"I should not stay here a minute," she cried, stamping her
foot. "Not one minute after the trial ! In this town? With that
element? Not for an hour!"
"Well!" he exclaimed, making a gesture with both hands
together with a slight shrug of the shoulders.
"Where is Anderson?" she asked quickly.
"In New York, I presume, ere this. I have not seen him."
"Fled?"
"The only proper thing. It's a great wonder to me that he
escaped at all. I should have expected him to be torn to pieces
by that mob."
"A bungled piece of business. I imagined that he was as-
sured of success. A sorry spectacle to allow them to slip from his
grasp so easily."
"Margaret, you do not understand a mob. They are as fickle
as a weather-cock. The least attraction sways them."
"Who did it? Have you learned?"
"No. A bedraggled loafer who was gifted with more talk
than occupation. He was acquainted with the whole scheme from
804 THE LOYALIST [Sept.,
beginning to end, and worked upon their feelings with evidences
of treason. The sudden mention of my name in connection with
the plot threw cold water on the whole business. They were on
their feet in an instant."
"You are quite popular," was the taunt.
"Evidently. The pass inspired them. It would defeat any
purpose, and Anderson must have sensed it and taken his hur-
ried departure. No one has since heard or seen aught of him."
"He was a fool to drag you into this, and you were as great a
fool to allow it."
"Margaret, don't chide me in that manner. I did what I
thought best. But I'm through now with these cursed Catholics
and with France."
"You are a free man now," she murmured.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that this court-martial relieves you of any further
obligation to the Colonies," was the answer.
"But I may still be second in command."
She paused to regard him. Did he continue to cherish ambi-
tions of this nature; or was he attempting to jest with her?
"You seem to forget Gates and the Congress," she said with
manifest derision.
"No. In spite of them."
She lost all patience.
"Listen! Don't flatter yourself any longer. Your cause is
hopeless, as hopeless as the cause for which the stupid Colonists
are contending. You are now free to put an end to this strife.
Go over to the enemy and persuade Washington and the leaders
of the revolt to discuss terms."
"Impossible!"
"What is impossible? Simply announce your defection; ac-
cept the terms of His Majesty's Government; and invite Adams,
Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton and Washington to meet you.
There is the assurance of all save complete independence."
"I shall wait."
"For what? The court-martial will be against you from the
start. Mark my words. You will be found guilty, if not actually,
at least technically. They are determined upon revenge, and they
are going to get it. You saw the paper?"
"I did."
"You read the list of charges?"
He did not answer. He had sunk into his chair and his hands
were clasped before him.
"How many of them were artificial? Except for the first,
1920.] THE LOYALIST 805
that about the pass, none are worth the reading, and the first can
never be proved. They have no evidence apart from the fanatical
ravings of a drunken Catholic. But wait! You shall be adjudged
guilty in the end. See if I am not correct."
"I have the right to question the composition of the court."
"What matter! You know the people detest you. They
have hated you from the moment you set foot in this city. Every
issue of the paper found some new grievance against you. And
when you married me the bomb was exploded. You yourself
know that it was the mere fact of your participation in this scheme
that quelled it. They loathe you, I tell you. They hate you."
Silence reigned in the room as she finished. His eyes were
closed, and he gave every appearance of having fallen into a deep
sleep. His mind was keenly alert, however, and digested every
word she uttered. At length he arose and limped to the window
at the further end of the room.
"I shall ask for a new command," he said quietly, "and we
shall be removed for all time from this accursed place. I shall do
service again."
"Better to await developments. Attend to your trial first.
Plan for the future later."
"I shall obey the wishes of the people."
"The people ! A motley collection of fools ! They have eyes
and ears, but no more. They know everything and can do
nothing."
"I don't know what to do. I "
"I told you what to do," she interrupted his thought and fin-
ished it for him. "I told you to join Anderson. I told you to go
to New York and make overtures to General Clinton. That's what
you should do. Seek respect and power and honor for your old
age."
"That I shall not do. Washington loves me, and my people
will not desert me to my enemies. The court-martial is the
thing."
"As you say. But remember my prophecy."
He turned and again sought his chair. She arose to assist
him into it.
"I wonder who that fellow could be ! He knew it all."
"Did you not hear?"
"No. I have seen no one who could report to me. The de-
tails were missing.
"Did you ever stop to think of the spy in the garden."
"I did."
"That was the man, I am sure. You know his body has not
806 THE LOYALIST [Sept.,
been found, and if I am not mistaken, it was present at that meet-
ing hall."
"We shall learn of his identity. We shall learn."
"Too late! Too late!"
He again dozed off while she watched him. For several min-
utes they sat in this manner until she stole out of the room and
left him alone. Sometime later she aroused him.
CHAPTER X.
A fortnight later Sergeant Griffin came to the Allison home
on a message from Stephen. He appeared at the doorway as the
shroud of eventide enfolded the landscape, changing its hues of
green and gray to the sombre blue or purple; an hour when the
indoor view of things is brightened only by the beams of the tal-
low and dip.
"Hail!" he said; "I have business with Matthew Allison."
"From Stephen?" Marjorie asked with evident interest.
He shook his head.
"The trial"
"Oh!" exclaimed Marjorie. Plainly she was relieved at the
nature of the message. Then she turned.
"Father!" she called.
"I am coming directly," cried Mr. Allison from the rear.
She had forgotten to invite the Sergeant into the room, so ab-
sorbed was she in knowing his business. With the sudden and
delightful lessening of her anxiety, she bethought herself.
"Won't you come in? It was stupid of me not to have asked
you before."
The Sergeant acted promptly. Marjorie followed at a little
distance, but had no sooner entered the room herself than her
father came through the other door.
"What news? Arnold?"
"Found guilty," was the response.
"The court-martial has come to an end?" asked the girl.
"Yes, Miss. And he has been found guilty," he repeated.
"I thought so," muttered Mr. Allison.
They were seated now in the parlor, the two men at opposite
ends of the table, the girl at the side of the room.
"They met at Morristown?" asked Mr. Allison.
"Yes. At Norris' Tavern. General Howe was chairman of
the court. Only four charges were pressed for trial; the matter
of the pass; the affair of the wagons; the shops; and the imposi-
tion upon the militia."
1920.] THE LOYALIST 807
"And Arnold?"
"He managed his own trial, and conducted his own cross-
examination. He made an imposing spectacle as he limped be-
fore the court. The sword knots of Washington were about his
waist, and he took pains to allude to them several times during
the defence. It was astonishing to hear his remarkable flow of
language and his display of knowledge of military law. He cre-
ated a wonderful impression."
"He was found guilty, you say?" interposed Mr. Allison.
"Technically guilty of one charge and imprudent in another,"
was the deliberate reply.
"And sentenced?"
"To receive a reprimand from the Commander-in-Chief."
Mr. Allison assented by a move of his head.
"How did he take it?" he then asked. "I cannot imagine his
proud nature to yield readily to rebuke."
The visitor thought for a moment.
"His face was ashen pale; there was a haggard look upon it;
the eyes were marked with deep circles and his step faltered as
he turned on his heel and, without a word, made his way from the
court room."
"Were you present at the trial?" Marjorie inquired.
"Yes, Miss Allison."
"Was Stephen?"
"No." The Sergeant answered mildly, smiling as he did so.
Marjorie smiled, too.
"Tell me," Mr. Allison asked. "Was the evidence con-
clusive?"
"The Isis occupied the court to some length. It was con-
tended that General Arnold had issued the pass with evil intent.
The affair of the regiment was referred to in connection with this,
but no great stress was brought to bear upon it because of the fear
of arousing a possible prejudice in the minds of the court. That
fact was introduced solely as a motive."
Allison shook his head again.
"It was proved," the Sergeant continued, "that the Isis was a
Philadelphia schooner, manned by Philadelphia men, and engaged
in the coastwise trade. The pass itself was introduced as an ex-
hibit, to support the contention that the General, while Military
Governor, had given military permission for the vessel to leave the
harbor of Philadelphia for the port of New York, then in posses-
sion of the enemy."
"That was proved?"
"Yes, sir."
808 THE LOYALIST [Sept.,
"Was the regiment alluded to?"
"Yes. But at no great length."
"And the pass?"
"It was there. The regiment was the motive for the pass.
The affair of the recruiting was scarcely mentioned."
There was an abrupt silence.
"What was the next charge?" Mr. Allison asked.
"That of the wagons."
"Yes."
"The prosecution made a strong point. Jesse Jordan was
introduced. Testimony was given by him to the effect that he
himself had drawn back a train of twelve wagons loaded with
stores from Egg Harbor."
"Where?"
"Egg Harbor. Where the traffic between the British Army
and the Tories of the city was carried on."
"Was this sustained?"
"The General denied most of the accusations, but he was
found imprudent in his actions. In regard to the other two
charges, that of the shops and that of the militia, absolute ac-
quittal was decided. The verdict was announced the following
morning, and the sentence was published immediately after ad-
journment."
"He was sentenced to be reprimanded, you tell me?"
"Yes. By General Washington."
"That will break Arnold's heart. He will never endure it."
"Others were obliged to endure it," sounded a soft voice.
"Yes, I know," replied the father of the girl. "But you do
not know General Arnold. Undoubtedly the city has the news."
"Yes," said the Sergeant. "I have told several. All know it
ere this."
"It is precisely that which I fear most," Mr. Allison said.
"If he curried less the public favor, little or naught would come
of it, and the reprimand would end the case. But you know
Arnold is a conceited man; one who carries his head high. Bet-
ter to deprive him of life itself than to apply vinegar and gall to
his taste."
"His return will be hard," Sergeant Griffin observed. He,
too, knew the character of the man.
"I doubt if he will return. He has resigned, you know, and
may dislike the sight of the city which witnessed his misfortune.
Still this is his home, and a man's heart is in his home regardless
of its environment."
"Do not forget Peggy," Marjorie reminded them. "I know
1920.] THE LOYALIST 809
she will never consent to live in the city. I know it. Dear me!
The shame of it all would confuse her."
"She might become accustomed to it," replied her father.
"All school themselves to the obstacles of life."
"Not Peggy. I know her. She will not forgive. Why, I re-
call quite vividly the violence of her temper and the terror of her
wrath. Her own aunt, with whom she was staying for a brief
space, took occasion once to reprove her for a slight indiscretion.
Peggy resented the correction fiercely and, leaving the house,
vowed she would never set foot into it again. That was seven
years ago. She has, to my knowledge, never violated that
pledge."
Her father shook his head.
"I see it all quite clearly," continued Marjorie. "The General
will resent the wrong; Peggy will nurture a fierce indignation.
Whatever thoughts of revenge will come to his mind she will ably
promote. Have a care for her; her wrath will know no
mitigation."
"He never expected the verdict," the Sergeant remarked.
"How did he appear?" asked Mr. Allison.
"Splendid. As he entered the court he laughed and jested
with several officers with all the self-possession of one of the eye-
witnesses. Flashes of the old-time energy and courage were
manifest at intervals. There was jubilation displayed on his
every feature."
"Was Peggy with him?"
"No, indeed. It was not permitted. She awaited him out-
side."
"And he maintained his composure throughout."
"He seemed to take delight in relating the resolutions of Con-
gress, its thanks, its gifts, for the many campaigns and the bril-
liant services rendered his country. His promotions, his horse,
his sword, his epaulets and sword-knots, all were recounted and
recited enthusiastically."
Mr. Allison looked at Marjorie and smiled.
"Only once did he lose his self-possession. Near the end of
his plea he forgot himself and called his accusers a lot of 'women.'
This produced a smile throughout the court room; then he re-
gained his composure."
He paused.
"That was all?" asked Mr. Allison.
"I think so. The court adjourned for the day. On the fol-
lowing morning the verdict was announced. I came here direct."
When he had finished he sat quite still. It was growing late
810 THE LOYALIST [Sept.,
and he had overstayed his leave. Still, the gravity of the occasion
required it.
Thoughts of the future, far more than poignancy of grief re-
specting General Arnold and his misfortune, were uppermost with
this small group. It seemed to them that these events were
fraught with grave and serious consequences. General Arnold
was a man of prominence and renown. To lead such a figure to
the bar of justice and to examine and determine there, in a defi-
nite manner, his guilt before the whole world was a solemn piece
of business. It meant that the new Republic was fearless in its
denunciation of wrong; that it was intent upon the exercise of
those precepts of justice and equity which were written into the
bill of rights. The violation of these by a foreign power had con-
stituted its true grievances; and it was actuated by a solemn reso-
lution never to permit, within its borders, the wrongs it had
staked its life and consecrated its purpose as a nation to destroy.
General Arnold was a big man, generous in service to his country,
honored as one of its foremost sons, but he was no bigger than
the institution he was helping to rear. The chastisement inflicted
upon him was a reflection upon the State; but it also was a medi-
cation for its own internal disorders.
The fact that the ruling powers of the city were bitterly op-
posed to the Military Governor, was not wholly indicative of the
pulse of the people. General Arnold was ever regarded with the
highest esteem by the army. A successful leader, a brave sol-
dier, a genial comrade, he was easily the most beloved general
after General Washington. With the citizen body of Philadel-
phia he was on fairly good terms popular during the early days
of his administration, although somewhat offensive of late because
of his indiscretion and impetuosity. Still he was not without his
following, and while his manner of life and of command had made
himself odious to a great number of people, there were a greater
number ready to condone his faults out of regard for his brilliant
services in the past.
Would he overcome his enemies by retrieving the past and
put to shame their vulgar enthusiasm by rising to heights of newer
and greater glory? Or would he yield to the more natural pro-
pensities of retaliation or despair? A man is no greater than the
least of his virtues; but he who has acquired self-control has in-
herited many.
With thoughts of this nature were the trio occupied. For
several minutes no one spoke. Mr. Allison leaned against the
table, his right arm extended along its side, played with a bodkin
that lay within reach; the Sergeant seated in silence, watched the
1920.] THE LOYALIST 811
face of his entertainer, while Marjorie leaned back in her great
chair, with eyes downcast. At length Sergeant Griffin made as if
to go. Marjorie arose at once to bade him adieu.
"You said you came direct?" she reminded him.
"Yes, Miss Allison."
"You saw ' she hesitated, but quickly added, "Captain
Meagher."
She nearly said "Stephen," but bethought herself in time.
"No, Miss. Not since the trial."
"He was not present?"
"No. He is with His Excellency. Several days ago I saw him
and he bade me come here with the report of the finding."
"That was all?"
"Yes, Miss."
"Thank you. We can never repay your kindness."
"Its performance was my greatest delight."
"Thank you. Goodnight!"
She withdraw into the hall.
CHAPTER XI.
More sin is attributable to the ruling passion of a man than to
the forbidden pleasures of the world, or the violent assaults of the
Evil One. Under its domination and tyranny the soul suffers
shipwreck and destruction on the rocks of despair and final im-
penitence. It frequently lies buried beneath the most imperturb-
able countenance, manifesting itself only at times, often on the
occasion of some unusual joy or sadness. It responds to one
antidote; but the antidote requires a man of courage for its self-
administration.
In this respect General Arnold was not a strong man. If he
had acted upon himself wholly from without, he would have
stifled his pangs of wounded pride and self love and emerged a
victor over himself in the contest. But he did not. Instead, he
gave way at once to violent anger. Feelings of revenge, of the
most acrid nature, fermented within him. His self love had been
crushed before the eyes of a garrulous world. His vanity and
his prestige had been ground in the dust. No consideration
weighed with him save determination for an immediate and ef-
fectual revenge.
"Don't worry, my dear," Peggy had whispered to him on the
way home. "Try not to think of it."
"Think of it? . . . I'll show them. They'll pay for this."
812 THE LOYALIST [Sept.,
Apart from that he had not spoken to her during the entire
journey. Morose, sullen, brutal, he had nursed his anger until
his countenance fairly burned. He slammed the door with vio-
lence; he tore the epaulets from his shoulders and threw them be-
yond the bed; he ripped his coat and kicked it across the floor.
No! He would not eat. He wanted to be alone. Alone with
himself, alone with his wrath, alone with his designs for revenge.
"The cowards ! And I trusted them."
