International

disaster-news which was picked up by amateur wireless operators, and through them reached the public.

To Chief Engineer Grace, of the Goethals, must be accorded the praise for the rescue of the forty men and officers of the S-5. He saw the danger of employing flame, and patiently and laboriously drilled with his own hands a circle of fifty or more small holes with a hand ratchet, working steadily all night. This done, he cut the spaces with a cold chisel and, as one correspondent says, pried out the metal with a crowbar, much as one would get off the top of a tin can. Through this hole the men were dragged, exhausted

holes at match play must be almost a record.

Evans, in the progress of the tourna ment, overcame the national champions of Great Britain, France, and Canada and four former American title holders.

In the final round Evans regained the title, which he first won in 1916, by defeating Ouimet seven up and six to play. The crowd at the match numbered some twelve thousand. Some of the spectators may be observed in the picture which accompanies this account.

THE TERROR OF THE EARTHQUAKE

66

VERY earthquake disaster is for

their perilous confinement. Commander Cooke, of the S-5, reported that his men acted with coolness and heroism; the crew sent a round robin to the President in warm praise of their commander, and all joined in recognition of the skill and intelligent action of their rescuers.

Altogether the incident makes one feel proud of American courage, endurance, and resourcefulness.

Italian statesman. The shocks of Sep tember 7 and later days destroyed hundreds of lives-estimates vary widely

(C) Underwood & Underwood

THE

crowded hospitals and churches with many more hundreds of crippled and suffering people, and led some halfmillion of people to abandon their homes, at least temporarily. The ter ror of the great earthquakes of Messina in 1909 and Avezzano in 1915 were recalled and renewed. In loss of life and in the ruin of a great city the Messina disaster was incomparably Italy's greatest earthquake disaster; at least 50,000 human beings perished at that time. With all such disasters, even when they are so comparatively unimportant in their destructive results as the recent series of earth shakings in California, there is an element of terror and panic which only the stout-hearted can bear with equanimity.

Tuscany was the scene of the most serious damage in the recent Italian experience, but shocks were felt almost as far south as Naples. Fivizzano, a little city on the slope of the Apennines, some seventy miles northwest of Florence and perhaps a third of that distance from Spezia, was the worst stricken of a dozen or more towns and villages in that vicinity. Reports state that over four hundred people were killed there. The stories of suffering and rescue are heartrending yet inspiring in their ac counts of the devotion of sailors from a war-ship, doctors, nurses, and countless volunteers. The shock, as is often the case, followed the general line of the mountain range. A volcanic crater opened at the top of a mountain nine miles from Spezia. Even the Swiss Alps felt the shocks.

Modern geology leans to the belief that most disastrous earthquakes are caused by shifts of strata along fissures or faults. Volcanic agencies may, however, play a part in such disturbances,

money for the Young Men's Christian Association and similar organizations. Some of the slogans familiar in other drives were used for stimulating the interest of the people engaged in this drive. A good many of these slogans seem to us, and would seem to a good many, ineffective, commonplace, and in some cases commercial and materialistic. In the whole amount of evidence, however, there is nothing, not a phrase or a word, to support Mr. Cox's charges that the Republican organization is trying to buy the Presidency or to buy it for the purpose of being able to use bayonets for the suppression of the workingmen.

The hearings at Chicago by the Senatorial Committee have been elaborate and long continued. No person testifying before that Committee has supplemented Governor Cox's alleged evidence with any evidence of any kind tending to support Governor Cox's accusations. No officer of the Democratic organization has acknowledged knowing of any such evidence.

In the face of this fact Mr. Cox has put himself in a position of making serious charges for which he has not the slightest proof. He has done his best to undermine the faith of American voters in the honesty of American political organizations, and he places the gravest of doubts upon the integrity of the mass of voters themselves. To do this without evidence is to make an attack upon the Nation itself. If it is not treason, it is because the legal definition of treason does not comprise such an act. It partakes of the nature of treason, for, in so far as it arouses class animosities and undermines confidence in self-government, it destroys the loyalty of the citizens.

To recapitulate, Mr. Cox has made one charge and in an attempt to prove the truth of it he simply proves the truth of another charge and not the one he has definitely made. There are thus two charges before the country. One is that the Republican party has undertaken to raise a camgaign fund, variously estimated, by means of quotas according to the method used in the Liberty Loan drives, in the drives for the Young Men's Christian Association, the Red Cross, the Knights of Columbus, the War Camp Community Service, and similar organizations. This charge is true. We are glad it is true. Mr. Hays of the Republican National Committee has done a service in putting the raising of campaign funds on the same basis with that of the raising of Liberty Loans and welfare funds. The old method of raising cam

paign funds was not only inefficient, paign funds was not only inefficient, but was injurious. Political committees got money from whatever sources were most available, and got that money secretly. Only a small part of a community ever contributed to the party fund, and as they made these special contributions they naturally expected special favors. This was the old "gum-shoe" method, and it was bad. To change that method for one which is organized, public, and fair is to perform a very valuable public service. In trying to discredit this attempt to put the raising of political funds upon a sound and fair basis the Democratic candidate for the Presidency is doing all he can to retain the old "gum-shoe" method.

