years. That growth has not been the symmetrical expansion of a live organism, like a tree. Rather it has been the unguided and unsystematic addition of a department here and a department there, until, as one official pictured it, the Government of the United States looks like an oyster to which irregular masses of barnacles have attached themselves without order, system, or harmony. There are scores of stories and sayings in Washington to illustrate how irregular has been the development of the nation's business. One, attributed to Mr. Hoover, is that when he took over the Department of Commerce he found that he had jurisdiction over polar bears, because the Arctic Pribiloff Islands are in his department of Commerce; whereas Secretary Wallace's Department of Agriculture has charge of brown bears, because the national parks are in his department; and Secretary Fall, of the Interior Department, has charge of grizzly bears, because Alaska is under his jurisdiction.

It must not be said that Harding has done more than made a beginning in rectifying this condition. It will take years to finish it, and there will be an amount of difficulty and a quantity of obstacles such as no one can foresee. In transferring bureaus from one department to another, human prejudices and the human sense of vested right will be encountered. The aggregate of this opposition will express itself in Congress; and, after all, the thing can only be done finally by act of Congress. All that Harding can do is to lay it out on paper and urge it on the country. But what can be said is that for the first time in 130 years, a President has laid his hands on this problem, and done it with earnest determination.

IN

TWO DIFFICULT TASKS

N addition to the administrative chaos, President Harding found on his desk two institutions of great size and complexity, of which the management was in the worst imaginable shape. One was the War Risk Bureau, the other the Shipping Board. The immensity of each of these institutions is beyond what the public generally appreciates. Of the War Risk Bureau it has been said that it is one of the five largest insurance companies in the world, although insurance is only one of its functions. Of the Shipping Board it has been said that with three billions invested in it, it is the largest business institution in the world. For the chaos that existed in the management

of both, not too much blame should be laid on the administration which instituted that management. Both institutions arose as incidents of the war. The War Risk Bureau was compelled to improvise, during three hurried years of war and war's aftermath, what had been with insurance companies of equal size the orderly and systematic growth of fifty years. Similarly, the billions which had been invested in ships was a response to a war-time emergency demand, arising at the moment when Germany was sinking ships faster than the world was building them, and when the cry was for ships of any kind and in the greatest possible quantity, regardless of cost. It was a case where time was everything and money was not to be considered. Under the circumstances, most of the talk of blame is beside the point.

But all that can be said in extenuation of the condition that was dumped in Harding's lap, does not make that condition any easier for Harding to handle. Here, as in much else, in the nature of things, not enough has been done yet to be recorded in terms of accomplished success. But everybody who has contact with these things believes that the corner has been turned and the direction changed.

In all these things that compose what may be called the business management of government-government housekeeping, so to speakPresident Harding has taken hold in such a way that, from the progress already made, no one doubts that the present administration will make a record never equalled before. In this field there is an extraordinary juxtaposition of the need, the man, and the means. It just happened that Mr. Harding's coming into office was coincident with the coming to fruition of a movement, energetically pressed during several years-for a national budget system. It was Mr. Harding's fortune to have the opportunity for appointing the first budget officer of the United States and otherwise to instal this device for bringing some of the efficiency of private business into the management of the government's fiscal affairs. In this particular, Mr. Harding expressed his own personality as administers always express their personalities by their appointments-by choosing Charles G. Dawes, a Chicago banker who during the war made an enormous addition to his experience by serving as purchasing agent for the Army in France. It was an ideal selection. General Dawes has business and banking experience; and has, in addition, the force and

magnetism of personality which enables him to break down old crystallizations of bureaucratic self-sufficiency, and inspire the heads of bureaus with loyalty to a new spirit. The installation of the budget system has been described without excess of superlativeness, as the most important act of government in the field of fiscal reform, except of course the Federal Reserve System, since the Civil War. There remains one field in which President Harding so far has done nothing. It may be that in this field, Mr. Harding does not expect to do anything. But the great probability is that sooner or later he will realize that whether he wills it or not, the country will consider him responsible for leadership in legislation, and will insist upon judging him accordingly. Or course it is true that it is Congress, and not the President, that makes the laws, and is responsible for the legislative programme. There is good reason for believing that Mr. Harding, in a reaction of distaste from the degree of leadership which Mr. Wilson exerted over a Democratic Congress, was moved to make a virtue of not asserting leadership over a Republican Congress. It was his intention to restore and conspicuously maintain the constitutional separation between the executive and legislative branches of the government.

He wished the country to approve him, not for pressing his leadership upon Congress, but rather for punctiliously refraining from interfering with Congress.

But Mr. Harding as President, and because he is President, is also, in the eyes of the country, the titular head of the Republican party. In that rôle, the country is disposed to hold him responsible for what a Republican Congress does or fails to do. Within this field, so far, President Harding's accomplishments are practically zero. They are this because he has wished it so. President Harding, up to date, has not made himself leader of his party in Congress. By the same token, Congress has not developed any leadership from within itself. So this moment, there is a growing demand from the country, and a growing appeal from Congress itself, for Harding to lead. In this first year since Harding's election, a complete half circle has been covered. A year ago, Harding was said to be "the creature of a Senatorial oligarchy"; to-day Harding is besought to let the Senate become the creature of his leadership. From assuming that the Senate was going to boss Harding. the pendulum has swung to where the country, and the Senate itself, begs Harding to boss the Senate.