He could not understand his guilt. There was no guilt, only
the insatiable lust on the part of his enemies for vengeance. The
execution came first, then the trial. There was no accusation;
he had been condemned from the start. The public at whose
hands he had long suffered, who reviled and oppressed him with
equal vehemence, who had elevated him to the topmost niche of
glory and as promptly undermined the column beneath his feet
and allowed him to crash to the ground, now gloated over their
ruined and heart-broken victim. They were on destruction bent;
he was the victim of their stupid spite.
If he could not understand his culpability, neither could he
apprehend fully and vividly the meaning of his sentence. To be
reprimanded by the Commander-in-Chief ! Better to be found
guilty by the court and inflicted with the usual military discipline.
His great sense of pride could not, would not suffer him to be thus
humiliated at the hands of him from whom he had previously
been rewarded with favors, and in whom he had lodged his most
complete esteem and veneration. He could not endure it, that
was all; and what was more, he would not.
He decided to leave the city forever. The howl of contumely
could not pursue him; it would grow faint with distance. He was
no longer Military Governor, and never would he resume that
thankless burden.
His wife had been correct in her prognostications. The
court, like the public mind, which it only feebly reflected, had been
prejudiced against him from the start. The disgust he felt for
the French Alliance was only intensified by the recent proceedings
of Congress. Perhaps he might listen more attentively now to
her persuasions to go over to the British side. He would be in-
demnified, of course; but it was revenge he was seeking; on this
account he would not become an ordinary deserter. He had been
accustomed to playing heroic roles; he would not become a mere
villain at this important juncture. This blundering Congress
would be overwhelmed by the part he would play in his new
career, and he would carry back in triumph his country to its old
allegiance.
1920.] THE LOYALIST 813
Gradually his anger resolved itself into vindictive machina-
tions, which grew in intensity. He might ohtain the command of
the right wing of the American Army, and at one stroke accom-
plish what George Monk had achieved for Charles II. It
was not so heinous a crime to change sides in a civil war, and
history has rewarded the memory of those who performed such
daring and desperate exploits. His country would benefit by his
signal effort and his enemies be routed at the same time. He
would open negotiations with Sir Henry Clinton over an assumed
name to test the value of his proposals.
"They'll pay me before I am through. I shall endure in his-
tory, with the Dukes of Albermarle and Marlborough."
As he mused over the condition of affairs and the possibilities
of the situation, he wandered into the great room, where he saw
two letters lying on the centre table. Picking them up, he saw
that one was addressed to Mrs. Arnold, the other to himself. He
tore open his letter and read the signature. It bore the name of
John Anderson.
The writer went on to say that he had arrived in safety in
the city of New York, after a hurried and forced departure from
Philadelphia. The meeting terminated in a tumult because of
the deliberate and fortunate appeal of an awkward mountebank,
who, possessed of a fund of information, fed it to the crowd both
skillfully and methodically; and by successfully coupling the
name of General Arnold with the proposed plot, had overwhelmed
the minds of the assembly completely.
He revealed the fact that the members of the court had al-
ready bound themselves in honor to prefer charges against Gen-
eral Arnold in order to placate the powerful Commonwealth of
Pennsylvania. He did not know the result of the trial, but pre-
dicted that there will be but one verdict, and that utterly regard-
less of the evidence.
"Hm!" muttered Arnold to himself.
The British Government, he added, was already in communi-
cation with the American Generals, with the exception of Wash-
ington, and was desirous of opening correspondence with General
Arnold. Everyone knew that he was the bravest and the most
deserving of the American leaders, and should be the second in
command of the rebel forces. The British knew, too, of the in-
dignities which had been heaped upon him by an unappreciative
and suspicious people, and they recommended that some heroic
deed be performed by him in the hope of bringing this unneces-
sary and bloody contest to a close.
Seven thousand pounds would be offered at once, together
814 THE LOYALIST [Sept.,
with an equal command, in the army of His Majesty, and with a
peerage in the realm. In return he would be asked to exert his
influence in favor of amicable adjustment of the difficulties be-
tween the Colonies and the mother country. General Clinton was
ready to begin negotiations after the advice and under the condi-
tions proposed by General Arnold. These might be interchanged
by means of a correspondence maintained with ambiguity.
"Egad!" He set his lips; then he turned to the beginning of
the paragraph. The offer was interesting.
Anderson then went on to relate what already had been sug-
gested to him during the night of their conversation in the park
at his magnificent home, the exigencies of the country, the oppor-
tunity for a master stroke by a courageous man, who would unite
His Majesty's people under a common banner, and who might
command thereby the highest honors of life.
He reminded him that it was possible to obtain a command
of the right wing of the American Army, a post only commen-
surate with his ability, which command might be turned against
the rebel forces in the hope of putting an immediate end to the
fratricidal war. There would be no humiliating peace terms.
There would be no indemnities, no reprisals, no annexations nor
disavowals. The principles for which the Colonists contended
would be granted, with the sole exception of complete independ-
ence. They would have their own Parliament; they would be re-
sponsible for their own laws, their own taxes, their own trade.
It would be a consummation devoutly wished by both parties, and
the highest reward and honor awaited the American General who
bound himself to the effectual realization of these views.
"Announce your defection, return to the royal cause, agree to
the terms which His Majesty's peace commissioners will make,
and earn the everlasting gratitude of your countrymen, like Monk
and Churchill."
So the letter concluded with the humble respects, and obedi-
ences of John Anderson. Arnold did not fold it, but continued to
stare at it for several minutes, as if trying to decide upon some
definite course of action in regard to it. At length he arose and
limped to the desk and, drawing out from its small drawer several
sheets of paper, began his reply.
But he did not conclude it. Hearing footfalls in the hall-
way, he hastily folded the several papers, Anderson's letter in-
cluded, and stuck them into his breast pocket. He sat motion-
less, with the pen poised in his hand, as Peggy entered.
"You here?" she asked.
He did not reply, nor make any movement.
1920.] THE LOYALIST 815
"Another resignation? or applying for a new command?"
He now turned full about and faced her.
"No. I was just thinking."
"Of what?"
She stood before him, her arms akimbo.
"Of many things. First of all, we must leave here."
"When?"
"I don't know."
"Well, then, where?"
"To New York."
"Do you mean it?"
Now she sat down, pulling a chair near to him that she might
converse the more readily.
"I am thinking of writing for a new command in the
army."
He thought best not to tell her of his original purpose in writ-
ing, nor of the letter which he had received from Anderson.
Whatever foul schemes he might concoct, he did not desire
to acquaint her with their full nature. Enough for her to know
that he intended to defect without being a party to the plot.
"Did I interrupt you? Pardon me!" she made as if to go.
"Stay. That can wait. You were right. They were against
me."
"I felt it all the time. You know yourself how they despise
you."
"But I never thought"
"What?" was the interruption. "You never thought? You
did, but you were not man enough to realize it. Reed would stop
at nothing, and if the Colonists gain complete independence, the
Catholic population will give you no peace. That you already
know. You have persecuted them."
"What are they? A bare twenty or twenty-five thousand out
of a population of, let us say, three million."
"No matter. They will grow strong after the war. Un-
fortunately they have stuck true to the cause."
"Bah! I despise them. It is the others, the Congress, Lin-
coln, Gates, Lee, Wayne. They will acquire the honors. Wash-
ington will be king."
"And you?"
"I'm going to change my post."
She smiled complacently, and folded her arms.
"Under Washington?"
She knew better, but she made no attempt to conceal her
feigned simplicity.
816 THE LOYALIST [Sept.,
He looked at her without comment.
Whether he shrunk from unfolding to her the sickening de-
tails of his despicable plan; or whether he judged it sufficient for
her to know only the foul beginnings of his treason without being
initiated into its wretched consummation; whether it was due to
any of these reasons or simply to plain indifference or perhaps to
both, he became unusually silent on this subject from this moment
onward. It was enough for her to know that he had been shab-
bily treated by the Congress and by the people, that he had long
considered the American cause hopeless and had abandoned his
interest in it on account of the recent alliance with the govern-
ment of France. In her eyes he thought it would be heroic for
him to resign his command and even to defect to the side of the
enemy on these grounds on the strength of steadfastly adhering
to his ancient principles. He knew well that she had counseled
such a step and was enthusiastic in urging its completion, never-
theless he sensed that the enormity and the depravity of his base
design was too revolting, too shocking for even her ears.
He would not even acquaint her with Anderson's letter nor
with the purpose he had of concurring with the proposition it
contained.
"Did you receive a letter from Anderson?" she asked
suddenly.
"Yes. He wrote to inform me that he had escaped in safety
and is now in New York."
"No more?"
"No. He did comment on the frustration of the plot, and ex-
pressed a desire to learn the identity of the disturber."
"You will tell him?"
"Later. Not now."
There was a pause.
"Do you intend to take active part in the coming campaigns?
You know your leg will prevent you from leading a strenuous life
in the field. Why not ask for some other post, or retire to pri-
vate life? I want to get out of this city."
"I am about to write for a new command. I have one friend
left in the person of His Excellency, and he will not leave me
'naked to mine enemies,' as the great Wolsey once said."
"But he is to reprimand you," she reminded him.
"No matter. That is his duty. I blame the people and the
court which was enslaved to them for my humiliation. They
shall pay for it, however."
"Let us leave together. Announce your desire of joining
arms with the British, and let us set out at once for New York.
1920.] THE LOYALIST 817
Mr. Anderson will take care of the details. You know his ad-
dress?"
"Yes."
"You have fought the war alone; end it alone. Settle your
claims with the government and let us sell our house."
"Our house? This is yours, Margaret, and they shall not
deprive you of it. No! We shall not sell our house. This is
yours for life, and our children's."
"Well, we can rent it for the present. For if you go, I am
going, too."
"Very well. We shall see what the future holds out for us.
Give me that stool."
He pointed to the small chair over against her. She arose at
once and set it before him. He placed his foot upon it.
"When I think of what I have done for them and then com-
pare their gratitude. Congress must owe me at least six or
seven thousand pounds, not to mention my life's blood which
never can be replaced. I have been a fool, a fool who does not
know his own mind."
"Didn't I predict what the outcome would be? I felt this
from the moment Anderson left. And what were you charged
with? A technical violation of the code of war. There was no
actual guilt nor any evidence in support of the charge. Were the
least shadow of a fault in evidence, you may be assured that it
would have been readily found. You were innocent of the
charge. But you were technically guilty that they might plead
excuse for their hate."
"I know it, girl ... I know it ... I see it all now. I tried
hard to disbelieve it." He seemed sad, as he muttered his reply,
and slowly shook his head.
He sat for a moment, and then sat suddenly upright.
"But by ... !"
It was surprising how quickly he could pass from mood to
mood. Now the old-time fire gleamed in his eyes. Now the un-
restrained, impetuous, passionate General, the intrepid, fearless
leader of Quebec, Ridgefield, Saratoga, revealed himself with all
his old-time energy and determination of purpose.
"By G !" he repeated with his hand high in the air, his fist
clenched. "They shall pay me double for every humiliation, for
every calumny, for every insult I have had to endure. They
sought cause against me, they shall find it."
"Hush! My dear," cautioned Peggy, "not so loud. The
servants will overhear you."
"The world shall overhear me before another month. Re-
VOL. cxi. 52
818 THE LOYALIST [Sept.,
venge knows no limit and is a sweet consolation to a brave man.
I shall shame this profligate Congress, and overwhelm my enemies
with no mean accomplishment, but with an achievement worthy
of my dignity and power. They shall pay me. Ha! they shall;
they shall."
Peggy rose at his violent outbreak, fearing lest she might
excite him the more. It was useless to talk further, for he
was enraged to a point beyond all endurance. She would leave
him alone, hoping he would recover his normal state again.
She walked to the window as if to look out. Then she
turned and vanished through the doorway into the hall.
Several days later a courier rode up to the door and sum-
moned General Arnold before him, into whose care he delivered
a letter from the Headquarters of the Commander-in-Chief.
Strangely excited, the General failed to perceive the identity of
the messenger as he saluted and made the usual brief inquiries.
Only after the courier was well down the road did the memory of
his strangely familiar face recur to him. But he was too pre-
occupied with the document to give him any more attention.
Breaking the seal he scanned the introductory addresses and read
his reprimand from his Commander-in-Chief, a reprimand
couched in the tenderest language, a duty performed with the
rarest delicacy and tact.
"Our profession is the chastest of all," it read. "Even the
shadow of a fault tarnishes the lustre of our finest achievements.
The least inadvertence may rob us of the public favor so hard to
be acquired. I reprimand you for having forgotten that, in pro-
portion as you have rendered yourself formidable to our enemies,
you should have been guarded and temperate in your deportment
towards your fellow-citizens. Exhibit anew those noble qualities
which have placed you on the list of our most valued com-
manders. I myself will furnish you, as far as it may be in my
power, with opportunities of regaining the esteem of your
country."
Slipping it again into its envelope, he slammed the door.
(TO BE CONTINUED.)
Iftew Books,
JACOPONE DA TODI, POET AND MYSTIC. By Evelyn Under-
bill. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. $6.00.
Jacopone da Todi, that remarkable Italian mystical poet, was
born soon after the death of St. Francis of Assisi, about 1228 or
1230, while Dante was yet in the prime of his manhood. Living
in the world until he was forty, a shrewd lawyer, a man of vivid
temperament, of wide culture and refined tastes, he received at
that age his first religious call. For the next ten years he wan-
dered about as a missionary hermit and in 1278, being then about
fifty, he became a Franciscan lay brother.
In the spiritual biography here under notice, Miss Evelyn
Underhill has set forth with discernment the late conversion, the
painful purification and the rapid growth of an ardent soul. As a
life story it might well be called "The Ordering of Love." For,
from first to last, Jacopone was a lover and a pursuer of Beauty,
first as he saw it in the many things that change and pass, and
finally in the One that ever remains. The stages of this "order-
ing" are put before us by St. Augustine in a chapter of his City of
God. "The body's peace," he says, "is an orderly disposal of the
parts thereof: the unreasonable soul's, a good temperature of the
appetites thereof: the reasonable soul's a true harmony between
knowledge and performance. But the peace of the body and soul
alike is a temperate and undiseased habit of nature established
throughout the whole creature." And Jacopone's spiritual history
is the history of just such a progressive ordering of his whole
nature. Indeed, he has summed it up himself in one of his most
beautiful poems written in the form of a dialogue between the
soul and Christ Himself.
Our Lord speaks as follows:
Order this love, O thou who lovest Me,
For without order virtue comes to naught;
And since thou seekest Me so ardently,
That virtue may be ruler in thy thought
And in thy love summon that charity
Whose fervors are by gentle Order taught:
A tree to proof is brought
By ordered fruit;
Bole, branch, and root,
All thrive in Order's grove.
820 NEW BOOKS [Sept.,
For see, with number and with measure fit,
All things I have ordered in this world that are:
From end to end fair Order ruleth it,
That all may move in peace, and not in war;
Should not, then, Love in ordered sweetness sit?
Love of her nature steadfast as a star?
Thy frenzy sore doth mar
The fervor of thy soul,
And brings thee dole;
Thou hast not curbed thy love.
Here then was Jacopone's spiritual life work, this ardent soul
of almost frenzied passion had God's call to the discipline thereof.
As he himself writes in another place:
First you- must be in God's own order set,
And then from Him the rule of love must get.
Miss UnderhilPs book is divided into two parts of about
equal length. The first is devoted to Jacopone's life, set in its
proper historical environment, in which we see him as a youth,
a penitent, a Franciscan friar, as one involved in constitutional
and spiritual development of the Franciscans, and finally as a
poet and a mystic who loses and finds himself again in God.
In the remaining part of the book Miss Underhill gives us a
chronological selection from his mystical poems, so well known
as the Laude, accompanied in the fellow page by an excellent
English translation (also into poetry) by Mrs. Theodore Beck.
We recommend the book without hesitation to all who would
learn of the vivid life of the Italy of that time, and more intimately
of the struggles of a vivid soul who came at last to "peace, silence,
stillness, unity, and rest" in God.
THE CREDENTIALS OF CHRISTIANITY. By Martin J. Scott,
S.J. New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons. $1.50.
