marshalling of their forces against the party in power. Not in the least deterred by this non-partisan conviction, the Union set itself out to organize national activity, and in 1915 over 150 delegates came to its convention. Of these delegates a fair proportion belong also to the National, and one of the principal objects of these members at the National convention was to deflect the National's party policy. The resignation of Dr. Anna Howard Shaw from the presidency of the National was regarded by some as favoring this possibility. But Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, the new president, revealed no desire whatever to assimilate the National's policy to the Union's. A joint conference between the leaders of these groups produced no result whatever, save a perfunctory asseveration that the capitol committees might consult over their lobbying. Whether Miss Paul and her associates will succeed in building up a duplicate suffrage organization to work in the states for federal amendment by compulsion is an open question. This, however, is to be said: the Union's activity marks the evolution of suffrage from propagandism into national politics. And the mere fact that the National Association has put its Shafroth amendment on the shelf proves that lively and bitter criticism has its positive effects. Whatever the prospects of the Union policy, the prospects of the National policy seem healthy. The suffragists will miss the gallant personality of Dr. Shaw, now retiring after twelve years; but its new Board is of the sort to slave with endless endurance amid the rocks and weeds and wastes of the public as well as the political mind. As an organization of will as distinct from an organization of thought the National bids fair to remain persistent. With Mrs. Catt coming from the New York campaign, Mrs. Roessing and Mrs. Patterson taking office after their labors in Pennsylvania, Miss Ogden after her experience in New Jersey, the body promises to have vigor and inspiration and skill. With the development of different and divergent methods of advancing the suffrage cause, methods which the leaders at Washington did not reconcile, the movement is now in the throes of actual political experience. The value of this experience will be incalculable. Whether you believe the National Association intolerant, outworn, over-reasonable, or the Congressional Union intransigent, premature, unreasonable, you must recognize in their conflict the very proofs of heightened political consciousness in women. And that, whatever your own choice as to method, whatever your urgent conviction that a choice should be made, is now the salient feature of the movement nationally organized. FRANCIS HACKETT. H Stephen Phillips E was one of that doomed generation that had in its number Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson, Aubrey Beardsley. Stephen Phillips lived to more mature years, but the time between Johnson's death and his own must have brought him bitterer defeats than even those who died so unvictoriously could have known. Lionel Johnson died in 1902. It was then that Stephen Phillips was having every sort of literary success. Scholarly critics were naming him with Dante and Sophocles. The public were buying editions of his plays and poems and filling the theatres where his dramas were being produced. He had St. James's and His Majesty's for his playhouses. People who considered poetry spoke of him as an artist strong enough to be popular, great enough to give to action beauty and distinction. Then came an article in the Quarterly Review which cleared away the values on which his reputation was reared. The breaths which had been blowing so warmly upon him began to blow coldly. A year after there was no young literary aspirant poor enough to do him honor. The breakup of his vogue was hastened by the tenure of London reviewing, which is taken up by young men who pass on to something else in about five years. A new batch of reviewers had arrived, and the parole amongst them was that Stephen Phillips was of no account poetically. Older men, eminent critics on important journals, remained to praise him. But what they said of him now was discredited by the extravagances of the things they had said before. William Archer's compliments on "Paolo and Francesca" and "Herod ""Sardou could not have ordered the action better, Tennyson could not have clothed the passion with words of purer loveliness "; "the elder Dumas speaking with the voice of Milton "- were remembered by the younger men, and they smiled. Other writers then began to have the cry-Yeats, Synge, Masefield. What Phillips wrote now received slight notice and was hardly an asset to publisher or theatre-manager. His will was broken, it seemed, and he was making himself less creative and more disreputable. Then came financial bankruptcy that seemed the correspondence of spiritual bankruptcy. Yet those who looked to him with sympathy noted that his many troubles did not bring cry or plea or lamentation from Stephen Phillips. They began to see too that he was making an effort towards reconstruction. He took up the editorship of a poetry magazine and regularly wrote good critical articles. He was beginning to be something of a force again. That the reconstruction was a real one can be seen in the volume he published in 1913, "Lyrics and Dramas." 