Political parties must have political funds.. They must have them in order to give information concerning their candidates to the voters. If that money is raised openly and honestly and is spent for legitimate purposes, the amount of the fund is not a vital question. Any money that is needed for legitimate purposes should be raised, the more general and public the method of raising it the better. The charge that the Republican party is using the quota method is true, and good citizens ought to rejoice that it is true.

The other charge is that the Republican party is trying to buy the Presidency for the purpose of using the Government to the financial profit of special interests and for the purpose of suppressing the workingmen with the bayonet. That charge is without foundation. Those who have made it ought to be ashamed of themselves and ought to be called to account for their public offense.

We said we had; but we contended also that many of them improved.

"I grant you that-most certainly I grant you that," he was quick to agree, with that generosity of mind which is so delightful a part of him. "But may I ask if you have recently attended a class reunion, or anything like that, where men foregather?"

We said we had-only last June, after a hiatus of more years than we cared to acknowledge.

"Then," he continued, smiling, "you must know what I am about to get at.

Didn't you observe how many of the men had gone off in æsthetic and spiritual charm? How many had lost the glamour of soul that they used to hold for you, and could talk of little but the stock market, golf, the high cost of living, what make of car they used, and how enormous their income tax was last year, and, oh, the Eighteenth Amendment-most of all, the Eighteenth Amendment !"

It was almost uncanny of the YoungOld Philosopher to say this, for we had returned from a certain college reunion much disillusioned as to a number of old chums; and though we had not framed our thoughts or become articulate with our wife concerning this sad circumstance, we could not but help giving it definite consideration for many days.

"I think," went on the Young-Old Philosopher, "that people are much like race-horses. There are thoroughbreds; and there is an underdone breed, a sort of riffraff that make startling spurts, cross the line nobly now and then, and finally, suddenly, drop in their tracks, unable to run the race to the end. There is an aristocracy of the body as well as of the mind; a spiritual something in the human frame itself that quite justifies that Biblical phrase, 'Know ye not that ye are temples of the Holy Ghost?' and which there is no gainsaying. If, combined with that thoroughbredness of the body, you find in a man a delicacy and superlative excellence of soul and mind and heart, then you discover the type that lasts, that holds the fort in desperate days,' to snatch a line of Stevenson, and that magnificently refuses to surrender. That kind of man goes on to the end of his days, finely sensible of his civic duties, his family duties, and his duties of mental development.

"The trouble with most of us is that we fall by the wayside, having graduated from some university, feeling that, the first line crossed, the last line has likewise been crossed; whereas the race has but just begun. Tolliver's business absorbs him to the exclusion of his former love of Hazlitt's Table Talk' or Burke's Sublime and the Beautiful; and Tucker, who once loved Wordsworth, hobnobs only with Wall Street. When he played golf after leaving college, he had the good sense to pause, every now and then, true to that sane and saving admiration of Wordsworth that was in him, and say of the landscape, 'How wonderful it is!' Now, alas! he has interest only in the ball and the proper club; and the countryside is but a means to an end—a bit

of wholesome exercise, I admit, but also a leading up to a too-heavy luncheon at the club afterwards.

"To be well balanced; to keep the blend at a high state of perfection that seems to me so worth while; as a man often does it in England, with his never-ending interest in the Latin he got at Eton, his refusal to forsake forever his little Greek or French, simply because the world at large knows little and cares less for the true fragrance of life.

"To keep our dreams of a higher standard-and you know very well that when we were younger we thought solemnly of standards-is the thing that will enrich a man beyond any reckoning. To hold in the heart, unashamed, some deathless line of Keats or Shakespeare will make a man almost an angel, mentally, and help him to be more generous, more companionable, more to be desired than rubies, when we go back to meet him and talk with him after the lapse of years.

"For the beauty we keep is the only beauty that counts in the final summing up. What is education, if we forget it and lose it? A boy in the war, captured by the Germans and sent to a forlorn and lonely prison camp, told me that his remembrance of Shelley saved his reason. Over and over he would say lines of magic, fragments from this or that favorite poem, and he took on the very essence of that 'blithe spirit' which Shelley has made the skylark's own.

"Is it, then, a little thing to remember all that we once loved; that which was poured into our poor brains byteachers who knew that in the coming days this beauty would stand us in good stead?