The present age is prepossessed by historical research. Meta-
physical and philosophical proofs are ruled out of court by un-
reasoned prejudices; but an historical inquiry will win an easy
hearing. To those imbued consciously or no with this spirit,
Father Scott offers a treatise that is in no wise metaphysical,
whose only philosophy is that of common sense. He takes as his
theme Augustine's saying: either Christianity proved itself by
miracles, or she is herself a greater miracle than any she claims.
Under Father Scott's able treatment, this is seen to be more than
an epigram. History knows nothing to balance, even remotely,
the birth and undying growth of an institution which is fated to
perish, according to every human means of judgment.
1920.] NEW BOOKS 821
The best pages are those that contrast pagan and Christian
life the world before Christ and after. Father Scott offers no
generalities, no broad assertions. His statements are detailed,
and taken from contemporary writers of Greece and Rome. No
one can refuse to see how absolute was the change introduced.
More than this. Our non-Catholic writers often prate of civiliza-
tion, of the indefinite progress of the race. It were a valuable
lesson if they could be shown, as Father Scott shows, how their
best ideals and the finest parts of social life are not a human
evolution, but are purely and solely borrowed from Christianity.
Despite the best efforts of atheists, deists and agnostics, our civil-
ization, our lives, our thoughts are Christian deep-dyed.
Father Scott notes the present-day movement to naturalism,
and the denial of the supernatural. He notes too that this move-
ment is bringing back the worst problems of the old pagan world.
It is time to reassert strongly the supernatural element in Chris-
tianity. The Credentials of Christianity is a valuable champion
in the warfare.
WESTMINSTER CATHEDRAL AND ITS ARCHITECT. By Wine-
fride 1'Hopital. Two volumes. New York: Dodd, Mead
& Co. $12.00.
A full account of John Francis Bentley and his great cathe-
dral was a need which nobody, perhaps, could supply so well as
Mrs. de 1'Hopital, the architect's daughter. For though her liter-
ary style is frequently clumsy and never particularly good, she
had the necessary facts at her disposal and upon the whole has
used them well. A more skilled biographer would have given us
more of Bentley. Mrs. de 1'Hopital has allowed her father to live
as he would have wished in the immortal bricks of West-
minster. For though one, the second of the two volumes, is con-
cerned with Bentley, it is entitled "The Making of the Architect"
and in it his private life is almost entirely neglected. He is
from start to finish the maker of Westminster Cathedral.
English Catholics owe a great debt to the willingness of
Cardinal Vaughan and Bentley to come to a compromise. The one
wanted an Italian Basilica; the other a Gothic building. The
Cardinal ruled out the architect's suggestion of a cathedral which
would have to compete with Westminster Abbey; and the archi-
tect (who had hitherto been a Gothic man) succeeded in per-
suading the Cardinal to forego the Italian and to accept the By-
zantine on the principle that if they could not be frankly Eng-
lish, they had better be frankly international.
Bentley accordingly went off to Italy to study Byzantine art,
822 NEW BOOKS [Sept.,
and returned without any sketches or written notes it was never
his habit to make either but with the cathedral he meant to
build already vividly present in his mind. The final result,
achieved after some further compromise and modification, is the
finest architectural conception of this generation and the noblest
piece of brick work existing in the world.
The unfinished interior is so splendid a thing, that it seems
a pity that the plain bricks should have to be covered with prob-
lematical mosaics for now that there is no Bentley to supervise
the decoration, there is a danger that the Cathedral may be spoiled
by marble whose merit lies mainly in its expense. Mrs. de
1'Hopital does not disguise her annoyance that the Stations of the
Cross are sculptured panels instead of the intended opus seciile.
In point of artistic value, however, Mr. Eric Gill's Stations are not
only excellent (if somewhat eccentric) examples of has relief:
they are in keeping with the harmony of the Cathedral. Bentley
and Gill are alike in their method of working in their material.
What Westminster Cathedral will be upon its completion is
a subject for speculation tinctured with anxiety. For as Pro-
fessor Lethaby has said: "Everything added, which is not up to
the height of Bentley's work, will really count as a subtraction,
however costly it may be."
The publishers have put out a book worthy of its content
paper, print, illustrations and binding are all of the best.
THE AMERICAN ARMY IN THE EUROPEAN CONFLICT. By
Col. de Chambrun and Captain de Marenches. New York:
The Macmillan Co. $3.00 net.
This is the story of America's participation in the Great War,
told from a new point of view. Most of the volumes that have
been placed before American readers are dedicated to the task of
memoralizing the deeds of some particular unit or describing
some particular phase of the fighting. This volume is the record
of the organization of the American forces in France as seen by
two French officers who were attached to General Pershing's staff,
and who knew intimately and comprehensively the task accom-
plished by the American Army. They speak, therefore, from per-
sonal observation and, while their valuation of the services ren-
dered their country by America is, of course, friendly, it is none
the less critical and may be taken at its face value, which is very
high.
The book is of special value in that it gives perhaps the
best account of the organization of the American troops in France.
When General Pershing landed in France, he was at the head of a
1920.] NEW BOOKS 823
ridiculously small army. Under tremendous pressure, he was
compelled, within a few months, to create an army of over two
million men, to clothe and feed them, but more important still, to
whip them into shape for efficient warfare. The authors of this
book assisted in this great accomplishment, and the outline they
give of the vast organization accords the reader a splendid insight
into a magnificent achievement. Were it merely for the or-
ganization that he built, General Pershing should receive lasting
credit, not to speak at all of the smashing victories that his troops
won. These, too, are vividly pictured by the French officers, and
their recital is one to make any American feel proud.
The authors also review the work done by the auxiliary or-
ganizations, such as the Knights of Columbus, the Salvation Army,
the Young Men's Christian Association and the Young Women's
Christian Association.
The value of the book and the quality that makes it of per-
manent worth, lies in the dispassionate exposition of the work
done by the American Army as seen by military experts, who, by
training and experience, are well qualified to express their judg-
ment. They have subscribed to a record of achievements never
surpassed in the history of warfare.
i
THEOLOGIA MORALIS. Aertyns-Damen. Editio decima.
Tomus I. and Tomus II. Buscoduci: Teulings Editorum So-
cietas.
For forty years Father Aertyns taught Moral Theology and
published manuals and articles which won for him, not only in
Holland, but all over the world, the reputation of being one of the
greatest moralists of his time. At his death, in 1915, his best
known text-book had reached its eighth edition. The appearance
of the new Code of Canon Law necessitated many changes, which
were effected in the ninth edition under the editorship of Father
Damen. That edition was quickly exhausted, and the present edi-
tion, called for to supply an urgent need of the schools, is prac-
tically a reprint of its predecessor. Volume I. comprises the
basic treatises on Human Acts, Laws, and Conscience; the Theo-
logical virtues; the Commandments and Precepts of the Church;
and the Duties of various states in life. Volume II. treats of the
Sacraments; Censures, and Indulgences, and adds a chapter deal-
ing with condemned propositions. The arrangement is even
better than the earlier editions of Father Aertyns' well-known
work. The rapidity with which the ninth edition was exhausted
indicates that this established work will continue to hold a high
place among the best manuals of Moral Theology.
824 NEW BOOKS [Sept.,
THE FOUNDATION OF TRUE MORALITY. By Thomas Slater,
S.J. New York: Benziger Brothers. $1.25.
Father Slater's latest contribution to moral science is an
eighty-eight page apologetic booklet. It aims at showing the
desirability and the trueness of the Catholic ethical standard and
moral norm over Protestant ethics. ("Desirability" is used here
in the pragmatic sense; Father Slater is willing to prove Catholic
Morals' claim to universal acceptance on that ground.) Father
Slater accomplishes the task he sets himself well enough. He
contrasts the high places in Catholic moral teaching with the high
places in Protestant moral teaching, especially with that of Luther.
The contrast results in what must seem, even to the average
Protestant layman who holds ideals of right living close to his
heart, as very nearly a reductio ad absurdum for the Protestant
case (in so far as Luther's moral teaching is concerned at any
rate). But we wonder how many average Protestant laymen ac-
cept Luther's moral theory?
Father Slater gives special chapters to "Legalism" and to
"Casuistry" as parts of moral science. He rightly insists on the
absolute necessity of the former from Christ's own teaching and
bravely defends the wisdom of the latter, while admitting (and
condemning) its occasional abuses.
The book will not likely find a large audience. Priests
should find it of value for many non-Catholics undergoing courses
of instruction in preparation for baptism.
THE STORY OF MODERN PROGRESS. By William Mason
West. New York: Allyn & Bacon. $2.00.
Has there ever been a time when the party that sets the
world's pace has doubted its progress? This present Story of
Modern Progress is consoling in a measure, but also provoking.
The writer has some straight views, then again, the three-hundred-
year-old tradition enfolds him. He states the Catholic doctrine
correctly, but he blames Tetzel unjustly; he has only one good
word for Spain her conflict with the Turks at Lepanto; he is
fair to the Jesuits, and just; but not to the Inquisition; German
ambitions and plans he sensed long before the War Bismarck he
disapproved. We cannot, however, praise his use of cartoons.
Caricature is not history : and to single out one victim is invidious.
When the writer comes to treat of England he lapses at once
into the tone of one who has a theory and must prove or defend it
against all comers. Admiration of England's democratic institu-
tions ought not to entail approval of all she has done. Yet the
only blame apportioned is for the extermination of the Australian
1920.] NEW BOOKS 825
aborigines, and for the episode known as the Bulgarian atrocities.
Even the American Revolution does not stir Mr. West to indig-
nation.
It is quite the way in England and America to admire revo-
lution and revolutionary ideas in foreign countries, but to view
them askance when they come home. On page 424 Mr. West
chronicles quite jubilantly a fact he would not so approve had it
taken place in America. Yet success does not always make wrong
right in his volume. The religious wars of France and Germany
are fairly dealt with : so, too, in a measure, is the French Revolu-
tion, but his quotation of Jowett's extravagant estimate of Voltaire
is surprising we had thought better things of Jowett. Lowell's
appreciation contains a far truer, saner thought: "We owe half
our liberty to that leering old mocker."
Mr. West's own conclusions may be quoted. He is speaking
of those watchwords of the French Revolution Equality, Liberty,
Fraternity.
"Equality before the law is achieved . . . towards Liberty
much progress has been made . . . Fraternity has not yet been
achieved in any land." But Fraternity postulates Paternity, and
men would seem by common consent to have agreed to leave God
out of His own creation.
Hilaire Belloc truly says that "the only key to the under-
standing of the history of Christendom, is the religion from which
Christendom takes its name;" and we may add that the only road
to successful reconstruction is the way of the Ten Command-
ments, or if you like better, the two in one, to which Christ Him-
self reduces them love of God and our neighbor. So long as this
world will have none of God or His Christ, so long will peace fail
to take up its abode on earth.
WORTH. By Rev. Robert Kane, S.J. New York: Longmans,
Green & Co. $2.25 net.
All of our manifold human relations are kindred, and when
one sets to himself to single out one phase of life for a full and
thorough examination, he must necessarily consider all phases in
relation to it. Hence, Father Kane, though he limits his title to
Worth, cannot limit the scope of his book. He needs must draw
upon all philosophy, and so there is much more of logic, of psy-
chology and of ethics than one would imagine. His work has
been well done: his mature years and the affliction, which sits so
gracefully upon him, for in his preface he calls himself "an old,
blind man," lend him an acute vision and a sound appreciation of
what real, true worth is.
826 NEW BOOKS [Sept.,
The six opening lectures, delivered some years ago, and now
revised, are clear and precise expositions of the general principles
of worth. They are lucid and solid, but the reasoning is some-
times too keen and prolonged and requires too much thought for
the average reader. The concluding lecture of this series, "St.
Patrick: A Type of Worth," is a brilliant application of the ab-
stract principles of the preceding chapters. The succeeding lec-
tures on the "Worth of Patriotism" treat of these same principles
in relation to the nations, at the time of delivery, locked in war.
The concluding lectures on "Personal Worth" are written in
Father Kane's best style, and recall the charming pages of his
Sermon of the Sea. In these, he considers the evolution of man,
with all his faculties, according to the principles of true worth,
until he approximates that greatest of all types of worth, the
Christ. The book is replete with sound logic, sterling ideals and
old-fashioned common sense; there are so many passages worth
remembering and referring to, that it is to be regretted that an
index has been omitted.
THE MEMORIAL VOLUMES FOR SIR WILLIAM OSLER. Con-
tributions to Medical and Biological Research dedicated to
Sir William Osier, Bart., M.D., F.R.S., in honor of his seven-
tieth birthday, July 12, 1919, by his pupils and co-workers.
Volumes one and two. Limited edition. New York: Paul B.
Hoeber. $20.00.
Last year, July, 1919, Professor Osier celebrated his seven-
tieth birthday. He had taught medicine in Canada in the seven-
ties and eighties, and at the University of Pennsylvania in the
later eighties, and then at Johns Hopkins, Baltimore, in the
nineties and the beginning of the present century until he came
to be looked upon as probably the greatest clinical physician in
the world, when he was drafted to Oxford to spend the last ten
years of his life as Regius Professor of Medicine there. In antic-
ipation of his coming to three score and ten, a committee of his
personal friends in the medical profession and in the sciences
related to medicine had arranged for the issue of a volume of
contributions to medicine to be published in honor of that event.
Such memorials are customary, but probably never was there a
more enthusiastic response. What was planned to be a single
volume of modest size developed by pressure of material into two
distinctly large ones, and still many contributions had to be re-
fused.
These two memorial volumes are full of important contri-
butions to the scientific medicine and the medical education of
1920.] NEW BOOKS 827
today. Unfortunately Professor Osier died before the end of the
year, but not before he had a chance to see their completion,
and could appreciate their cordial tribute to him from the phy-
sicians of the English-speaking world.
A century hence the reader of these pages will obtain a good
idea of what interests the physicians in this day and age, espe-
cially those who teach medicine, yet he will learn comparatively
little of the treatment of disease as now practised. That is prob-
ably as it should be, for Professor Osier in his last serious con-
tribution to medical literature, the chapter on "The Treatment of
Disease" in The Oxford Medicine, quotes with approval Benjamin
Franklin's shrewd remark that "he is the best doctor who knows
the worthlessness of most medicine." Osier believed in drugs,
but thought many of them had been sadly abused. He quoted
with approval that expression of old Dr. Parry of Bath: "It is
much more important to know what sort of an individual has a
disease than what sort of a disease the individual has."
These volumes reflect the many sidedness of Osier's interests.
They will stand, too, as a memorial of his genius for friendship:
as a tribute to the genial gentleman who could give men the
feeling that he was personally interested in them even though
they were just beginning their career and had never been under
his influence, but had only shown him by some contribution to
medical literature that they were capable of thinking for them-
selves. There is not another such a monument in the whole his-
tory of medicine and surely this one, because of the noble human
elements in it, will be acre perennius.
THE INTERCHURCH AND THE CATHOLIC IDEA. By the Rev.
A. M. Skelly, O.P. Tacoma, Washington: Dominican Sisters'
Publication Society. Cloth, $1.35; paper, 95 cents.
Father Skelly takes as his sub-title "A Polemical Discus-
sion." The Inter-Church World Movement now proven a
failure gave rise to a controversy in the public press of Seattle
concerning the Catholic and the non-Catholic concepts of Church
unity and organization. An Episcopal Bishop-elect fired the open-
ing gun. An Episcopal minister came to the defence of his su-
perior, and thereafter a Lutheran pastor and a Methodist mis-
sionary joined the encounter. Father Skelly's articles, regarded
as polemics, are able, courteous, fair, yet exact, logically con-
structed, firm and authoritative. They meet successfully all the
difficulties of an always difficult situation.