66 This volume contains some poems that are not derivative but have that " personal energy" which, as Arthur Symons showed in the Quarterly article, was wanting in the extravagantly praised "Christ in Hades" and Marpessa," in "Paolo and Francesca" and "Herod." I find in this volume a unity of tragic mood, the mood of a man who confronts defeat with little hope and for whom the world's familiar things the lights in the sky, the early song of birds, the beat of the sea-have become the haunting things. Defeat and loss are acknowledged, but life is not made to appear cheap and mean. There is nobility in these poems. For their maker, looking sadly on the world, sees it filled, not with deceptive and passing but with grave and permanent things. Because I know that many writing of Stephen Phillips will quote his better known, less personal verse, I take it upon myself to give in full a poem from "Dramas and Lyrics "the poignant and individual "Dawn and Loss": I lack thee in the noontide light, I want thee in the deep of night, Then seem I most of all forlorn Then is the hollow world remade. God! but the image will not fade! That ghostly chorus from the leaves Reminds and yet again bereaves. The widowing beam upon me falls For in that dimness we had speech, Simple and prudent each to each; Slow on my shoulder fell thy head; I held thee close as skies grew red. O, dear wert thou in silent dew, Thrice dear in deepening of the blue; But now I see from this dark room Only the glimmer of a tomb. Because they mistook a familiar design for a new manifestation of beauty the critics, big and little, wrote wrongly about his narrative poems and his poetic plays. Tennyson had trained a generation to believe that the production of certain cadences and certain images meant a poetic creation. Stephen Phillips produced the expected cadences and images almost perfectly. For that he was hailed as the successor not only of Tennyson but of all the ac cepted poets. He wrote plays which had the spectacle that delights the crowd and he was able to give to the personages of that spectacle lines which had all the associations of poetry. He had acted with the Bensons; he knew what was effective on the stage, and he understood how to make verse that an actor could speak. All this was journeyman's knowledge, and it was the grievous error of the critics that it appeared to them as the insight of the creator. His prime failure his failure to create character-was not publicly perceived. In none of his plays is it anything within the people themselves that brings them into the tragic entanglement. Who makes the action in "Paolo and Francesca"? Not Francesca, not Paolo, not Giovanni. Everything seems to be brought on by the unconvincing words of a blind old woman who is said to have second sight. None of the personages in his plays ever say anything that is finally and absolutely their own. Contrast the words that Deirdre and Naisi speak in Synge's tragedy "Deirdre of the Sorrows," with what Paolo and Francesca say to each other when they are drawn tragically together: PAOLO Thou wast the lovely quest of Arthur's knights. FRANCESCA Thy armour glimmered in a gloom of green. PAOLO Did I not sing to thee in Babylon? FRANCESCA Or did we set a sail in Carthage Bay? PAOLO Were thine eyes strange? All ghostly grew the sun, unreal the air Paolo and Francesca might have learnt such sentences off a drawing-room calendar. They who wronged Stephen Phillips were the men who praised his least personal work in such extravagant terms as made it inevitable that he should be flung down by men who regarded poetry as distinctive creation. His verse-plays should have been received as equivalents to new stage-decorations, and he should have been given the proper meed of praise for them. He honored beauty as he saw it and poetry as he read it, and he wrote some poems that really come out of an individual experience: Beautiful lie the dead; Clear comes each feature; Satisfied not to be, Strangely contented. Like ships, the anchor dropped, These verses from his volume of 1913 should stand for our present thought of him. PADRAIC COLUM. G Uneasy America ROWING discomfort has been manifest in taken different forms, but the net effect of it has been to center a great amount of criticism on the President. If all the complaints were drawn up in a list we should find that pacifists, militarists, radicals, conservatives, friends of the Allies, German-Americans, "aggressive Americans," nationalists and internationalists were all in varying ways disgruntled. They disagree violently among themselves, to be sure, but they are curiously agreed in not liking the part played by America in the war. The sense that we have been found wanting has impressed itself among an increasing number of people. More feel it, I imagine, than are ready to confess it. Many feel it who resent bitterly the self-abasement of those who go to Europe to proclaim the sordid cowardice of Americans at home. Many feel it who detest the snobbery of those Americans who entertain foreign visitors by telling them what a miserable people we are. Yet stripped of its flunkeyism, its colonialism, its piety for the fatherland and its party politics, the feeling persists that we cannot think with any pride of the part we have played in the supreme event of our lives. We wonder a little whether we are like the Roman gentleman who seemed to remember vaguely that an agitator had been crucified in Judea. This inner dissatisfaction is perhaps the most important political fact of our time, and it may have extraordinary consequences. The spiritual uncertainty in America has its outward sign in a tendency to be forcible-feeble, weak and sharp, forbearing and curt, in a series of violent oscillations. We move in jolts and jerks, now rattling the sabre, now turning the other cheek. And because we are unsteady and distracted, we are liable to panic at one moment and insensibility the next. We are roused by Belgium and forget it, we are roused by the Lusitania and forget it, are roused and forget again, a little like