refrain, with slight variations, that we have all heard countless times and that has led to the conjecture whether, if American husbands should think somewhat less about business, and American wives somewhat more, we might not have a generally improved state of affairs.

It is not only that the wives of our business leaders are ignorant of business and admit that they are; they desire to remain so. A contemporary of my own, a college graduate whose husband is a man of large business interests, protested in my hearing the other day against the present practise of what she called the better magazines publishing articles relating to business. "Not that I read them," she concluded, "the very word 'business' bores me to extinction!"

A still more significant comment was an indignant one I heard not long since from a wealthy, philanthropic, and influential American woman in regard to a personal acquaintance whose name was appearing on the front page of the daily press as the result of his having become involved in a national business scandal. "Of course I don't believe Mr. X is guilty! Why, we know him well! He's the most charming man." One of theirs-that settled the gentle

man's innocence.

It is altogether possible, with our sharp falling away in this country from the ideals of our founders and earlier leaders, that even those American mothers, once held up to ridicule for their simple lay, I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier, will soon be practising one more in harmony with the new national ideals, I raised my boy to die for oil, if need be;-with rubber, lumber, or any commodity you choose, substituted as the national exigency may dictate.

As for women in business, they have been there too short a time and have been thus far too fully occupied with personal survival and progress to demonstrate whether big business is, or is not, a sphere susceptible to woman's influence in the finer sense.

IV

A more immediate hope for any leavening of the Bourbon spirit in business is from insurgents within the Bourbon group.

The business Bourbons' children are far less easy to hoodwink than the business Bourbons' wives. For one thing, Bourbon children are reading opposition literature, if their fathers and mothers are not. They are simply lapping it up. I was struck with the sober talk of a young man in the Middle West, not over twenty-three, who recently came into a large fortune and succeeded to heavy business responsibilities. "I admired my grandfather" (the founder of the family fortune) "and had the highest respect for my father personally," he said, "but I hope to God I'll never develop some of the business ideas they had!"

The familiar story-often quoted as a horrible example of what the higher education may do to women-of the Vassar graduate who undertook to reorganize her father's factories along humanitarian lines, may be apocryphal, but there is more than one indication that a new spirit is stirring in the more thoughtful of our rich American youthnot the old complacent idea of riches as a trust and a chance to play Lady or Lord Bountiful, but a persistent inner searching as to whether these grateful rôles are not played, in the main, at too high a cost to somebody.

--

Many of the younger representatives of big business, men in early middle life, are distinctly out of tune, as hardly needs pointing out, with the spirit that prevails in the higher business world. It is from these younger men that the suggestion impious to their elders has come, that the mental hygiene of our big business leaders needs looking into;-that here, in fact, is a behaviour problem with incalculably important bearings, industrial and social. But the real rulers of big business, speaking broadly, are men from fifty to seventy, and back of them is a ghostly but

powerful phalanx; for the hand of dead leadership is still heavy on American business.

Perhaps all we should ask, at present, of our business Bourbons, considering their business inheritance and their circumscribed existence, is that they should be a little less insistent on the divine right of big business to be immune from criticism; that the voice of big business should be a little less sanctimonious when it talks of moral responsibility in connection with business manoeuvres; and that they should look a little less solemn. Too often business Bourbons' visages lack that shining as of an inner sweetness and light, from which, nevertheless, we venture to hope they are not cut off.

E

THE DEEPER SIGNIFICANCE

OF PROHIBITION

BY HENRY PRATT FAIRCHILD

ONFORCE it or repeal it."

How familiarily the sentiment rings in our ears! And how unerringly we jump to the conclusion that it is the liquor law to which it refers!

A stranger to the United States, unfamiliar with the present situation and its background, would infer from all the clamor that among all our multitude of laws the prohibition law stood out unique for the failure or inadequacy of its enforcement. The truth is, on the contrary, that the uniqueness of the prohibition law lies in the fact that it is about the only important law that any one expects to be enforced. At first glimpse this statement may seem fantastic -but let us see.

Law is one of the most ancient, as it is the most concrete and explicit, of social expedients. One of the earliest consequences of an emerging group consciousness was the selection of certain acts of the individual to be placed under that definite proscription of the community which is law. It was natural that the first of the acts so designated should be those involving the greatest social injury, and at the same time most likely to be committed; specifically, attacks upon life and upon property. From time immemorial, therefore, all societies have had some form of laws against murder and against theft, and a considerable part of the energies of all states has been devoted to the enforcement of these laws. One might be justified in expecting, accordingly, that after uncounted centuries of effort in this direction the most modern and "civilized" states should have virtually

mastered this problem, and that certainly in the United States the laws against murder and theft would be almost perfectly enforced. What are the facts?

That we have not succeeded in eliminating murder in the United States is a matter of all too common knowledge. It is perhaps not so generally known that our efforts in this direction are becoming steadily less successful. In 1882 the homicide rate was about 3 per 100,000 of the general population. In 1900, according to the careful compilations of Dr. Frederick L. Hoffman, the rate in twenty-eight American cities, stood at 5.1 per 100,000. Since then it has increased steadily until in 1924 it reached 10.3 per 100,000, having more than doubled in a quarter of a century.

Some consolation for this situation, possibly, might be found if we were improving our technique for dealing with those guilty of these crimes. Unfortunately just the reverse is true. According to the figures of the Chicago Tribune, in 1882 the number of executions amounted to 8.25 per cent of the murders committed, in 1890 it was 2.37 per cent, and in 1899, 2.1 per cent. What the rate is at present, it is difficult to say, the Chicago Tribune apparently having discontinued its statistics, and official figures being notoriously lacking.

The Homicide Bureau of the District Attorney's office of New York in 1920 investigated six hundred and seventynine killings which were reported as possible homicides. The bureau presented evidence to Grand Juries in one hundred and thirty cases, and obtained seventy-eight indictments. The net result in convictions for first degree murder was just one.

Strange that we hear no one crying out for the repeal of the law against murder!

Our record in the matter of theft is similar, though not capable of quite such concise statement.

In both these respects the showing of the United States is humiliating when compared with that of foreign coun