The book is of even greater value to apologetics. The letters
of the non-Catholic protagonists are quoted in full, and thus es-
828 NEW BOOKS [Sept.,
tablish clearly the nature of the principles and the arguments
which a Catholic must meet in this our day and country. There
are, indeed, the stock-worn historical and Scriptural difficulties,
which crop up still as if they had not been a thousand times
answered. There are too ad hominem objections drawn from
present-day circumstances. All these Father Skelly handles with
vigor and skill. But one vital fundamental fact rises to challenge
attention. The statements and arguments of the Protestant di-
vines are ample proof of Father Skelly's bold claim, that "the
Protestant religion, of whatever brand, is a religion of pure
reason, and in no way touches the supernatural. For just as
rivers cannot rise above their sources, so neither can institutions
or systems rise above their principles." Catholic writers and
speakers, whether lay or clerical, must needs be vividly aware of
this unspoken rejection of the supernatural. It is the touchstone
for all difficulties. Upon the truth or the falsity of the super-
natural, non-Catholic claims fall or stand.
In another field of controversy, the concluding chapter on the
notorious "Ballinger Baby Case" is timely and pointed.
THE NEW WARNING. Poems by Alfred Noyes. New York:
Frederick A. Stokes Co. $1.35 net.
If a new volume of poems by Alfred Noyes is no longer the
event it might have been considered five years ago, it is still an
episode of distinction in the world of letters. It is even of par-
ticular significance when it happens to bring together all the verse
written by so important a poet since 1914. To be sure, this sig-
nificance is in the main a negative one, since Mr. Noyes' war
poems are neither comparable with his own best work nor with
the best written in England during the Great War. Not much of
it is likely to be treasured in the memory of mankind. Yet it is
verse written by a tried craftsman, by a man of high ideals ob-
viously intent upon making his lyric gift "do its bit." It is con-
scientious poetry but it lacks, in Hopkins' word, "the one rap-
ture of an inspiration." Some of the verses are, in fact, rather
too patently propagandist in intention as the lines which laud
George Washington as the "Englishman who fought the German
king!" and nearly all shine with that determined optimism, that
belief in world-amity and world-peace which was one of the finest
illusions of post-armistice days.
Mr. Noyes is all "on the side of the angels:" and for his
uniform reverence, his hold upon sane ideals of life and such
spiritual phenomena as prayer, he deserves our thanks in these
troublous times.
1920.] NEW BOOKS 829
WITH OTHER EYES. By Norma Lorimer. New York: Bren-
tano's. $1.90 net.
Miss Lorimer has done much good work in this novel of
uneven merit. The opening action takes place at Glastonbury,
where, in the summer of 1914, Evangeline Sarsfield gives her
heart to young Dr. Allan Fairclough. The love story so auspi-
ciously staged takes an unexpected turn when it develops that
Allan has no mind to represent in person the surrounding tradi-
tions of chivalry and valor. He frankly stales that he must be
unhampered in carving out a career for himself, thus allowing
ambition to make him a laggard at both love and war. This is
well handled, and the manner in which Evangeline meets the
painful situation establishes her in the reader's good graces.
The story proceeds along lines that remain unhackneyed, even
when the book becomes, virtually, a war novel. Time brings its
strange revenges to Evangeline, and the War, new vision, with
experiences that try and test her character, leaving her the gainer
in depth and sweetness.
It is a grave, thoughtful piece of work that does the author
credit. Charmingly as she describes the Arthurian country, it is
far more fiction than guide-book. Its principal defect rises from
an error in judgment, which seeks to divide interest and space
almost equally with a secondary story. The latter is in itself all
very well; but the prominence given it mars continuity and
strains the attention.
IN AN INDIAN ABBEY: SOME PLAIN TALKING ON THEOLOGY.
By Joseph Rickaby, S.J. St. Louis: B. Herder Book Co. $2.40.
A mythical abbey in India, founded in the year 2020 for the
purpose of oral discussion of difficulties in religion, is the imag-
inary scene of ten dialogues that gather up just the problems upon
which reflective minds would fain have more light than they can
glean from the ordinary sources of instruction at their command.
To these dialogues Father Rickaby has brought the clearness of
thought, the erudition, and the grace of style that invest his writ-
ings with perennial freshness. The solutions offered for some of
the difficulties are, as the author makes plain, theological hy-
potheses; but in every case they show originality and a disposi-
tion to meet the problem fairly. Whether he discusses the an-
tiquity of the human race, or the difficult notion of creation, or
St. Augustine's thorny theory of Original Sin, or pragmatism,
or predestination, or scandals in the Church, Father Rickaby faces
the issue squarely.
Besides the solutions offered to questions that always vex the
830 NEW BOOKS [Sept.,
theological mind, the epigrammatic sayings sprinkled through the
pages of the book provoke thought and keep the reader on the
alert. To only one class of these sayings we draw attention
those that are evidently the fruit of a lifetime of controversy.
"At Oxford I learnt no better lesson than this that there is a
great deal to say against every truth; and the deeper and more
precious the truth, the more it is assailable; but the truth re-
mains true for all that; and he is a fool who shifts his intellectual
course for every wind of opposition. Truth comes out under
manifold aspects under manifold attacks; it is not swept away,
but expanded by contradiction. . . The truth that is most valu-
able to man, moral, social, and religious truth, appeals to the
whole man, to the entirety of human nature; and not, like the
truths of number and dimension, to the intellect only. . . . There
is such a thing as satiety of argument, and consequent distrust
of it in those who are most proficient in its use."
THE SCIENCE OF LABOR. By Dr. Josef a loteyko. New York:
E. P. Button & Co. $1.60.
This is "a study of physical fitness for work, in which the
human being is considered as a motor, with certain chemical and
electrical energy applied. A scientific analysis is made, based
upon the most modern researches of the world's experts in such
investigations, of the forces contributing to the successful stimu-
lation and control of the human machine for efficient labor."
Although it all sounds extremely callous and cold-blooded, it is
not unlikely that students of industrial psycho-physiology will
derive profit from the results of the researches of this Belgian
investigator. The book consists of articles reprinted by the author
from the Revue Philosophique, the Revue Scientifique and the
Revue Generate des Sciences.
PAGES OF PEACE FROM DARTMOOR. By Beatrice Chase.
New York: Longmans, Green & Co. $2.00.
These "Pages" are not only peaceful; they are, in spots,
soporific. They belong to a series with which the reader is pre-
sumed to be familiar. Here and there are paragraphs with a
claim to beauty, but for the most part the short chapters and
they are none too short deal either with trifling domestic affairs,
the humor of which is undiscernible to the non-British mind, or
with reflections of a quasi-pious nature which confirm one in the
opinion once expressed by a greater man than the reviewer, viz.,
that no woman has any business dabbling in theology! On the
whole, it is difficult to square the purchase price of the book with
what one finds between its covers.
1920.] NEW BOOKS 831
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. By James I. Osborn. Boston: Hough-
ton Mifflin Co. $5.00.
This is the first adequate critical hiography of Clough, friend
of Matthew Arnold and of Emerson, and most eminent of Vic-
torian "minor" poets. There is much in this study which the
student of mid-Victorian poetry and intellectual life will find
useful and suggestive. Especially interesting is the account of
dough's later experiences in America. But Mr. Osborne's work
has little charm of style, and fails to render Clough attractive
to the reader.
HOME THEN WHAT? By James L. Small. New York: George
H. Doran Co. $1.50.
In May, 1919, to stimulate self-expression among the men,
at the suggestion of Captain Leon Schwarz, U. S. Army, three
prizes were offered of 500, 250 and 100 francs, respectively, for
the three best essays on the topic "Home Then What?" the
subject having been selected by Chaplain H. C. Frazer, U. S. Army.
Although only a brief time could be given for the writing of
these papers owing to the rapid movement of our troops in
America, several hundred were sent into the judges of the com-
petition. This volume contains a selection of the best, and in
the opinion of J. Kendrick Bangs, who writes the introduction,
presents the best symposium of soldier thought in existence today.
The papers have been edited and arranged by Mr. James L. Small,
who was with the American troops as K. of C. Secretary.
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM. By Coulson Kernahan. New
York: John Lane Co. $1.25.
This little book is of considerable value as a supplement to
Gosse's Life of the poet and the collection of Letters edited by his
biographer in collaboration with T. J. Wise. There are several
new and enjoyable Swinburne "stories" and letters, and a thor-
oughly diverting account of how Watts-Dunton induced the poet
to abjure brandy and, proceeding by easy stages through port,
burgundy, and claret, to decline upon the lower range of bottled
beer.
TALKS TO NURSES: The Ethics of Nursing. By Henry S. Spald-
ing, S.J. New York : Benziger Brothers. $1.50.
Father Spalding's book is very valuable for nurses; it is
hardly less valuable for doctors, seminarians, and even the general
public. This is high praise, but richly deserved. Not that there
is anything astounding or anything of discovery in the book; it is
832 NEW BOOKS [Sept.,
only a solid moral primer, a sound Catholic presentation of true
ethical viewpoints on sociological questions which come within
the special purview of nurses (and doctors and priests) ; this
is its aim and it fulfills it generously. The presentation is clean-
cut, forceful and pointed; its reading is exceedingly easy. Of the
book's ten chapters, the last five are most intimately connected
with the practical duties of nurses, in training and after training.
The first half of the book, however, is worth while reading for
any adult; it sums up fundamental Catholic ethic and pays spe-
cial attention to the application of Catholic principles to Euthan-
asia, Birth Control and the Rights of the Unborn Child. These
latter questions are treated plainly, but never so as to offend.
There is constant insistence on the fundamental principle that
one innocent person may not be killed to save another innocent
person, and there are proofs enough given of the truth of this
principle to convince any right-minded man or woman.
Father Spalding has made a valuable contribution to the
spread, where it is most needed, of the kind of moral teaching
which alone can save this world of ours from its own folly.
THE RELEASE OF THE SOUL. By Gilbert Cannan. New York:
Boni & Liveright. $1.75 net.
Mr. Cannan does not define what he understands by the
"soul." But for certain he does not mean that vital spark of
heavenly flame, which our Faith teaches us, is only a little lower
than the angels. He seems rather to mean some vague power
outside us, perhaps some emanation of the Pantheists, or maybe
of the Neo-PIatonists. Moreover, the tone of the book is
rhapsodical; its sentences are so desultory; and even the illus-
trations drawn here and there from history, art and literature are
so loose, that it is difficult, if not impossible, to decide at times
what he exactly does mean.
On every other page high-sounding words occur: life, the
soul, love, God, religion, humanity. But these words do not
connote for the author what they do for the ordinary man. There
is a haze of mistiness about them, a kind of oracular mirage, so
that they may mean almost anything.
Pages seventy-seven to eighty-five describe what seems to
us a very simple nervous exaltation. Mr. Cannan magnifies the
phenomenon hugely, and his grandiloquent description verges on
the ludicrous. Later he charitably informs us that journalists,
novelists, politicians, and the clergy lie to the people. We shall
not impute such turpitude to him. But neither shall we affirm
that he has not attempted to befog the people.
1920.] NEW BOOKS 833
LIFE OF THE VEN. ANNE MADELEINE REMUZAT. By the Sis-
ters of the Visitation of Harrow. Dublin: M. H. Gill & Sons.
Marseilles owes to this holy Visitation nun the glory of hav-
ing been the first city dedicated to the Sacred Heart. After the
plague which decimated the city in 1720 and 1721, from her clois-
ter she effected the complete conversion of the people and per-
suaded them to consecrate themselves and their successors by a
yearly festival, which lasts to the present day, to the Most Sacred
Heart. In this work, she was the chosen instrument of God to
carry on the apostolate begun by her canonized sister, St. Mar-
garet Mary Alacoque. Like her, Anne Madeleine Remuzat was an
obscure soul through whom God willed to show His power. The
recital of her life is an enigma to all save the elect, and God's deal-
ings with her are mysterious and almost weird to our dull com-
prehension. From her earliest years she was singled out as the
divine "victim." At fifteen, she entered the Visitation Monastery
of Marseilles, and from that time till her death at the mystic age
of thirty-three, she became as clay in His hands. She was tor-
mented by extreme physical and mental pain, at the same time
that her soul was inundated with sublime love and consolation.
Physical signs, an enlarged form of a heart, the sacred name,
manifestations that could not be explained by the medical pro-
fession, were found upon her body. Through her were revealed
the secret thoughts of the heart and future events that were ful-
filled. Favored as she was by God in so many ways, she retained
her own sweet natural disposition and throughout the book we
see her working as one with and under the guidance of the
Holy Spirit.
FATHER TOM. Life and Lectures of Rev. T. P. McLoughlin
(1859-1913). By Peter P. McLoughlin. Illustrated. New
York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. $2.60.
The subject character of this volume, while a priest in the
New York diocese, was an active enthusiast in music. In the
twenty years referred to, he had prepared and often given a
number of musical lectures which he illustrated with many songs.
The work is divided about equally between the biographical ma-
terial and a reproduction of the lectures. These lectures lean
toward the poetic side, therefore do not contain a great deal of
technical material, yet they constitute very creditable studies. It
is especially noteworthy that the priest, as early as 1898, was up-
holding the innate power of the Stephen Foster melodies. Now
musical authorities are corroborating his opinion on every hand.
Of the other lectures, those on Scottish and Irish music lent
VOL. cxi. 53
834 NEW BOOKS [Sept.,
themselves particularly well to his temper and his Celtic blood.
Everywhere he emphasized the value of the poems which inspired
the songs of the different countries, and it has been a happy
thought of the biographer to reproduce those in the present
volume.
THE STORY OF OUR NATIONAL BALLADS. By C. A. Browne.
New York : Thomas Y. Crowell Co. $2.00.
We all pretend to know our national ballads, but those of us
who really know their history are few. In this book the author
tells us how these songs came into existence, the political circum-
stances from which some of them arose; anecdotes and the various
factors that have entered into their making being given in full
detail. The material is so arranged, as to make it splendid read-
ing for both musician and layman. We learn such facts, as that
"Yankee Doodle" was first used by the British against our ragged
Colonial troops, as a term of derision, only to be promptly taken
up by the Yankees themselves, and finally played in triumph
when Cornwallis surrendered. We learn again of the story of
old John Brown, and we are told that the marching song resulted
in Mrs. Howe's majestic battle hymn. The final chapters are de-
voted to the songs of the Spanish War, and the terrible World
War, through which we have just passed.
THE MODERN BOOK OF FRENCH VERSE. Edited by Albert
Boni. New York: Boni & Liveright. $2.50.
Mr. Boni's admirable compilation of English translations of
the best French poetry makes a delectable volume. It is not, as
the title might mistakenly be read, a collection merely of modern
French verse : it includes fragments from the Chanson de Roland,
from Marie de France, and many beguiling mediaeval songs, and
it brings the tale down to our own contemporaries, Francis
Jammes and Jules Romans.
Moreover, the translations are not "made to order" for the
present volume, but are nearly all culled from sources that have
already become classic from Chaucer, Swinburne, Rossetti,
Francis Thompson, Andrew Lang, Ernest Dowson, Wilde, the
voluminous and sympathetic Arthur Symons, Jethro Bithell, Aus-
tin Dobson, etc. There are very few false notes in this varied
chorus (one of them, alas! is Ezra Pound's calamitous turning
of Charles d'Orleans' "Dieu, qu'il la fait ban regarder!") and
there is more sheer beauty than most of us would have thought
possible in a storehouse of wholly borrowed jewels a "loan col-
lection," so to speak.
1920.] NEW BOOKS 835
FROM DUST TO GLORY. By M. J. Phelan, S.J. New York:
Longmans, Green & Co. $1.75 net.
This sequel to Father Phelan's book, The Straight Path, fully
justifies its title, for it carries a man through the full span of
existence, from the dust that he is, to the glory that is his. In its
general plan, the book follows the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ig-
natius. Too often the solid principles of religious life fail
to make much impression, since they are presented in their philo-
sophic aspect and couched in dull, prosaic language. In this book,
however, the same deep truths that have formed and inspired
saints are again presented, but in a new and charming dress.
They have been passed through a vivid Celtic imagination and
expressed in simple, direct appeals. Their simplicity makes them
lose nothing in greatness; while the vivacity, the vivid word-
pictures and the apt, copious illustrations with which the author
has adorned them, give them a driving force and a most cogent
appeal.
SYLVIA AND MICHAEL. By Compton Mackensie. New York:
Harper & Brothers. $1.60.