P

ROBABLY the greatest single achievement of Mr. Stefansson is his demonstration, by actual experience, that Arctic explorers can remain indefinitely in the Polar regions and live off the country, if they are adequately supplied with guns, ammunition, and fishing tackle. Equipped with nothing more than these it is quite feasible for an explorer to find plentiful food and clothing for himself and to live for long periods in these regions in as much comfort as the native Eskimos, who enjoy it thoroughly. Earlier - explorers than he tried to carry enough supplies (of the sort to which they were accustomed in the temperate latitudes) to last them throughout their stay in the North. Many of them died of starvation within rifle shot of game enough to support a tribe of people, their 'supplies" thus proving to be simply that much useless impedimenta, dragging them back from rapid progress and consuming an undue share of their time and energy.

Stefansson proceeded upon the assumption that where the Eskimos lived he could live, and what they ate he could eat. On one of his expeditions (financed by Harvard and Toronto Universities) he arrived on the shores of the Arctic Ocean in a light overcoat and a blue serge suit. "And I knew just what I was doing," said Stefansson. "I was going to live with the Eskimos, learn their language and study them; and I knew I could never have done it effectively by putting up my own quarters, dressing as a white man and living like a white man. I helped the Eskimos to fish, went with them ahunting, ate and throve on their food, and stayed for eighteen months."

His second Arctic expedition was a further and even more dramatic proof of his theory. On this expedition he remained in the Far North for fifty-three months, or the better parts of the years 1908-1912.

This enormous simplification of the Arctic

explorer's work has robbed northern exploration of most of its terrors and most of its difficulties.. Mr. Stefansson's scientific achievements are of great value. He has explored and mapped about one quarter of the one million square miles of hitherto unknown Polar regions, found new Arctic islands, and corrected the outlines of others on the map.

To these achievements Mr. Stefansson has been working to add a third, which in the course of time may overshadow the others. This is to convert the public to the facts about the habitability of northern lands and the immense opportunities for their profitable development for the welfare of the human race. He has devoted a great deal of time to correcting popular superstitions about the so-called Frozen North and to convincing the governments of Canada and the United States of the feasibility of developing an enormous supply of meat by the propagation of herds of reindeer and caribou upon the huge grassy prairies of the northern plain.

Experiments that have been undertaken by the United States Government in Alaska indicate the correctness of Mr. Stefansson's views and the practicability of the plans he has proposed. Their success indicates the probable development within twenty-five years of a new source of sustenance for the human race, of greater importance than the cattle ranges of the United States and Argentina combined.

Mr. Stefansson's parents were among the first Icelanders to venture from their native island to the New World. He himself was born in 1879 in an immigrant's cabin on the shores of Lake Winnipeg. Eighteen months later his parents moved southward in a prairie schooner into the then territory of Dakota. Here Stefansson grew up on his father's farm twenty miles from a railroad. Here he went to public school, punched cattle for a living at fifteen, and at eighteen entered the preparatory department of the University of North Dakota on the savings of his boyhood work. He earned

his way through college by doing chores, chopping wood, and teaching country schools. Dismissed from college in his third year for a mischievous disrespect toward some of the faculty, he became a newspaper man at Grand Forks for a few months. During this experience he was nominated as Superintendent of Public Instruction for North Dakota on the Democratic ticket. He had scarcely started his campaign when his opponents pointed out that he was not yet of legal age to hold a state office. Stefansson thereupon entered the University of Iowa, where he graduated the following spring. In the fall of 1903 he accepted a scholarship in the Harvard Divinity School, but after a year's attendance he found that his interest had turned to science. He then entered the Harvard Graduate School as a student of anthropology and won the Thaw Fellowship in that subject. The summers of 1904 and 1905 were spent in Iceland, the home of his forefathers, on an archeological expedition for Harvard University.

Stefansson's career as an explorer dates from 1906 when he joined the Leffingwell-Mikkelsen Polar Expedition as ethnologist. His second Arctic expedition was under the auspices of the American Museum of Natural History and the Government of Canada, 1908-1912. His third expedition was financed by the Canadian Government and covered the years 1913-1918. Altogether Stefansson has spent ten winters beyond the Arctic Circle, which is one winter more than has ever been spent there by any recognized explorer living or dead, and four winters more than any explorer now living.

A singular legend seems to have grown up

about Stefansson that has caused him some embarrassment. This legend is that he is a huge man of powerful physique and little learning, who has achieved extraordinary things in the Arctic by reason of physical endurance. The contrary is the fact. Stefansson's Arctic exploits are achievements of the intellect and not of the body. He is slightly under six feet and weighs less than 160 pounds. In other words, he is of the lean Scandinavian type. And his feats of Northern travel were accomplished by making scholarship and reason save his body. His theory of "living off the country" in the North was the product of exhaustive research into the facts of Northern life and of the projection of the scientific imagination upon those facts. His practical success with that theory was the product of moral courage the moral (not physical) courage to test a rational theory by experiment.

The fact is that Stefansson is a scholar by instinct, who became an explorer as a necessary part of the task of advancing his scholarship in his chosen field of investigation. It is significant that his work in the North has come to a head in the practical proposals which he has made to the Canadian Government, by which that Commonwealth is now planning to make the Northern plains the home of a great beefproducing enterprise by propagating the native caribou and musk-ox. This plan is based on Stefansson's scientific knowledge of the life of these animals and of the flora of the North, turned to the benefit of man by his constructive imagination-an example of the scientific mind at its best, consciously at work in the service of mankind.