JEWISH ΜΕΝ Do You Want More Are you willing to do just a little to- Hundreds every year are becoming These boys are not hopeless cases. Every day we hear the cry-from What can you do? The Big Brother Movement has proved in its work among boys It is not so much an effort to redeem At present about 200 Jewish young Will You Help? The General Secretary will be glad to tell you how. THE JEWISH BIG BROTHER ASSOCIATION 356 Second Avenue New York could have worked up to the climax of Thea's cool flight to Mexico with the young Ottenburg, Thea inexorably true to her art, taking passion as an interesting but indispensable incident of life. There the story could have broken off with a leap. Our imagination would have easily supplied the finished career. Miss Cather does not mean to spell deterioration for Thea, and yet so unskilful is the handling of these later chapters that it is almost impossible to find in the bourgeoise Madame Kronborg the same Thea, with her "loyalty of young hearts to an exalted ideal, and the passion with which they strive." In the inscrutable epilogue Miss Cather seems simply to throw to the winds what she is trying to do. Her story was the progress of a peculiarly arresting youthful talent. The epilogue acts as if she were writing a sociological treatise of the town of Moonstone, Colorado, in which every last citizen of the girl's early environment is to be accounted for to the anxious reader. Yet few novels give so tell-tale a pattern of the difficulties that beset the imaginative writer, and the narrow way that must be walked. Miss Cather would perhaps be shocked to know how sharp were the contrasts between those parts of her book which are built out of her own experience and those which are imagined. Her defects are almost wholly those of unassimilated experience. The musical life of this opera singer who has so fascinated her she has admired, but she has not made it imaginatively her own. She has contented herself with the fascination and has not grasped the difficulty of reading herself into this other life and making it so much hers that the actual and the imagined are no longer separable. This is almost the whole cunning of the novelist's art. "O Pioneers!" was artistic because it was woven all of a piece of imaginatively interpreted experience. Its charm made one want to put Miss Cather's next book among that very small group of epics of youthful talent that grows great with quest and desire. But in that little library one cannot give even temporary place to "The Song of the Lark." Resentment of this unpleasant fact is perhaps the greatest compliment one could pay to its author's genuine talent. Various New Novels The Passionate Crime, by E. Temple Thurston. New York: D. Appleton and Co. $1.30 net. T HE man who wrote "The City of Beautiful Nonsense" might have been able to make us believe that there are fairies in Ireland-though he spelled them "faeries." He might have been able to capture our interest for a young poet living alone in the mountains, who thinks it necessary for his freedom to renounce companionship, and fears the earthly pull of his love because he calls it "selfishness." That author might even have been able to show us such a young man murdering his lover because she gives herself to him; and he might have made us accept "The Passionate Crime" as the title of the story. Such a feat, however, would have been the result of greater faith on the part of the writer than the present Mr. Thurston evidently has. Much of the book appears to have been put down to convince the author himself that he could imagine elaborately the events chronicled. With a proper show of imagistic but somewhat apocryphal Irish dialogue, with much "description of nature," and with endless protestation of his own curiosity about the affair, Mr. Thurston fails to make his characters seem more than the shadows they must have been when the plot first occurred to him as the occasion for writing another novel. Around Old Chester, by Margaret Deland. New York: Harper & Brothers. $1.35 net. What will happen to Harper's Magazine when Dr. Lavendar dies? Imagine the howl of protest that would go up from all the throats that swallow his humorous and kindly philosophical pills so eagerly, if one suggested that his day had passed. No, the star of Billy Sunday may rise and wane, but the minister of Old Chester is a fixed planet in our sky. This is Mrs. Deland's fourteenth published volume; and, as one soon discovers from the text as well as from the illustrations of hoop-skirted ladies, almost everything related therein seems to have happened several generations ago-long enough to escape all contamination from the baffling, whirling age in which we live. If Mrs. Deland herself has heard of Freud, and Roosevelt, and the I. W.W., she doesn't allow the knowledge to "get through" to the calm of her village backwater, where character, gossip and matrimony are still as much the central interests of life as ever they were in old New England. While this pleasant and thoroughly capable writer continues to uphold the sweet, sane, and sentimental in fiction, American morals are safe, in spite of Robert W. Chambers. To her, as to Dr. Lavendar, the voice of God and the voice of commonsense are synonymous terms. * Why, Theodora! by Sarah Warden McConnell. Boston: Small, Maynard & Co. $1.25 net. "Why, Theodora!" is the best kind of light fiction. It is written with an evident delight in its own charming heroine. This young lady is shut out from life in a country town, with a father who has "used all his poetry to make a book of verse " and an aunt "whose wand of office is concession." Theodora consoles herself by communion with Jimmy, an imaginary being who reveals to her what she really thinks. The hero, Larry, is an impetuous painter with an ambition to "smash the sky and get the stars down." He manages to get arrested and is ready to plead guilty to theft, but Theodora sticks to him in spite even of himself, refusing a man who offers to "do everything for her and make no demands." The heroine "wants demands," and it is Larry's need of her that makes her insist on giving herself to him. The plot, however, gives little idea of the pleasure awaiting the reader. Theodora is not only a spontaneous girl, she is also a true and fine-spirited woman. Larry is adequately though not minutely drawn, and the others are cleverly sketched in. Tom is one of the men "who at all ages want to show you their jack-knives." The style is free, surprising and self-effacing. Violette of Père Lachaise, by Anna Strunsky Walling. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co. $1.00 net. This is the story of the development of a girl's soul. Violette, living with an old grandfather who keeps a poor little florist shop opposite the cemetery of Père Lachaise in Paris, grows up under the shadow of age and poverty and death. The great cemetery, "the Champs Élysées of the poor," is not only her playground, but the focus of her spiritual and mental expanding. Where the tourist sees only dreary acres of monuments and bead wreaths, Violette wakes to deep joy of life, to love, to an artistic career, and most of all to an inspired part in the social revolution. The book has hardly a thread of story. If it were not so spontaneous, Mrs. Walling would hardly escape the charge of fine writing. But she has contributed something delicate and sincere in this subjective analysis of the revolutionist of the future. VOLUME V REPUBLIC A Journal of Opinion Editorial Paragraphs.. 156 Leading Editorials Germany Stands Pat. Are We Pro-German?. The Ways of Industrial Anarchy. F Secretary Lansing's note to the Austro-Hungarian government on the sinking of the Ancona could be considered without reference to the previous notes to Germany or to previous expressions of American dissatisfaction with the behavior of the Central Powers, it would deserve warm and undivided approval from American public opinion. The barbarity of launching a torpedo at that vessel while its innocent and unfortunate passengers were still struggling to escape is almost more deserving of the abhorrence of all humane people than is the torpedoing of the Lusitania. Americans should be thankful that the government of the United States has the legal as well as the moral right to protest, and they should pay cheerfully any price which needs to be paid in order to make the protest good. It is time to have our sense of responsibility reinforced. War brings with it so much inevitable barbarity, and in many cases the facts are so difficult to establish, that the tendency of prolonged fighting is to make the public conscience callous and indifferent. Some such change has been taking place Number 59 in the American attitude towards the uglier aspects of the European war. It is much less sensitive to indubitable instances of the infliction of suffering and death on non-combatants than it was six months ago. It has been abominably callous and indifferent about this very Ancona tragedy, and would have connived at any attempt made by the administration to evade it. The President deserves all the more credit for the sharp and uncompromising manner in which he has expressed and emphasized this new American grievance against the Central Powers. UR doubts about President Wilson's handling of American relations with Germany and Austria do not concern the Ancona note itself. They concern rather the whole policy of which the Ancona note is apparently the culmination. We would like to know what Mr. Wilson really proposes to do to Germany. It looks as if he were adopting an unnecessarily indirect and devious method of indicating American discontent with German be havior. The enforced recall of the two attachés was intended to chastise not two minor officers who had only been obeying orders, but the government who issued those orders. The reproach and condemnation which the President in his message heaped upon disloyal and lawless German-Americans was apparently aimed chiefly at the officials across the water who instigated the disloyalty and the law-breaking. Finally the extremely peremptory tone of the Ancona note has almost certainly been addressed quite as much to Berlin as to Vienna, and is intended to accomplish more than a disavowal of the slaughter of the Ancona passengers. Doubtless these are shrewd tactics for a President when he wishes to warn a foreign power that his patience is exhausted, without at the same time committing any act which will necessarily involve a break with the offender. But are they not too shrewd? No doubt the German Foreign Office has been made fully to understand