In this second instalment of the amazing adventures of his
erratic but always delightful heroine, Sylvia Scarlett, the author
involves her in difficulties and entanglements galore, physical
and spiritual, in various remote parts of Europe and Asia.
Nothing, however, daunts this irrepressible young woman, and
she rises magnificently superior to every situation, finding hap-
piness (or rather appearing to have found it for one never
knows what is going to befall Sylvia from hour to hour!) at the
end, in the love of Michael Fane, an old friend of Mr. Mackensie's
readers. As in all the author's later novels there is here both
wit and wisdom: "I made friends," says Sylvia, during the mar-
velous confession she whispered into the priest's ear at Bucharest
"with an English priest not a Catholic but half a Catholic
it's impossible to explain it to a foreigner. I don't think anybody
would understand the Church of England out of England, and
very few people can there . . ."
A SHORT GRAMMAR OF ATTIC GREEK. By Rev. F. M. Connel,
S.J. New York: Allyn & Bacon. $1.40.
The author of A Short Grammar of Attic Greek presents in
a clear and simple manner the essentials of Greek necessary for
the translation of ordinary Greek prose. Irregular forms and
Homeric pecularities have been omitted, the book offering the
grammatical information most necessary and useful to the pupil
studying Greek in high school.
836 NEW BOOKS [Sept.,
DEBS: HIS AUTHORIZED LIFE AND LETTERS. From Wood-
stock Prison to Atlanta. By David Karsner. New York:
Boni & Liveright. $1.50 net.
The author of this book is an ardent Socialist and a fervent
disciple of the imprisoned Socialist leader. The hook was author-
ized by Debs, now serving a ten-year sentence in the Atlanta
prison for violation of the Espionage Act. It is complete in its
presentation of the incidents of the Socialist leader's life, and gives
a very vivid presentation, though, of course, a highly colored one,
of the acts, speeches and writings of the Socialist standard bearer.
One is compelled to admire the zeal of the disciple in the warm
appreciation that he shows for his beloved teacher.
While the book is entirely Socialistic propaganda, it serves a
useful purpose in giving a full delineation, from the Socialist
point of view, of the make-up of this man, his ideas and the
things for which he stands. For this reason, it is a useful con-
tribution to the literature of the day. It is the kind of work that
one would expect under the circumstances.
DAISY ASHFORD: HER BOOK. By the Author of The Young
Visitcrs. New York: George H. Doran Co. $2.00.
This time it is Mr. Irvin S. Cobb who writes the preface to
Miss Ashford's book, taking occasion to explain that he is espe-
cially gratified at having this task assigned to him since he claims
"the distinction" of being the first person in America, except the
publisher, to read the manuscript of The Young Visiters and
advise its publication.
The book is a collection of the remaining novels of Daisy
Ashford, four in number, accompanied by a novel from the pen
of her eight-year-old sister, Angela. At the same age was written
"Short Story of Love and Marriage." What has been said of
The Young Visiters is all applicable to the present volume, and
there is nothing to be added.
THE PRINCIPLES OF MUSIC. By Orpha F. Deveaux. Montreal :
149 Pie IX, Boulevard.
Teachers of music will find in this work an excellent pre-
sentation of the rudiments of music to very young beginners.
The author gives a very clear statement, presents the matter in
attractive form, and shows an intimate acquaintance with the
mode of presentation of the first principles of music to young
children. It is well graded, taking up one difficulty at a time
and dwelling on this difficulty until the pupil has it within his
grasp. The work is also provided with questions for review.
1920.] NEW BOOKS 837
HISTORY OF ENGLAND SERIES. British and Anglo-Saxon
Period. By Rev. Ernest R. Hull, S.J. New York: P. J. Kenedy
& Sons. 75 cents.
This is a most interesting book. Its purpose is to point out
wherein much present-day history is not real history. The
preface emphasizes the fact that there is abundant need of such
a work. This effort, the author modestly avers, is merely a
"stop-gap, a 'pioneer.' " The book is well worth the attentive
perusal of both Protestants and Catholics. But Father Hall im-
presses the fact that prejudice and a traditional Protestant view
has led to much of the falsification of history, coupled with an
innocent reliance on Protestant historians. He is charitable to
blunderers, and only re-states to those who willfully misstate.
THE annual volume of Historical Records and Studies of the
United States Catholic Historical Society contains, as usual,
useful studies on many interesting topics. Rev. Gerald Treacy,
S.J., gives an account of "Father John Bapst, S.J., and the 'Ells-
worth Outrage;'" "Know Nothingism in Rochester, New York"
is treated by Rev. Frederick J. Swierlein, D.Sc., M.H.; Father
Laurence Kenny, S.J., tells the history of the famous Mullanphy
family of St. Louis, and Mrs. Margaret B. Downing of Major
L'Enfant's interesting papers to be found in the James Dudley
Morgan Collection at Washington, D. C.; the account of "The
Mission to Liberia" is taken from the Diary of the Rev. John
Kelly, and that of "The Jesuits in South America" is contributed
by the Rev. John F. O'Hara, C.S.C. The Record of the Society's
transactions and the essay on "Catholic Day," which won the
prize in the Second Intercollegiate Historical Contest, add to the
interest of the volume.
YOUR OWN HEART, by Father Garescb.6, S.J. (New York:
Benziger Brothers. $1.25 net), gathers together another series
of articles which Father Garesch4 tells us in the preface "are
meant to minister in some degree to our desire for self-knowl-
edge and self-betterment." Your Own Heart thus becomes a com-
panion to the other works of the same author, and if the ideas are
not new, at least Father Garesche's presentation of them will be
helpful to his readers.
A VERY complete bibliography of Irish life and character as
portrayed in "Irish novels, tales, romances and folk-lore"
will be found in Ireland in Fiction, by Stephen J. Brown, S.J.
(St. Louis: B. Herder Book Co. $3.75 net). Infinite patience and
838 NEW BOOKS [Sept.,
care has been given to the compilation of this volume. The books
are so classified and listed as to facilitate the work of the inquirer.
OUTDOORS AND IN, by J. F. Crowell (Boston: The Four Seas
Co. $1.50 net). The author of these verses is obviously a
faithful and diligent observer of nature in all its moods, and
there is hardly a page in this book that is without its exactness
of descriptive epithet. Skilled though he be in verse forms, Mr.
Crowell is nevertheless far from being a poet, and no discrim-
inating reader will ever suspect him of it. One comes with a
start of surprise upon so obvious an example of the sincerest
form of flattery as the lines entitled "Snow," which begin:
I think that I shall never know
A truer beauty than the snow.
SPIRITISM has been much to the fore these days, though they
say it is now on the wane. A collection of stories dealing
with this subject is published by Boni & Liveright, under the title,
The Best Psychic Stories ($1.75 net). The most definite thing we
can say about Spiritism is that it is indefinite. The Best Psychic
Stories add no light to the situation.
LEAVES ON THE WIND, by Rev. D. A. Casey (Toronto: Mc-
Clelland & Stewart. $1.25), is a pleasant collection of songs
and lyrics and poetical meditations, some of them on sacred and
patriotic subjects, by the well-known Canadian poet-priest. There
is an appreciative foreword by Father Dollard, himself a poet of
distinction.
EVERYONE who loves dogs, and most of us do, should read The
Story of Jack, a tale of the North, and the "Other Fascinat-
ing Dog Stories," by J. Horace Lytle, contained in the same
volume. The scene of the title story is laid in the Klondike land
in the Klondike days. Jack is a real dog, and a great one, who
will win straight to the heart of every reader. While his story
is in every sense the leading one, the others are close seconds
and no one will take the book up without seeing it to a finish.
These are stories of live people and live dogs told in a live way.
(Dayton, Ohio: The Pettibone-McLean Co.)
THE HOUSE OF LOVE, by Will D. Muse (Boston: The Cornhill
Co. $1.25). The verses beginning "Dear Old Sunny Tennesee
Say! it's good enough for me" are by no means the worst of a
collection which, frankly, is not good enough to win the present
reviewer's benison.
1920.] NEW BOOKS 839
FOREIGN PUBLICATIONS.
PIERRE TEQUI, Paris:
Le Ron Esprit an College, by Monscigneur Tissier, who holds the
first place among the Bishops of France who, during the course of the
terrible war, have proved themselves Leaders and Pastors in every
sense of the word. No one is ignorant today of the name and works of
the Bishop of Chalons. But the Bishop does not let us forget the bril-
liant, sagacious and original educator that he formerly was and will
always remain. Monscigneur Tissier knows the soul and the character
of the young man, what cord to vibrate in order to elevate him ever
higher toward an ideal always more beautiful, more noble, more
delicate. To cite only one chapter, read the one entitled "The Spirit of
Sacrifice," or the chapter added to this book, "The Spirit of Patriot-
ism," the service of the Fatherland after the War, and you will fully
admire with us this beautiful book which is a splendid achievement.
En Marge Des Combats, by Gabriel Joly, is a Novena of Thanks-
giving in honor of our Lady of Lourdes.
Vers la Victoire is a volume made up of sermons and pastoral
letters which Monseigneur Julien, the now Bishop of Arras, pro-
nounced during the War, first as Arch Priest of Notre Dame, Havre,
and afterwards as Bishop. These pronouncements have lost their
timeliness.
Le Renouveau Catholique: Les Jeunes Pendant La Guerre, by Abbe
Rouzic, is the second volume in the triptych which the author devotes
to the renaissance of Catholic life amongst the French youth of today.
On reading this book one would imagine that all France had suddenly
become sincerely and devoutly Catholic. It seems overdrawn and is
without lasting interest except for Frenchmen, yet some of the letters
written by the boys at the front and reproduced in this volume, are
worthy of living forever.
Retraite de Premiere Communion Solennelle, by Chanoine Millot.
Canon Millot has written much for children. Up to the present he has
not written a retreat which was specially destined for them. This
volume fills this gap, and will be very useful for priests and others
preparing children for their First Communion. In a very well ar-
ranged appendix preachers will find numerous stories suitable for
reading to the children in the interval between the exercises.
Le Predicateur Des Retraites De Premiere Communion, by two Mis-
sionaries, is a work on the same order as the above. It contains ten
different retreats with seven instructions for each one, followed by
twenty-five instructions for the Great Day. Those who look for fully
developed sermons will be disappointed in this volume, as the instruc-
tions are, for the most part, merely outlined not developed. This
work is well known in France and has already gone through six
editions.
La Novice Parfaite, by Chanoine Emile Thevenot, is a very brief
work made up of spiritual counsels and canonical legislation for the
Postulate, Novitiate, and Profession of Sisters with simple vows.
840 NEW BOOKS [Sept.,
Le Christ Vie De L'Ame, by Dom Columba Marmion. The con-
ferences which compose the present work are the fruit of several years
of reflection and prayer. They were given in very varied circum-
stances to very diverse audiences. The first part comprises a general
expose of the economy of Divine Providence, wherein the author tries
to show the plan followed by God, the Father, Son and Holy Ghost to
make us participate in the Divine Life in Jesus Christ. In the second
part he shows how the soul can and ought to adapt itself to the
divine plan and assimmilate the Divine Life brought on earth by
Christ. Faith in the Divinity of Jesus is the first attitude of the soul
and baptism the first sacrament.
He then borrows from St. Paul the fundamental doctrine accord-
ing to which this sacrament of Christian initiation impresses on the
entire life of the disciples of Jesus Christ a double meaning: "Death
to Sin," and "Life for God." He then exposes in detail how this double
character should be found in the entire development of Christian life.
Most of the conferences contain the matter of several sermons,
whence the length of some of them. Rather than multiply chapters,
the Editor has preferred to group around a subject all that relates to it
in order to safeguard the homogeneity of the ideas.
GABRIEL BEAUCHESNE, Paris:
La Parole Educatrice, by Abb6 F. Delerue du clerge de Paris, is a
very timely little work, useful alike for the pastor, the mother and the
voluntary catechist. It is a cycle of short dogmatic and moral exhor-
tations which the author preached to the children of his parish pre-
paring for first Communion. There are very few such works in any
language, and for this reason the book should have a good sale.
Les Grand Blesses du Lieutenant Kessler, by M. Albert Boulicaut
(4/rs. 50), describes the working of a successful agricultural school
for French soldiers at Sainte Ann d'Auray. Over two hundred and
fifty pages of the book are devoted to a practical course of agriculture,
which follows the same lines as the schools of our State Universities.
TReccnt Events,
The victorious advance of the Bolshevik
Russia. armies against the Poles continued
throughout the month, and the Polish
volunteer army under General Haller has been shattered. The
Poles have fallen back on Warsaw, where a last desperate defence
is planned and where a concentration and re-grouping of the
Polish forces for a great counter-stroke on the entire Warsaw
front, the centre of the Bolshevik lines, is in process.
According to late dispatches, bitter fighting is going on north-
east and east of the capital. The Bolshevik army, despite repeated
efforts, has failed to get a firm footing on the west bank of the
river Bug in the region of Brest-Litovsk, though they succeeded
earlier in the month in capturing the east bank from the forces
of General Haller. In the northeastern sector the situation is
more threatening. Russian cavalry has been reported conducting
raiding operations over a wide territory and drawing closer and
closer to Warsaw. On the southern front, before Lemberg, the
battle line is deadlocked and the Russians are unable to make
progress.
The present situation at Warsaw is most critical and the fall
of the capital seems imminent. The Russian plan of campaign,
which is proving most effective, consists of delivering successive
blows at different points along the front line, which tend to dis-
organize the Polish defence, compelling the Polish staff to rush
reserves to widely separated points. The Bolshevik Northern
forces have been reenforced heavily and pushed to within striking
distance of the capital. Russian cavalry, driving westward from
Przasnysz, has occupied Chor, which is within a day's riding
distance of the Warsaw-Danzig Railroad, which is expected to
be reached either at Miawa or Ciechanow, according to advices
reaching the French Foreign Office. The Russians are occupying
a stretch of twenty-four miles of the direct railway line between
Warsaw and Danzig, and a large force is pushing across the
Danzig corridor to cut the remaining railroad.
In the south the activity of the Bolshevik General, Budenny,
is causing a new danger. Budenny has two alternatives, the suc-
cess of either of which would prove serious to the Poles. He can
either push northward between the Bug and Vistula Rivers and
hamper the concentrations and movements of the Polish reserves,
or move southwestward and turn the Polish defences on the east
842 RECENT EVENTS [Sept.,
Galician rivers, swoop clown upon Lemberg, and eventually
Prezemysl and the line of the San River.
The Polish forces seem to be in a bad state of disorganiza-
tion. Every third man of the Polish army of the north is reported
without shoes, and there is hardly one with complete field equip-
ment. In one instance the artillery support for three full divi-
sions of infantry amounted to only fifteen artillery pieces, and
these were of small calibre. Yet the divisions are in positions
which are vital to the defence of Warsaw. Rations seldom reach
the soldiers, so practically they are forced to live off the country
through which they are fighting. Provisions for the care of the
wounded are of the most elementary kind. There is still a splen-
did patriotic spirit in the population, and an heroic effort is being
made to defend the city; but it is believed it cannot hold out more
than a few hours after the final attack begins.
To turn from the military to the diplomatic situation is to
find an equally tragic cast of affairs, and on which threatens
even wider and more serious consequences to the world than
does defeat of the Poles, namely, a complete break between the
two chief Allies, Great Britain and France. The situation, as de-
scribed in last month's notes, was this: that the Allies dispatched
to the Moscow Government a note demanding the granting of an
armistice to the Poles on condition that the latter withdrew to
the boundary lines laid down for them by the Treaty of Versailles.
On the failure of the Bolshevik Government to grant this armis-
tice, the Allies declared they would give full assistance to the
Polish armies.
The Bolshevik reply to the Allied demand was the suggestion
of a peace parley between themselves and the Poles, which was
held at Baranovitchi, but proved a failure. Later a second meet-
ing was proposed at Minsk, and this has not yet been concluded.