"I think not. On the contrary, I wish I could impress upon the generation now growing up the worth of that vast store of literature, from the Bible down, that has helped not only the martyrs and the dreamers, but the practical men of all ages."

spondent is that the report of a church commission as rendered is not a defense of the strikers, but a judge's decision against an accused whom he has tried. Our answer to the second is that it is one thing to condemn injustice and another to determine who are the unjust; one thing to condemn every form of industry which enriches some at the expense of others, quite another thing to decide that the steel trust is guilty of this injustice. Jesus condemned Pharisees who devoured widows' houses and for a pretense made long prayers, but he never tried and condemned individual Pharisees for being guilty of this crime. “I judge no " he said. And again: "I came not to judge the world, but to save the world."

man,

The Church is admirably equipped to arouse the public conscience against every form of injustice, but it has every form of injustice, but it has neither the equipment nor the personnel for an investigation of persons, whether individual or corporate, who are accused of wrong-doing. It cannot compel the attendance of witnesses, nor require them to submit to cross-examination, nor administer oaths, nor convict them of perjury if they testify falsely, nor demand the production of books and papers; nor are its leaders generally fitted either by temperament or training for the task.

We do not pass judgment on the correctness of the report of the Interchurch Commission, but we take this incident as an occasion to restate our conception of the function of the Church of Christ.

Christ was not in any strict sense a re-former. He made no attempt to reconstruct the existing order of society. Slavery was universal; he said nothing about slavery. War was the chief honorable profession; he said nothing about war and did not condemn the army. Government was an absolute monarchy; he uttered no protest against monarchy and proposed no changes in the form of government. Gluttony and drunkenness were far worse in his day than in ours; he advocated neither total abstinence nor prohibition. He strongly affirmed the permanence of the marriage tie and the stability of the family; otherwise he said nothing about the institutions of his day.

It does not follow that Christians are not to be reformers. Even Jesus Christ is not to be blindly followed. The duties of the citizen in a free republic are not the same as the duties of a citizen in an imperial despotism. But to his Church Christ gave a definite commission: "As the Father hath sent

me, even so send I you." And the purpose for which his Father had sent him he made clear in a single sentence: "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly." It was not the purpose of Jesus to give the world new laws or new institutions, religious or secular. He came to give the world new life"the life of God in the soul of man;" and he trusted that life to work out the necessary reconstruction of forms and institutions. Doubtless they were to be worked out by his disciples, but not directly by his Church.

It is of the utmost importance that our presidents and governors, Our legislators and judges, should be inspired by the spirit of Christ; but it is very undesirable that they should be ecclesiastics. The attempt has often been made by the Church to assume legislative and judicial functions. We do not recall any instance in history in which this attempt has been beneficial to the community. The Church of Rome governed Italy. No patriotic Italian desires to go back and re-establish the States of the Church. Luther in his battle with Rome entered into political partnership with the princes of Germany, partly to protect the Protestant Church, partly to purify the German Government. The partnership furnished some political protection but no political purification. The State pulled the Church down; the Church did not lift the State up. The Church in England sought to modify the proceedings of the civil courts by establishing ecclesiastical courts, and so ameliorate the harshness of law by the introduction of what was called equity. The result was so unsatisfactory that in this country in almost all the States of the Union courts of equity have been abandoned and powers which they once exercised have been transferred to the courts of law. The bishops of the Established Church were given seats in the House of Lords. It is said, and we believe history justifies the saying, that they have always been found as a body not to promote but to hinder political progress. The Puritan ecclesiastics suc ceeded no better. The sons of the Puritans in New England have no wish to go back to the era when the Puritan Church was the dominant power.

The prophet Micah defines religion as doing justly, loving mercy, and walking humbly with God. To organize our political, educational, and industrial institutions on the basis of Micah's definition is of the first importance. But this cannot be done unless the spirit of Micah's definition is inspired in the

hearts of the men and women who constitute the community. Every indication on the part of the Church or the ministry to do the work rather than to inspire the workers we look upon with regret. It may not be more important to feed the springs that run among the valleys than to dig the channels and direct the water into its appointed courses; but there is no institution so well equipped as the Church and no individual except the mother so well situated as the minister to feed the springs, and unless they are fed the channels, however skillfully dug, will remain dry.

Since this article was begun we have received a letter from the widow of a clergyman widely known for his effective preaching of what may be called social Christianity, from which we make the following quotation :

We wanted to join in a world-encompassing compact that war should be no more. And we seem to be getting farther and farther away from that dream. The simplicity of the teaching of Jesus, to love God and our brother as ourselves, to live with the spirit of love and fellowship-we seem so far from that ideal.