what Mr. Wilson means, but the great majority of his fellow countrymen have not. They have not the faintest idea how near their government is to a break with Germany. If the break comes and proves to be costly and dangerous, they will be wholly unprepared both for the sacrifices and the perils. The President in his anxiety to avoid embarrassing public agitation has refused to take public opinion into his confidence and has slowly infected a certain part of it with a kind of moral tepidity. If the occasion arises when in his opinion national self-respect requires a more vigorous resistance to German and Austrian invasion of the independence and security of the United States, he will find that the support in public opinion which such a policy needs has been gradually and seriously weakened. I F Yuan Shih-Kai had refused to play his part in the carefully prepared program which has been consummated by his acceptance of the imperial title, he would have "lost face" in the eyes of his countrymen. The better element in China regards him as the strong man who alone can save the country from Japanese aggression. Yet his action may precipitate the very catastrophe which they have endeavored to avoid. As Emperor of China he may be obliged to acquiesce in the terms of Group Five of the Japanese demands presented early in the year, which were eliminated in the settlement of questions outstanding between China and Japan. The policy of Yuan and his counsellors may have been determined by reasons which it is impossible for us at this distance accurately to gauge, but it would appear to have been wiser had he deferred his decision to some date at which he could have counted upon a more effective balancing of rival interests at Peking. Unless Japan is subjected to unlooked-for pressure from London, Paris and Petrograd, she is not likely to accept without protest this open defiance of her recent polite but nevertheless ominous suggestion that it would be unwise for China at this time to change her form of government. Japan has expressed her determination to preserve peace in the Orient. This peace may be threatened by revolutions in China which Japan in conformity with her declaration will feel called upon to suppress. Should Japan intervene in China at this time her troops will be permanently established, and Yuan may discover that in endeavoring to save his face he has lost the power which as president he possessed. broker, buying or building a certain aggregate tonnage of ships and leasing them in large part to private parties. What can the administration hope to achieve by such a program? Certainly not a very substantial increase in the American merchant marine. American shipyards are already working to capacity, and orders placed by the government can only displace vessels that would otherwise be built for private parties. Neither does the program offer a solution to the problem of building up a class of American seamen. The private lessees of publicly owned vessels will be as helpless in the face of competition with oriental seamen as private owners have been in the past. Even if the administration decides that the government should itself operate some of these vessels, the President's ingenuous announcement that as soon as the business becomes profitable the government will withdraw, will itself jeopardize the whole program. The government cannot secure a personnel of expert shipping men to conduct a temporary enterprise. Shippers will not dare incur the enmity of powerful established lines by patronizing a government line if it is soon to be discontinued. Nor can South American governments be expected to coöperate in a project to which the United States is not permanently committed. PRE REVIOUS ship purchase bills have lacked at least one good point which the new bill as foreshadowed in press dispatches will introduce. A shipping board is created with regulatory power over all foreign shipping. This marks a distinct progress away from the earlier notion of regulation by government competition, in the direction of a more effective mode of administrative control. But here too the program has serious faults. The board is to be at least in part political, including in its membership two and perhaps three Cabinet officials. If the Interstate Commerce Commission has succeeded in winning the respect of the railroads and the public, it has been because its membership has been so largely free from political influence. If the fortunes of a part of the shipping board are to be bound up in the success or failure of a particular administration, the whole board will be under suspicion. Again, the same board which is to regulate private shipping is to own and perhaps to operate the government fleet. Aside from the obvious injustice of subjecting shipowners to regulation at the hands of their immediate competitors, the result must be to divide the allegiance of the shipping board between promoting the government's venture as a shipowner and protecting the shipping public. A separate non-political commission should be given supervision over government-owned ships no less than over private lines. DVOCATES of stringent regulation of the distribution of patronage among hungry but de A railways have beste being public who has a the paragraph in the President's message in