To the general situation thus created the attitude of the Allies,
as expressed by the British Premier, who had been conducting
negotiations for trade resumption with Soviet representatives in
London, was one of aloofness, the position being taken that the
Bolsheviki as the victors had the right to impose terms and that
Poland, who was considered to have acted aggressively and against
the advice of the Allies, must accept the terms or continue to
oppose the Bolsheviki alone. In this stand Great Britain was
joined by Italy, who also was desirous of trade resumption with
Russia, and apparently also by France.
At this juncture, however, the French, who from the first
have been bitterly opposed to anything in the nature of negotia-
tions with the Soviet and strongly in favor of armed intervention
1920.] RECENT EVENTS 843
on behalf of the Poles, suddenly and without any indication of a
change in policy, gave official recognition to General Wrangel,
the anti-Bolshevik Commander, as chief of the de facto Govern-
ment in Southern Russia, and decided also to send military aid to
the Poles. This action of France followed immediately on the
receipt of a note of the United States Government to the Italian
Ambassador in Washington declaring America's unwillingness to
participate in a proposed general conference at London which, in
all probability, so the note declared, would involve two results to
which America was opposed, namely, recognition of the Bolshevik
regime, and a settlement of the Russian problem upon a basis of
the dismemberment of Russia.
Marshal Foch and the entire French General Staff have been
placed at the full disposal of General Wrangel, as also have been
the immense supplies of American and French munitions at the
railheads and on the dumps of former battlefields. Meanwhile
General Weygand, head of the French mission to Warsaw, has
been appointed to supreme command of the Polish armies, and
the reorganization of the six hundred thousand Polish troops is,
at present writing, being conducted with feverish haste. Efforts
are under way to enlist the support of Rumania and Hungary with
a view to the initiation of a tremendous push, which Marshal
Foch believes would sweep across Russia from the Black Sea to
the Baltic and from Finland to Siberia, eradicating Bolshevism
from the entire country.
The diplomatic viewpoint of the situation is that an extremely
serious break in the Franco-British entente cordiale is coolly con-
templated by the French Foreign Office, which states that France
will not back down on her intended war plans. French relations
with Italy also are strained, France charging Italy with the re-
sponsibility for Poland's plight, owing to the withdrawal of the
Italian troops which policed the Allenstein district at the very
moment when armed resistance was necessary to prevent the Bol-
shevik Army from cutting the Danzig-Warsaw communications.
On the British side Premier Lloyd George has given to M.
Krassin and M. Kameneff, Bolshevik emissaries in London, an
unequivocal assurance that he will not stand back of the French
recognition of General Wrangel as the de facto Government in
Southern Russia. He intends soon to make a public statement
to that effect, condemning the French movement as gravely im-
perilling the impending peace between Poland and Russia, inas-
much as it is likely to mislead the Poles into believing that the
Allies secretly are bent on an anti-Soviet policy.
According to recent dispatches dealing with the Russian in-
844 RECENT EVENTS [Sept.,
ternal situation, starvation has cast its shadow over the country
from the Far East to the Finnish frontier four thousand miles
of undisputed territory. Everywhere the cry is raised for food
and clothing, and in consequence there is spreading a spirit of
revolt which threatens the iron control of the enormous Bolshevik
military organization. Indeed, the Bolsheviki hold their present
great power chiefly because of the impression they have created
that they are fighting a purely defensive war against external
aggression, with the result that many patriotic men, really hostile
to Bolshevism, are serving in the Bolshevik armies from pure love
of country. Coal supplies are virtually exhausted, and the few
factories still in operation are forced to use wood for fuel. The
so-called "labor armies" have been found useful only in rough
work, but fail completely in the more skilled occupations. Lenine
himself, according to the accepted report in Moscow, admits that
the Russian people cannot pass through another winter like the
last and that some relief is an absolute necessity.
The outstanding event in France during
France. the past month has been the decision to
support General Wrangel, the anti-Bolshe-
vik Commander in the south of Russia, and also to give military
aid to the Poles, as described above. A further result of the
French action in Russian affairs is its attitude toward Germany.
France, acting alone if necessary, has decided to send a stern
note to the German Government informing it that France will act
instantly and vigorously to enforce the Treaty of Versailles in its
provisions for Eastern Europe as well as for the West, and that
France can properly take coercive action along the Rhine. The
French Government is declared to be convinced that Germany is
plotting with the Soviets to nullify the Polish boundaries created
by the Allies last year, and is hampering all Allied efforts to aid
the new Republic during the critical period.
There is some internal opposition in France to further inter-
ference with the Russian situation, and according to resolutions
recently adopted railroad men throughout the country threaten
to strike if called upon to transport troops to Poland. Indeed, a
direct appeal by the Soviets to French labor not to permit France
to make war on Russia has been published in the French Socialist
press. Louis Frossard, Secretary-General of the French Socialist
party, has stated that the French workers will fight side by side
with English labor, who have also declared against interference
with Russian internal affairs, and thus render the decision of the
French Government futile.
1920.] RECENT EVENTS 815
The Senate has adopted a law regulating the price of wheat,
the rate fixed being one hundred francs a quintal. The law
carries amendments requiring approval by the Chamber of
Deputies. /The Government expects control of wheat to cease to
be necessary at the end of the year, but refused to include a pledge
to this effect in the law. It is intended to continue eighty per
cent milling and adulteration of flour to avoid heavy importations.
By a decree which revoked the decree of April 23d forbidding
the importation of certain articles, the chief American products
affected by the original decree automobiles, dental supplies, silk
goods, cameras and films will now be permitted to enter Hie
country under former conditions. The customs duties will re-
main the same, automobiles, for example, paying a tax of forty-
five per cent.
Turkey, the last Power to remain in a state of war with the
Entente, signed the Treaty on August 10th and is now officially
at peace. Serbia and Hedjaz, alone of the nations interested,
refused to sign.
The movement against carrying out the
Germany. Spa undertaking by the German Govern-
ment to seize arms in unlawful possession
of civilians, is assuming serious proportions. It has been insti-
gated by extremists of the Left, who contend that the necessary
powers the Government is asking the Reichstag to confer upon it
constitute a disguised "campaign against the proletariat." These
opponents having already succeeded in delaying the passage of
the bill through the Reichstag, recently called their supporters
into the streets to demonstrate against what they call "the new
penal servitude law." One very disquieting feature of this at-
tempt to sabotage the Spa decisions is that, while the initiative
came from the Communists, it is backed up by the Independent
Socialists and the Berlin Trade Union Congress, who for the first
time have joined forces.
The German Government, according to late dispatches, is
awaiting the arrival in Berlin of Wigdor Kopp, Soviet Repre-
sentative to Germany from Moscow. He is known to be bringing
important communications, and perhaps history-making decisions
by the Soviet Government. With his return to Berlin the Russo-
German relations will become defined more clearly, with all indi-
cations pointing to their entering on a distinctly new stage. What
that stage will be and how much of it will become public will de-
pend on the conversations between Premier Lloyd George and
Premier Millerand on the one hand and the attitude of the French
846 RECENT EVENTS [Sept.,
toward Germany on the other. In spite of dangers attendant on
the numerous points of high tension in the last ten days and the
uncertainties, there is for the first time since the armistice some-
thing like a feeling of satisfaction in Germany, due to the as-
surance that her position is strong, is getting stronger daily, and
that she is still in the European political ring.
A dispatch to the London Times from Brussels reports the
arrival in Louvain of the first consignment of ten thousand books
from Germany, for the Library of Louvain University, in accord-
ance with the terms of the Peace Treaty. The dispatch adds that
representatives of the Reparations Commission are searching Ger-
many for books stolen from Louvain during the War.
Radical workers of Bolshevik tendencies recently seized con-
trol of Zittau, Saxony, a city of between twenty-five and thirty
thousand population, where serious labor troubles have been oc-
curring. The police withdrew, and a committee of fifteen, com-
posed of Independent Socialists, Communists and Syndicalists,
assumed control over the city. The Saxon Government at once
declared a state of siege in the districts of Zittau and also of
Lobau, about twenty miles northwest of Zittau. The terrorists
are reported to be under the leadership of two fugitives from
justice from the Ruhr region. The German Government hoped
that the population would help restore order, but at last accounts
the situation was not very favorable.
Recent reports from Cologne show a greater increase there of
business in commercial and trade circles than in the other large
German cities. This is owing to the business transacted with
England and Holland. The Dutch merchants are sending all the
foodstuffs they can lay hands upon into Germany, which keeps the
prices very high in their own country and is causing strong pro-
tests to be made by the working classes in Rotterdam, Amsterdam
and other cities. The goods are brought from Holland to Dussel-
clorf and Cologne by freight steamboats. There is considerable
activity in the factories in Aachen, Dusseldorf and Cologne. The
people in these centres are paying attention to their business, and
are more optimistic in regard to the outlook than the Germans
in Berlin, Hamburg, and Frankfort.
At the present time, according to an expert English military
observer, Germany could put a well-equipped army of six hundred
thousand officers and men into the field if they could be organ-
ized to fight together. The major part of this force is the army
of the Baltic and the smaller bodies of troops who have not yet
been disbanded. The ordinary German workman, however, ac-
cording to the same authority, seems to have had more than
1920.] RECENT EVENTS 847
enough of war and soldiering, and desires to live with his family
and pursue his trade peacefully. The French military leaders
do not agree, with this view in regard to the Germans, and helieve
that they are secretly organizing to avenge their defeat. The
officers, especially the Prussians of the old regime, would no doubt
like to do this, as fighting is their trade, but the rank and file,
according to the English view, would probably refuse to follow
them into the field.
The Germans still have plenty of airplanes, arms and ammu-
nition. Out of twenty-eight thousand field guns they possessed
when the armistice was signed, they have destroyed only two
thousand so far. It is very difficult to get the German Govern-
ment to carry out the conditions of the Peace Treaty, which de-
mand that these guns should be destroyed, and that the forts and
strategic railways constructed in the course of the War should be
demolished. The claim is put forth by the Germans that all this
work would occupy a long time, and would be unproductive and
expensive to the Government, which has no funds to meet it.
Judging from the slow manner in which things have been done so
far, it appears that it will be years before these conditions are
fulfilled, if ever.
Pressure by the big agrarian interests has forced the German
Food Ministry to consent to a sharp advance in the wholesale
prices for this year's grain crop. It has been officially announced
that the price of rye would be 1,400 marks per ton (about $1.19
a bushel at present exchange rates), while wheat would bring
1,540 marks and oats 1,350. Then there are extra payments for
early deliveries, etc., all of which bring the rates up to about fifty
per cent more than the spring estimates and to more than twice
as much as last year's prices. This has brought earnest protests
from nearly all the German papers, with the exception of the
organs of the Junkers, as it is noted that the Government's action
is calculated to strengthen, rather than to weaken, the vicious
circle of rising prices and wages, which was shaken some months
ago by stagnation in the retail trade, but now seems in full swing
again.
The Association of German Cities, in a memorandum sub-
mitted to the Food Minister, protests against the minimum price
of twenty-five marks, with a premium of five marks, per "zentner"
(110 pounds), fixed for the potatoes which the municipalities are
expected to store up for their inhabitants this fall to insure them
against a potato famine next winter. It is declared that the cities
may be caught with large quantities of these potatoes on their
hands because of the activities of independent traders who may
848 RECENT EVENTS [Sept.,
undersell them, if the plan of allowing free trade in potatoes,
after the municipal supply is put in, be carried out.
As the result of the boycott declared on beer in wide German
circles early this season, the Berlin Brewery Association has given
out a statement to the effect that the brewers were planning to
increase the malt content of their product and at the same time
to lower the price. To enable the brewers to keep this promise,
pressure is to be brought upon the Government to increase the
allowance of barley for brewing purposes.
Under a decision made by a board of arbitration the city of
Leipsic will have to pay 282,000 marks more per month to its
employees, whose weekly wages are to range from 145 to 230
marks, according to skill, length of service and age.
According to the preliminary report of the German National
Insurance Office, there were 574,840 industrial accidents in Ger-
many in 1919, resulting in the payment of 204,321,817 marks to
104,502 persons. In 1918 the number of accidents was 657,277,
involving the payment of 192,407,301 marks to 107,275 persons.
In order to purchase the minimum rations necessary to sus-
tain a family consisting of two adults and two children in Berlin
during the month of June, it was necessary to spend 295 marks
weekly, according to data compiled by the director of the Statis-
ical Bureau of Schoenberg. A single person could keep alive on
146 marks a week. In June, 1914, the respective figures were
28.70 and 16.65 marks.
The Italian attitude toward Soviet Russia
Italy. was made plain on August 6th in a speech
to the Chamber of Deputies by Count
Sforza, Minister of Foreign Affairs. Making a strong plea in favor
of allowing Russia to develop her Government along her own
lines without foreign interference, he declared that this formed
the basis of the Italian policy in admitting a Russian representa-
tive to Italy and the sending of an Italian emissary to Russia.
After expressing hope for speedy peace between Russia and
Poland and an independent Poland in accordance with the Ver-
sailles Treaty, Count Sforza deprecated the employment either of
what Premier Clemenceau called "a barbed wire cordon" or of
the blockade against Russia. He declared the former had failed,
while the latter gave the Bolsheviki moral advantages which far
outweighed any material damages they suffered. As a matter of
fact Italy's commercial relations with Russia are now in full
swing, $50,000,000 worth of merchandise and raw material al-
ready having being exchanged via Trieste.
1920.] RECENT EVENTS 849
An agreement has finally been reached between Greece and
Italy on the question of the disposition of the Dodecanese Islands
that has been, holding up the signing of the Peace Treaty with
Turkey. The agreement provides for the transfer of the twelve
small islands of the group to Greek sovereignty, and for the post-
ponement of the plebiscite on the Island of Rhodes for a period
of from five to fifteen years, to be determined. The agreement
carries no stipulation concerning the Smyrna district, where the
Greeks are in charge.
According to trustworthy reports, Italy is making much more
rapid progress toward recovery than is commonly supposed and,
in approaching its problems of reconstruction and readjustment,
is showing more intelligence and energy than many of the other
European countries. She has not been free from the uncertainties
of radical political action, but there is every evidence that these
are on the decline. Italy's wealth in hydro-electric especially is
being developed at a rapid rate. The current for industrial pur-
poses, while absorbed as quickly as it is produced, is extremely
cheap, and in a few years it will be abundant. The whole coun-
try is being interlaced with electric lines.
On the other hand, grave statements concerning Italy's food
situation were recently made in the Chamber by Signor Soleri,
Food Commissioner. The harvest was disappointing, he reported,
and despite requisitioning there would be only 12,000,000 instead
of the 40,000,000 quintals of wheat it had been hoped to obtain.
To meet the needs of the population, the Commissioner explained,
Italy would be required to purchase abroad about 30,000,000
quintals. He added that as Argentina and India had placed em-
bargoes on wheat exports, it was very doubtful whether Italy
could obtain her requirements.
Italy has decided to abandon Avlona to the Albanians, ac-
cording to reports printed by the Giornale d'ltalia and the Cor-
riere d'ltalia. These newspapers say that an Italo-Albanian
agreement has virtually been reached on a basis involving, in ad-
dition to the abandonment of Avlona by the Italians, the imme-
diate cessation of hostilities, exchange of prisoners, the garrison-
ing by Italy of certain points constituting the defence of Avlona
in the event of its being attacked by sea, and recognition by Italy
of the independence of Albania according to the frontiers estab-
lished by the Conference of London in 1913.
August 17, 1920.
VOL. cxi. 54
With Our Readers
'THE CATHOLIC WORLD has made an uninterrupted monthly
appearance since April, 1864. It is one of the oldest of all
American magazines.
From the first years of its publication, throughout its history,
the Paulist Fathers, who publish and edit it, have sought to give
capable expression, a worthy dress to contemporary Catholic
thought. Its purpose in the highest sense of the word has been
missionary. The printed word is the most efficient and effective
organ of truth. To be the defender and expositor of Catholic
truth: to show in its expression that it deserves, lends itself
to, and commands the highest beauty of literary expression has
been the aim of THE CATHOLIC WOULD.
The cost of its printing and publication have always been com-
paratively heavy. In view of its high purpose the price of its sub-
scription has been kept as low as possible.