T

The great Interchurch World Movement for Christianity had a splendid sound to our ears. We had been dealing in world movements, and this seemed to satisfy our hopes for healing the wounds of the nations.

That hope, too, has disappointed us, and our churches are not thronged with home-coming soldiers, whose hearts have been touched by the awful experiences and their own nearness to eternity.

Is the Church overlooking some of the things that are her own? Is she claiming all of the triumphs of her Leader that rightly belong to her? It may be we have looked for the leaven, which the Church is supposed to have, within the Church. Possibly the leaven we find there is stale, like the leaven of the Pharisees. Our leaven should be like that of the woman Jesus noticed, who hid it from sight in the meal.

Yeast must be hidden to be found, and then we can only find it in its effects. It is like the wind; we hear the sound thereof, but no man can tell whence it comes or whither it goeth.

And our correspondent gives a glowing account of two industrial meetings largely composed of employers, which she has recently attended, in one of which the four points of the principal address were Contact, Con

ference, Confidence, Co-operation, and in the other of which the greatest applause and most enthusiasm were for the addresses which presented the real Christian side of industrial relations; "Honest to God friendliness" was one expression which brought down the house.

We share our correspondent's fear that the Church may be overlooking some of the things that are her own, that she may be losing something of her moral power in the community, because she is substituting the ambition to do the work of other organizations for the ambition to inspire all organizations to do their own work well.

We believe that it is the function of the Church to furnish this hidden yeast; to inspire with a passion for righteousness men who will carry into industry the spirit of human brotherhood, into education eagerness to impart faith in the values of justice, mercy, and humility, and into our courts and our legislatures more and more that spirit of righteousness, peace, and good will which make the Nation great. LYMAN ABBOTT.

HE Bolshevik debacle in Poland furnishes convincing proof, if proof were needed, that the armies of Lenine and Trotsky are by no means so formidable as their recent victories in southeastern Russia and Siberia would seem to indicate. The apparent ease with which they defeated Kolchak and Denikine led the world to believe that there was no force in Russia capable of withstanding them, and that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to prevent them from overrunning Poland, the Caucasus, Asia Minor, and even Persia. For this belief, however, there never was any substantial foundation. The Bolsheviki no doubt are skillful and successful propagandists; but as fighters they are not to be compared with the disciplined armies of western Europe, or even with the hastily assembled and imperfectly trained soldiers of Poland. Their previous victories were due not to fighting efficiency, nor to exceptional skill in strategy, but rather to lack of cohesion, unanimity, and patriotic enthusiasm in the forces that were opposed to them. This was particularly the case in southeastern Russia. General Denikine was a sincere patriot and a fairly competent military leader, but he had little administrative capacity; he could not understand or did not regard the thoughts, wishes, and

BY GEORGE KENNAN aspirations of the common people, and he failed, therefore, to gain the wholehearted support of the class that might have been most useful to him. No army can long continue to be victorious if it has behind it an apathetic, discontented, or hostile population, and Denikine was defeated not by exceptional strength or efficiency in the Bolshevik forces that confronted him, but by dissatisfaction and dissension in his rear. The peasants and Cossacks upon whom he was mainly dependent for support were alienated or made apathetic by administrative errors that he might have avoided if he had had more political sagacity.

One of the reasons for the unsympathetic attitude of the peasants toward him was his treatment of the land question. Land, to the Russian peasant, is the most important and valuable thing in the world. Under the old régime he never had enough of it to satisfy his urgent needs, and when the Revolution gave him an opportunity to steal a few acres from a neighboring landlord he did not hesitate to enlarge his holdings in that way. But he knew nevertheless that he was not acting fairly and that under some later form of government his claim to the land thus seized might not be recognized. He was extremely anxious, therefore, to secure something like a legal title, and in order to obtain

it he was quite willing to give reasonable compensation to the previous owner.

When General Denikine practically assumed civil as well as military control in southeastern Russia, he ignored this natural desire of the peasants, and, following the lead of Kolchak, declared that he had no authority to settle the land question, and that it must be left for the consideration of a Constituent Assembly, to be elected by the whole nation at some future time. This disappointed and irritated the peasants, not only because they regarded it as an evasion of their demands, but because it seemed to confirm a suspicion which they already had that Denikine and his advisers were acting in the interest of the nobility and the great landed proprietors of the old régime.

Another grievance of the peasants was the arbitrary and often unauthorized confiscation of their grain and other personal property by Denikine's subordinate officers. These seizures in many cases amounted almost to looting, and although they were made upon the plea of urgent military necessity the people resented them, just as they resented similar acts of injustice on the part of the Bolsheviki.

Finally, the peasants were displeased when Denikine refused to recognize or co-operate with their own partisan lead