which he suggests the appointment of a commission to investigate the present legal and economic standing of the American railway system. If any harm should overtake the principle and method of railroad regulation as the result of the commission's work, it would be because the friends of administrative control of the railroads failed to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by the investigation. Perhaps the inquiry is being instigated by people who are seeking relaxation of government supervision, but it need not be allowed to result in any such relaxation. It may, on the contrary, be made to result in a more effective method of national control. The present machinery is as unsatisfactory from the point of view of those who are seeking to make the railroads the agents of the public economic welfare, as from the point of view of those who propose to make the railroads more profitable to their stockholders. The Interstate Commerce Commission is overworked and needs badly a somewhat different organization. It certainly requires personal representation on the boards of directors of the interstate railway systems. The railroads themselves are in favor of federal supervision of the issue of railway securities, provided such supervision can be substituted for the vexatious and wasteful supervision which they are now getting from state commissions. In these and many other respects the whole question as to the proper limits and methods of railway regulation demands reconsideration by an independent public authority. It would remain for the advocates of more regulation, of less regulation, of different regulation, or of national ownership to urge their cases before the commission and secure what support they could for their favorite solution of the existing difficulties. In any event one negative result of the inquiry may be confident. ly predicted. Public opinion would not stand for any backward step in the work of converting the railroads into national utilities. I Na recent reference to the dismissal of Edward McCall as chairman of the New York Public Service Commission of the second district, THE NEW REPUBLIC did Governor Whitman a manifest injustice. It attributed to him an intention to substitute for a dismissed Commissioner a man who would be appointed chiefly because he was willing to use the office for partisan Republican purposes. The imputation was based on the Governor's previous substitution of a partisan Republican for a very competent and experienced Commissioner, Mr. Maltbie. It has proved to be unfair. Some politics may enter into Oscar Straus's appointment as chairman, but its object certainly cannot be the earned the confidence even of his opponents in politics. His influence on the Commission will increase public confidence in its disinterestedness. In order to complete work so well begun, what Governor Whitman now has to do is to fill any other vacancies which may come about during his term of office with men whose technical qualifications as public utility engineers are as unexceptional as those of Mr. Straus as an experienced administrator. CH an expert HICAGO has once more consulted on the problem of washing its dirty face. It now knows to the last ton how much grime is daily deposited on its virile countenance. It can tell to an ounce the average inhabitant's ration of smoke and the proportions of protein and carbohydrate in its atmosphere. But the whole inquiry is fundamentally disloyal and insincere. Everybody knows that in its secret heart Chicago has not the slightest desire to change its appearance. It is not merely inured to dirt. It would feel naked and indecent without. it. It is all very well for effeminate travelers to return with emulous tales of New York's smartness. But Chicago knows better. It has taken years for it to generate a particular tone and flavor. Such things are not lightly parted with. As it is now, the entire Middle West revels in the effluvia of Chicago. It scents it joyously from afar, and young visitors still dream with rapture of walking on the face of the Chicago river. To give this up for insipid cleanliness would be like giving up Pink Marsh for Little Lord Fauntleroy. A MUNICH professor of archaeology named von Bissing is reported to have said that one of the principal preoccupations of the German government in Belgium is to make sure that the Americans do not use for the benefit of their trade the influence that they have secured over the Belgians through the latter's stomachs. Two things about this dispatch are interesting. The first is that the professor is the son of Baron von Bissing, who is Governor-General of Belgium; the second, that he speaks frankly of a German policy apparently intended to discredit or to weaken the work of the Commission for Relief in Belgium. It is a tribute to the effectiveness of the work of the Commission that the Germans should fear its influence over both Belgian minds and Belgian stomachs, but the tribute is a poor asset from the American point of view. Germany has never understood our philanthropy. She suspects us even when we bear gifts. But what can she do? Either the relief work must stop, or it must be left where it is at present, in American hands. If the Germans choose to stop it they must take the consequences; and those consequences, as |