Everyone knows that the price of production, of raw material,
of labor of every kind has advanced rapidly during the past few
years. Through these years THE CATHOLIC WORLD has borne
heavy losses in the hope that the conditions of raw paper, of labor,
of material would grow easier.
Instead they are growing more exacting. The print paper
for body and cover has increased over two hundred per cent:
wages have increased sixty per cent: and this increase has char-
acterized every department of the business. Indeed, it is almost
impossible to procure print paper at any cost. Many journals
have been forced to suspend publication. "The Red Cross Maga-
zine" has just issued such an announcement. THE CATHOLIC
WORLD is therefore compelled to raise its price from three to
four dollars a year, and from twenty-five cents to forty cents a
copy.
Our readers and subscribers will, we feel, appreciate the fact
that we have postponed doing this for a long time with great loss
to ourselves. We do it now owing to the conviction that prices
of production and material will remain where they are and will
even increase.
The advance price will take effect with the publication of the
October, 1920, issue.
We are grateful for the long continued support of the Catholic
public of the United States.
1920.] WITH OUR READERS 851
The need of a Catholic monthly which will give reasoned
thought and careful expression to the questions of the day is
more and more evident. The radicalism of the proletariat so
called may be ignorant and emotional, but at the bottom, or rather
at the head, it is intellectual: founded upon a false philosophy
of life, of society, of human responsibility. It postulates neces-
sarily a denial of religious belief. To meet it we must be intel-
ligently armed: mentally strengthened, able to defend the philos-
ophy of the Christian religion, the faith of Holy Church. THE
CATHOLIC WORLD will endeavor to continue faithfully on its mis-
sion: and it feels certain in the future, as in the past, of the gener-
ous, loyal support of American Catholics.
IN view of centralizing tendencies, we need just now an intensive
campaign of education among our people on the real dangers
that accompany such a movement. Individual responsibility is
being shirked more and more habitually. Corporations shirk it:
labor unions repudiate it: the individual excuses himself from it
because he concludes he is the servant of forces quite beyond his
control. The newspapers, the daily mental and emotional food
of the people, shirk it and claim that they have the absolute right
to print the news, and the news is what they may interpret as
such. Our standards are being formed by others who the
"others" are we do not know and seldom ask but in a spineless
way, we conclude that we must conform.
* * * *
THE lack of this conscience is making of us a well-fed indolent
people, interested in our immediate surroundings, taking our
pleasure and our recreation and our reading matter as they come
to us from the hands of "others," led and fashioned by a minority,
who are active, zealous, watchful for the doctrines, the policies,
which they profess and which bring to them fame or power or
money or all three. Indifference, a lax conscience, an easy inter-
pretation of personal responsibility not only beget weak indi-
viduals: they beget a weak nation. Recently in an address to
Catholic women, on the subject of dress, Cardinal Mercier said:
"No: no: tyranny, no matter where it comes from, is an attack
upon liberty and liberty was given to man not to suppress virtue,
but to promote it." "Collective enthusiasm," the great prelate de-
clared, "can never justify any excess."
852 WITH OUR READERS [Sept.,
IT profits little to say there are many evils in the social body
that ought to be cured. It profits much to be vigilant and intel-
ligent. Following the habit of refusing to recognize individual
responsibility, there follows the other habit of shifting the cure
and the care to some one else again not to an individual, be-
cause we've forgotten that moral truth but to an entity that we
call the State, and that we delude ourselves into thinking can
do all things. We have got into the habit of centralizing let the
Government do it. Ills grow: evils increase because the individual
citizen forgets or neglects his duty. Instead of curing the evil
when it should be cured, he transfers it to a Government, which,
if it accepts, must accept with all the ills that difficulty has
already incurred through the neglect of the individual or the
local body that had it in charge. The individual is negligent, the
individual defies the law, and an evil results and it is turned over
to the city government for cure. The individuals of the city
government grow neglectful and the evil increases. It is then
handed over to the particular State. The individuals of the State
government show themselves faithless and the evil shows itself
greater, even far reaching, and then it is handed over to the
national Government.
* * * *
THE habit is growing on the American people. Government
can do much; centralization has its necessity and its place,
but the excess of every right thing is evil and the greater the
excess the greater the evil. Government can do much but it can
eventually do nothing, unless there is an individual sense of moral
responsibility, of personal obligation among its citizens. In pro-
portion as they are weakened, the Government is weakened. And
unless there is a revival of religious and moral responsibility
among the individual citizens of our nation, our nation will not
live.
* * * *
THE principle ought to be borne in mind in certain matters that
seem altogether political but which, to any one who knows
the genius of our Government, are fundamentally united with
the very character of our existence as a free and independent
people. One of them is the matter of education. Our constitu-
tion has granted to the people liberty of education: our States,
when accepting the Union, were guaranteed the right to them-
selves of the control of their education.
We have Spoken frequently of the dangers from the point
of view of our national life of the various attempts to federalize
1920.] WITH OUR READERS 853
education. It would be one of the strongest contributions to
radicalism that we know of. For if it were opposed to radicalism,
il would lay the national Government open to the charge that by
federal control we have tyrannized over the thought of the
nation: if it were not opposed to radicalism, it would make the
Federal Government an agent of its own destruction.
AT the recent convention of the Catholic Educational Associa-
tion held in New York, the well-known constitutional author-
ity, Mr. William D. Guthrie, presented an address on the Federal
Government and Education, which is of exceptional value. He
quotes the statement of former Secretary of the Interior, Franklin
K. Lane, that "federal control of schools would be a curse, because
the inevitable effect of federal control is to standardize." And in
the judgment of the American Council on Education:
"The power to establish standards would unquestionably be
the most influential prerogative of a Department of Education.
Under the Smith-Towner Bill the Department is implicitly given
this power. Through its ability to withhold appropriations
unless State plans meet with its approval, the Department can
establish minimum standards in some of the principal fields of
educational effort. It is this implied power to coerce through
shutting off supplies that constitutes in the minds of critics of the
bill one of its principal dangers. Standards formulated in the
serene seclusion of Washington may be imposed without debate
or appeal upon institutions in all parts of the United States.
Nothing is more likely to foster bureaucratic tendencies."
MR. GUTHRIE continues: "Interference by Congress in the
matter of education would gravely challenge the future in-
tegrity, independence and autonomy of the States. Nothing is
more essential to the perpetuity of our present system of gov-
ernment than the federal principle of Nation and State, each
supreme and independent within its allotted sphere, and the pres-
ervation to the States of their right to local self-government and
the actual practice of that right. Our Federal Constitution con-
templates and assumes the continuance of the States as auton-
omous, independent, self-governing communities, and this is an
inseparable incident to the republican form of dual government
intended to be established by the Founders of the Republic. Such
a vital principle ought not to be now in any way or degree bar-
gained away and sacrificed by the States because of a temporary
854 WITH OUR READERS [Sept.,
need and crisis, or because of the desire for subsidies of federal
funds to meet the increased cost of education. The States
should be jealous of their right to control a matter affecting them
so vitally, and not experiment with federal control, which under
federalization would be centred in Washington and readily de-
velop into the tyranny and irresponsibility of bureaucratic gov-
ernment. . . .
"It is of paramount importance that the American people
should now appreciate and face the fact that under the decision
of the Supreme Court upholding the Eighteenth Amendment,
there is, perhaps, no state function that cannot be usurped by the
Federal Government under the power to amend the Constitution,
and that the only protection lies in an informed, patriotic and
vigilant public opinion. If these questions involving the per-
petuity of local self-government and the right of each State to
regulate education within its own borders be submitted to the
people with adequate explanation and full discussion of the
merits, the verdict will probably be a wise and just one. Catho-
lics, for example, have nothing to fear from an informed Prot-
estant or Jewish public opinion, for patriotic Protestants and
Jews alike are just as much interested and concerned in pre-
serving our institutions. The American spirit ought to lead to a
sound, provident and just conclusion. True Americans, who
understand the real issue, will never barter away the heritage of
local self-government simply to secure a few millions of federal
funds in aid of education. Nor will they abdicate their duties
and responsibilities to their children and the children of their
neighbors. They will not vote, as I confidently believe, to transfer
the education of their children, a matter of as vital concern to
them as their religion, to a bureaucracy functioning in Wash-
ington and controlled, it may possibly be, by obscure and irre-
sponsible politicians. I have no apprehension as to the result,
if those who believe in our present form of republican govern-
ment will only practice vigilance, unite and defend their right to
local self-government, and not allow this great and vital issue to
go by default.
"It should, in my judgment, be impressed upon the members
of the Catholic Educational Association of the United States that
the proposed nationalization of education presents not so much
a religious or Catholic question as a fundamental political and
patriotic issue which should be of profound and vital concern
to every American of whatever denomination Catholic, Prot-
estant, or Jew."
1920.] WITH OUR READERS 855
IN THE CATHOLIC WORLD for February, 1919, we reviewed briefly
the Russian Soviet Constitution. Apparently that document
granted the broadest kind of liberty: made the people absolutely
free and was the last word in republicanism. It was so greeted
by many reputable journals in this country and our Government
was criticized because, as the father of liberty throughout the
world, it did not approve and support enthusiastically this latest
endeavor of a people to clothe themselves with the mantle of
freedom.
In the summary given in THE CATHOLIC WORLD, we stated
that this Constitution far from giving freedom to the Russian peo-
ple would saddle them with an autocratic and tyrannical govern-
ment; that the All-Russian Congress could be but a general con-
vention without the opportunity of deliberative power; that it
would be "dominated by the Executive Committee in whose hands
would be all the machinery of government." We stated further
that "the numerical strength of this Committee would weaken its
corporate strength and would place the ruling power in a few,
strong, active men." "The necessary checks in truly representa-
tive government are absolutely lacking, nor is there personal re-
sponsibility of particular members of the government to a real
legislative body."
* * * *
BERTRAND RUSSELL, one of the most radical men of present-
day England, went to Russia last June, quite in sympathy
with Soviet rule, expecting to study an interesting experiment in
a new form of representative government. This sympathetic
radical was thoroughly disappointed. He found in Russia that the
Soviet government had degenerated into just what THE CATHOLIC
WORLD had foretold over a year before. The All-Russian Soviet
Congress is moribund. The Moscow Soviet, nominally supreme in
Moscow, is, in words of Bertrand Russell, "only a body of electors
who choose the Executive Committee out of which in turn is
chosen the Presidium, consisting of nine men, who meet daily
and have all the power.
"It is easy for the Government to exercise pressure over the
election of the Executive Committee and again over the election
of the Presidium. It must be remembered that effective protest is
impossible owing to the absolutely complete suppression of free
speech and free press."
Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, are not known.
It is impossible for the people to express their will. In fact,
Russell was not able to make any study of the Soviet system,
because there is no such system : in his own words, it is moribund.
856 WITH OUR READERS [Sept.,
If there were a Soviet system, a true liberty of voting, there
would, in the words of this radical, be no majority of Communists
in either town or country.
"No conceivable system of free election would give majorities
to the Communists in either town or country. Various methods
are therefore adopted for giving the victory to Government can-
didates. In the first place, the voting is by show of hands, so
that all who vote against the Government are marked men. In
the second place, no candidate who is not a Communist can have
any printing done, the printing works being all in the hands of
the State. In the third place, he cannot address any meeting,
because the halls all belong to the State. The whole of the press
is of course official; no independent daily is permitted."
"All real power is in the hands of the Communist Party, who
number about 600,000 in a population of about 120,000,000. I
never came across a Communist by chance; the people whom I
met in the streets or in the village, when I could get into con-
versation with them, almost invariably said they were of no
party."
Of the bureaucracy that makes up the existing government
among the majority are "young arrivistes, who are enthusiastic
Bolsheviki because of the material success of Bolshevism. With
them must be reckoned the army of policemen, spies and secret
agents, largely inherited from the Tsarist times, who make their
profit out of the fact that no one can live except by breaking the
law. This aspect of Bolshevism is exemplified by the Extra-
ordinary Commission, a body practically independent of the Gov-
ernment, possessing its own regiments which are better fed than
the Red Army. This body has the power of imprisoning any
man or woman without trial on such charges as speculation or
counter-revolutionary activity. It has shot thousands without
trial, and though now it has nominally lost the power of inflicting
the death penalty, it is by no means certain that it has altogether
lost it in fact. It has spies everywhere, and ordinary mortals live
in terror of it."
* * * *
REVIEWING the accepted estimate of Bolshevism held by some
of its supporters outside of Russia, Bertrand Russell states:
"Friends of Russia think of the dictatorship of the proletariat
as merely a new form of representative government, in which
only working men and women have votes and the constituencies
are partly occupational, not geographical. They think that 'pro-
letariat' means 'proletariat,' but 'dictatorship' does not quite mean
'dictatorship.' This is the opposite of the truth. When a Russian
1920.] WITH OUR READERS 857
Communist speaks of dictatorship, he means the word literally,
but when he speaks of the proletariat he uses the word in a
Pickwickian sense. He means the 'class-conscious' part of the
proletariat i. ?., the Communist Party. He includes people by
no means proletarian (such as Lenine and Chicherin) who have
the right opinions, and he excludes such wage-earners as have
not the right opinions, whom he classifies as lackeys of the
bourgeoisie.
"Marx has taught that communism is fatally predestined to
come about; this fits in with the Oriental traits in the Russian
character and produces a state of mind not unlike that of the
early successors of Mohammed. Opposition is crushed without
mercy, and without shrinking from the methods of the Tsarist
police, many of whom are still employed at their old work.
Since all evils are due to private property, the evils of the Bolshe-
vist regime, while it has to fight private property, will auto-
matically cease as soon as it has succeeded.
"Bolshevism is internally aristocratic and externally militant.
The Communists have all the good and bad traits of an aristocracy
which is young and vital. They are courageous, energetic, capable
of command, always ready to serve the state; on the other hand,
they are dictatorial, lacking in ordinary consideration for the
plebs, such as their servants, whom they overwork, or the people
in the streets, whose lives they endanger by extraordinarily reck-
less motoring. They are practically the sole possessors of power,
and they enjoy innumerable advantages in consequence. Most
of them, though far from luxurious, have better food than other
people. Only people of some political importance can obtain
motor cars or telephones. Permits for railway journeys, for
making purchases at the Soviet stores (where prices are about
one-fiftieth of what they are in the market), for going to the
theatre, and so on, are of course easier to obtain for the friends
of those in power than for ordinary mortals. In a thousand ways
the Communists have a life which is happier than that of the
rest of the community. Above all, they are less exposed to the
unwelcome attentions of the police and the Extraordinary Com-
mission.
"The Communist theory of international affairs is exceed-
ingly simple. The revolution foretold by Marx, which is to abolish
capitalism throughout the world, happened to begin in Russia,
though Marxian theory would seem to demand that it should
begin in America. In countries where the revolution has not yet
broken out, the sole duty of a Communist is to hasten its advent.
Agreements with capitalist states can only be makeshifts, and
858 WITH OUR READERS [Sept.,
can never amount on either side to a sincere peace. No real good
can come to any country without a bloody revolution; English
labor men may fancy that a peaceful evolution is possible, but
they will find their mistake."
* * * *
THE recent note of our own Government to the Italian Govern-
ment on the Russian-Polish situation reviews the friendship
of the United States for Russia, its sympathy with its national
aspirations for freedom, and adds that for these very reasons we
held its present government unrepresentative "whose only sanc-
tion is brute force." The note continues; and we reprint this
lengthy extract, because it is vitally necessary that every American
bring home to himself what Bolshevism is: what it means, and
combat it whenever and wherever found :
"That the present rulers of Russia do not rule by the will or
the consent of any considerable proportion of the Russian people
is an incontestable fact. Although nearly two and a half years
have passed since they seized the machinery of government,
promising to protect the Constituent Assembly against alleged
conspiracies against it, they have not yet permitted anything in
the nature of a popular election. At the moment when the work
of creating a popular representative government, based upon uni-
versal suffrage, was nearing completion the Bolsheviki, although
in number an inconsiderable minority of the people, by force and
cunning seized the powers and machinery of government, and
have continued to use them with savage oppression to maintain
themselves in power.
"Without any desire to interfere in the internal affairs of the
Russian people, or to suggest what kind of government they
should have, the Government of the United States does express
the hope that they will soon find a way to set up a government
representing their free will and purpose. When that time comes
the United States will consider the measures of practical assist-
ance which can be taken to promote the restoration of Russia,
provided Russia has not taken itself wholly out of the pale of the
friendly interest of other nations by the pillage and oppression of
the Poles.
"It is not possible for the Government of the United States
to recognize the present rulers of Russia as a Government with
which the relations common to friendly governments can be
maintained. This conviction has nothing to do with any par-
ticular political or social structure which the Russian people
themselves may see fit to embrace. It rests upon a wholly differ-
ent set of facts. These facts, which none disputes, have convinced
1920.] WITH OUR READERS 859
the Government of the United States, against its will, that the
existing regime in Russia is based upon the negation of every
principle of honor and good faith, and every usage and convention,
underlying the whole structure of international law, the nega-
tion, in short, of every principle upon which it is possible to base
harmonious and trustful relations, whether of nations or of indi-
viduals.
"The responsible leaders of the regime have frequently and
openly boasted that they are willing to sign agreements and
undertakings with foreign powers while not having the slightest
intention of observing such undertakings or carrying out such
agreements. This attitude of disregard of obligations voluntarily
entered into, they base upon the theory that no compact or agree-
ment made with a non-Bolshevist government can have any moral
force for them. They have not only avowed this as a doctrine,
but have exemplified it in practice.
"Indeed, upon numerous occasions the responsible spokes-
men of this power, and its official agencies, have declared that it
is their understanding that the very existence of Bolshevism in
Russia, the maintenance of their own rule, depends, and must
continue to depend, upon the occurrence of revolutions in all
other great civilized nations, including the United States, which
will overthrow and destroy their governments and set up Bol-
shevist rule in their stead. They have made it quite plain that
they intend to use every means, including, of course, diplomatic
agencies, to promote such revolutionary movements in other
countries.
"It is true that they have in various ways expressed their
willingness to give 'assurances,' and 'guarantees' that they will
not abuse the privileges and immunities of diplomatic agencies
by using them for this purpose. In view of their own declarations,
already referred to, such assurances and guarantees cannot be
very seriously regarded.
"Moreover, it is within the knowledge of the Government of
the United States that the Bolshevist Government is itself subject
to the control of a political faction with extensive international
ramifications through the Third Internationale, and that this
body, which is heavily subsidized by the Bolshevist Government
from the public revenues of Russia, has for its openly avowed aim
the promotion of Bolshevist revolutions throughout the world.
The leaders of the Bolsheviki have boasted that their promises of
non-interference with other nations would in no wise bind the
agents of this body.
"There is no room for reasonable doubt that such agents
860 WITH OUR READERS [Sept.,
would receive the support and protection of any diplomatic
agencies the Bolsheviki might have in other countries. Inevitably,
therefore, the diplomatic service of the Bolshevist Government
would become a channel for intrigues and the propaganda of
revolt against the institutions and laws of countries, with which
it was at peace, which would be an abuse of friendship to which
enlightened Governments cannot subject themselves.
"In the view of this Government, there cannot be any common
ground upon which it can stand with a power whose conceptions
of international relations are so entirely alien to its own, so
utterly repugnant to its moral sense. There can be no mutual
confidence or trust, no respect even, if pledges are to be given
and agreements made with a cynical repudiation of their obliga-
tions already in the mind of one of the parties. We cannot recog-
nize, hold official relations with, or give friendly reception to the
agents of a Government which is determined and bound to con-
spire against our institutions; whose diplomats will be the agi-
tators of dangerous revolt; whose spokesmen say that they sign
agreements with no intention of keeping them."
THE fact that the English Government fails to govern Ireland
and why the Irish people have set up their own republican
government, has been made still more evident by the passing of
the so-called Irish Force Bill. No wonder that Mr. Carlisle, a
Belfast Irishman, declared before the House of Lords, as they also
were about to pass it: "My lords, if you pass this bill, you may
kill England, not Ireland." The text of the bill is as follows:
"(1) Where it appears to His Majesty in Council that owing
to the existence of a state of disorder in Ireland the ordinary law
is inadequate for the prevention and punishment of crime or the
maintenance of order, His Majesty in Council may issue regula-
tions under the Defence of the Realm consolidation act, 1914
(hereinafter referred to as the principal act), for securing the
restoration and maintenance of order in Ireland and as to the
powers and duties for that purpose of the Lord Lieutenant and
the Chief Secretary and of members of His Majesty's forces and
other persons acting in His Majesty's behalf, and in particular
regulations for the special purpose hereinafter mentioned.
"(2) The provisions of the principal act with respect to the
trial by courts-martial or courts of summary jurisdiction and
punishment of persons committing offences against the Defence of
the Realm regulations, shall extend to the trial and punishment of
persons who have committed crime in Ireland whether before or
1920.] WITH OUR READERS 861
after the passing of this act, including persons committed for trial
against whom indictments have been found, so, however, that:
"(A) Any crime when so tried shall be punishable with the
punishment assigned to the crime by statute or common law.
"(B) A court-martial when trying a person charged with a
crime punishable by death shall include as a member of the court
one person (who need not be an officer) nominated by the Lord
Lieutenant, being a person certified by the Lord Chancellor of
Ireland or the Lord Chief Justice of England to be a person of
legal knowledge and experience, and regulations under the prin-
cipal act may be made accordingly.
"(3) Regulations so made may also:
"(A) Provide that a court of summary jurisdiction when
trying a person charged with a crime or with an offence against
the regulations when hearing and determining any application
with respect to a recognizance shall, except in the Dublin metro-
politan police district, be constituted of two or more resident
magistrates, and that a court of quarter sessions when hearing
and determining an appeal against a conviction of a court of
summary jurisdiction for any such crime or offence shall be con-
stituted of the recorder or county judge sitting alone.
"(B) Confer on a court-martial the powers and jurisdiction
exercisable by justices or any other civil court for binding persons
to keep the peace or be of good behavior for estreating the en-
forcing recognizance and for compelling persons to give evidence
and to produce documents before the court.
"(C) Confer on persons authorized to summon witnesses
before a court-martial the power of issuing warrants for com-
pelling persons to attend as witnesses, and any warrant so issued
shall have the like effect and be executed in the like manner as if
issued by a justice of court of summary jurisdiction having juris-
diction in the place in which it is executed or sought to be exe-
cuted.
"(D) Authorize the imposition by courts-martial of fines in
addition to or in substitution for any other punishments for of-
fences against the regulations, as well as for crimes, and pro-
viding for the manner in which such fines are to be enforced.
"(E) Authorize the conveyance to and detention in any of
His Majesty's prisons in any part of the United Kingdom of any
persons upon whom a sentence of imprisonment has been passed
in Ireland, whether before or after the passing of this act.
"(F) Provide for any of the duties of a coroner or any
coroner's jury being performed by a court of inquiry constituted
under the army act instead of by the coroner and jury.
862 WITH OUR READERS [Sept.,
"(G) Provide that where the court house or other building
in which any court has been usually held is destroyed or rendered
unfit for the purpose, the court may be held in such other court
house or building as may be designated by the Lord Lieutenant.
"(H) Authorize the trial without jury of any action, counter
claim, civil bill, issue, cause or matter in the high court or a
county court in Ireland which, apart from this provision, would
be triable with a jury.
"(I) Provide for the retention of sums payable to any local
authority from the local taxation (Ireland) account or from any
Parliamentary grant or from any fund administered by any Gov-
ernment department or public body where the local authority
has in any respect refused or failed to perform its duties, or for
the purpose of discharging amounts awarded against the local
authority in respect of compensation for criminal injuries or
either liabilities of the local authorities and for the application of
the sums so retained in or toward the purpose aforesaid.
"(4) Any such regulation may apply either generally to
the whole of Ireland or to any party thereof and may be issued
at any time, whether before or after the termination of the present
war, and the principal act shall continue in force as far as may
be necessary for that purpose, and the regulations may contain
such incidental, supplemental, and consequential provisions as
may be necessary for carrying out the purposes of this act and
shall have effect as if enacted in this act.
"(5) In this act, unless the context otherwise requires, the
expression 'crime' means any treason, felony, misdemeanor or
other offence punishable, whether by indictment or, on summary
conviction, by imprisonment, or by any greater punishment, and
other offences against the Defence of the Realm regulations. The
expression 'persons committed for trial' shall include a person
who has entered into recognizance conditions to appear and plead
to an indictment, or to take his trial upon any criminal charge,
or who has been committed to prison, there to await his trial for
any crime."
THE Report of The Society of the Propagation of the Faith shows
that, in 1919, $1,471,648.53 was collected in this country. This
gives American Catholics first place in the list of contributors.
France, which so long held the lead, is now second. All honor
to her that, despite her financial exhaustion, she still ably supports
Foreign Missions. The total amount collected in the world last
year was about eight millions of francs. But as rates of exchange
1920.] WITH OUR READERS 863
,T
differ in every country, and vary all the time, it is impossible to
obtain a correct idea of the relative contributions of each country.
The letter from the Cardinal Prefect of Propaganda to Mon-
signor Freri will be gratifying reading for the American con-
tributors to this "-Tire-eminently Catholic work:"
"RIGHT REVEREND MONSIGNOR:
"The report of the receipts of the American Branch of the Propa-
gation of the Faith in 1919 you have sent me has been a source of great
consolation. I admire the success obtained by your organization,
which is certainly favored with the blessings of Heaven. Even before
the Holy Father raised His august voice in behalf of the missions
through the Encyclical Letter 'Maximum Illud,' American Catholics
understood that your Society was in need of more generous assistance;
they gave it willingly, showing thereby their appreciation of this pre-
eminently Catholic work and placing themselves at the head of its
supporters.
"Accept for yourself, your co-workers, associates and benefactors
my sincere thanks for the help given to the missions, and my best
wishes that the sacrifices made for the diffusion of our Holy Faith be
rewarded by Heaven's choicest blessings. I ask Our Lord to give you
the means to continue and develop more and more The Society for the
Propagation of the Faith.
"G. CARDINAL VAN ROSSUM."
IT is surprisingly strange that Bertrand Russell should state that
the cultivation of art and belief in the Catholic faith are incom-
patible. Shortly after meeting with that surprise, we read the
words of a French poilu, who, because of his artistic ability, was
taken from the front trenches and directed to put into lasting
form his idea of the faithful soldier. This same poilu sculptor,
M. Peyre, has recently visited New York. Passing down Fifth
Avenue and beholding St. Patrick's Cathedral, he said: "It's a
Gothic church inspired by the beautiful Gothic cathedrals of
France. In the Gothic cathedrals of the Middle Ages, the brick-
layers, the carpenters, the stone workers, the architect, all these
had faith, and their churches bespoke that faith. That's why
these works are capable of giving so much inspiration."
WE have been eager for the past few months to summarize in
these pages the proceedings of the French Government and
the Vatican with regard to a renewal of diplomatic relations. The
difficulties and delays are known to our readers through the items
in the daily press. When a definite result is reached, THE
CATHOLIC WORLD will treat of it at length.
BOOKS RECEIVED.
AMERICAN BOOK Co., New York:
The Story of Liberty. By J. Baldwin. Essentials of English. By H. C. Pearson
and M. F. Kirchwey. History of the United States for Catholic Schools. By
C. H. McCarthy, Ph.D. Everyday Chemistry. By A. Vivian. Animal Hus-
bandry. By J. L. Tormey, B.S.A., and H. C. Lawry, B.S.A. New Champion
Spelling nook. By W. E. Hicks. Sailing the Seas: The Log of Tim Drake.
By J. Baldwin and W. W. Livcngood. Psychology for Teachers. By D. W.
La Hue, Ph.D. The Classroom Teacher. By G. D. Strayer and N. L. Engel-
Iiardt. Sociology and Modern School Problem!. By C. A. Ellwood, Ph.D.
Essentials of Latin for Beginners. By II. C. Pearson.
HARPEB & BBOTHKBS, New York:
Leerie. By Buth Sawyer $1.75 net. All-Wool Morrison. By the author of "The
Bider of King Log," etc. $1.90 net. "The Greatest Failure in All History."
By J. Spargo. $2.50 net.
THE MACMILLAN Co., New York:
The History of Africa South of the Zambesi. By G. McCall Theal, LL.D. Vol. I.
E. P. DUTTON & Co., New York:
America 'and the New Era. Edited by E. M. Friedman. $6.00 net. Political
Summary of the United Slates, 17X9-1920. By E. F. Clymer. $1.00.
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, New York:
Jesus' Principles of Living. By C. F. Kent, Ph.D., and J. W. Jenks, LL.D. $1.25.
The Girl, a Horse, and a Dog. By F. Lynde. .f2.00. The Chinese Coat. By J.
Lee. $1.75. The United States in Our Own Times, 1865-1920. By P. L.
Haworth, Ph.D.
P. J. KENEDY & SONS, New York:
Deck of Bcckford. By M. E. Francis. $2.00. The Story of Hildcbrand. By
E. W. Buxton, F.B.H.S. $1.50.
LONGSMANS, GREEN & Co., New York:
Missionary Survey as an Aid to Intelligent Cooperation in Foreign Missions. By
H. A. Allen, M.A., and I. T. Coehrane, M.B. $2.40 net. The Problem of
Reunion. By L. J. Walker, S.J. $1.50 net. The Faith of the New Testament.
By Rev. A. Nairne, D.D. $2.25 net. A History of Penance. By O. D. Watklns,
M.A. Two volumes. $16.00 net. Tl>e Way of Ileautu. By Sister A. Mason.
$1.75 net. The Odes and Psalms of Solomon. Vol. II. Edited by R. Harris
and A. Mingana. $7.50 net. Tlif Problem of Evil. By Rev. P. Green, M. A.
$3.25.
BONI & LIVEBIOHT, New York:
The Advancing Hour. By Norman Hapgood.
FUNK & WAGNAI.LS Co., New York:
Heart Troubles: Their Prevention and Relief. By L. F. Bishop, Sc.D. $3.50 net.
THE SENTINEL PRESS, New York:
A Eucharistic Manual. Cloth, 27 cents; paper, 17 cents.
THE AMERICA PRESS, New York:
The Logic of Lourdes. By Rev. J. J. Clifford, S.J. $1.00.
THE DEVIN-ADAIR Co., New York:
What's the Matter with IreJund? By Ruth Russell. $1.75 net.
HENRY HOLT & Co., New York:
The Cairn of Stars. Poems by Francis Carlin.
GEORGE H. DORAN Co., New York:
The Eve of Pascua. By H. Dehnn. I'onng Hearts. By J. E. Buckrose. "Queen
Lucia." By E. F. Benson.
GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE, Washington, D. C. :
\ative Cemeteries and Forms of llurinl East of the Mississippi. By D. I. Bush-
nell, Jr.
MATRE & Co., Chicago:
The Brides of Christ. By Motlier Mary Potter. $1.25.
ILLINOIS STATE HISTORICAL LIIIRARY, Springfield :
Illinois Constitutions. Edited by E. J. Verlie.
B. HERDER BOOK Co., St. Louis:
Father Tim's Talks. By C. D. McEnniry, C.SS.R. $1.50 net.
CHURCH BOOK RACK PRINTING AND PUHUSHING Co., Denver, Col.:
Seven False Facts or Seven Times Naught is Nant/ht. By Professor C. W. Meyers.
THE EXTENSION PBESS, Toronto, Canada:
The Bells of Old Quebec, and Other Poems of New France. By J. B. Dollard,
Litt.D.
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, London:
The Anonymous Poet of Poland, Zgumunt Krastnski. By M. M. Gardner. 12s. 6 d.
P. S. KING & Co., LTD., London:
The Making of America. By F. C. de Sumlchrast. 6 s.
M. II. GILL & SON, Dublin:
The Divine Office. By Rev. E. J. Quigley. 7s. 6 d.
PIERRE TEQUI, Paris:
L'Autre Vie. Par JS. Meric. Tomes I., II. 10 fr. each. Les Sources. Par Mon-
scigneur Tissier. 5 fr. Elements de Philosophic. Par J. Maritain. 5 fr.
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