a man reeling down an alley, hitting one wall and then the other. An explanation of it is to be had, I think, which is at least plausible. We have lived for seventeen months the spectators of events that have no parallel in our lives. At first we were stirred as never before, and in the onset of war there was an unprecedented amount of feeling that reached out beyond our daily work. But this feeling has spent itself on nothing. We have had nothing to exercise our emotions upon, and we are choked by feelings unexpressed and movements arrested in mid-air. Nothing is so bad for the soul as feeling that it is dispensed on nothing. We recognize this well enough in the esthete who takes in impressions and gives forth estheticism, in the schoolgirl who weeps over impossible romances, in the old gentleman afflicted with chronic moral indignation. To feel and feel and feel and never to use that feeling is to grow distracted and worrisome, and to no end. We Americans have been witnessing supreme drama, clenching our fists, talking, yet unable to fasten any reaction to realities. Ferment without issue, gestation without birth, is making us sullen and self-conscious and ashamed. This brooding impotence drains off and wastes the emotion which is needed for thought. Nothing is left to save us from the relaxation in which we retreat to our oldest habits. A great purpose is said to "lift men above themselves," which means that the rush of it sweeps tribal loyalty and suspicion and petty preoccupation before it like a great wind through a dusty attic. When the élan is lacking we settle back into our meanest habits, and cover our sense of futility by huddling into them deeper. The apologists tell us that the contradictory nature of the attack on the President's leadership is a sign that he has taken the middle course of reason. They are, I think, mistaken. The clashing dissatisfactions are the result of no leadership at all, a sign of the disintegration which follows from the withdrawal of a positive ideal. When an army mutinies, different groups go off on their own, but nobody calls it the result of "reasonable " generalship. When a political party breaks up into its group-interests the meaning is that the party has lost a strong central ideal. When a nation becomes petty and quarrelsome it is because no one has succeeded in holding its attention to a national purpose. The source of our trouble may be traced directly to the President's first message to the American people, when we were asked to be neutral in feeling. We were not told to feel about anything positive, we were merely told not to feel too deeply. That negative injunction was bound to fail, and the vacillation of America has ever since grown more serious. What President Wilson seems not to understand is that the enunciation of a great purpose which enlists emotion is the only way to avoid that clashing of emotions from which we suffer. When there are a number of conflicting views the reasonable course does not consist in being negative to them all, it consists in raising a view which gathers " them up-into which, as the Germans say, the varied feelings are aufgehoben." But from the outbreak of the war the President has never said anything to which the nation might rally. He has been pushed and goaded. He has never led. And if he is beset by agitations he has himself to thank. The man who will not lead is driven. Whether it was humanly possible for Mr. Wilson to give our neutrality a positive meaning, whether he could have laid out a program to which the nation would have responded we cannot know. It was an unexpected crisis and he was caught unprepared. Perhaps it is too much to expect anything more than he has done. Perhaps only a great genius among statesmen could have risen to the opportunity. But for lack of that genius America to-day is distraught. A COMMUNICATION To an End with Prussia SIR: I have received for some time past and read with great interest THE NEW REPUBLIC, and I think it is only right in view of the opinions expressed in it by subjects of belligerent governments, or with regard to the subjects of belligerent governments, to enter a certain protest. Mr. Hobson, for instance-who deserves our respect in this country, and fully has it as a most conscientious and able student of economics-has put a certain view before the readers of your paper with regard to the mind of the English upon the present war. A lady of the name of Doty has suggested something similar with regard to the mind of the French, the wounded of which nation she has observed in the hospitals. In common with other of your readers in this country I have regretted to see the point of view put before you by such writers, the subjects of belligerent countries or writing with regard to the subjects of belligerent countries; they give a quite false view of public opinion. By this phrase I do not mean that these writers fail to express their own conviction, but I do mean that they are utterly wrong in their guesses at the general mind of the public either in England or in France. I think I have, from my experience, my birth, my traditions and my acquaintance, some right to speak upon opinion in both countries. The opinion, the general or public opinion, of the English differs of course very widely from that of the French in this matter, for the two nations differ in religion (the root of all differences) and in experiBut what the public opinion of both countries has in common is these two points: ence. First, the determination to reduce the enemy to impotence; secondly, a conviction that short of this, no matter what their achievement, their action against Prussia will have failed. The expression "the determination to reduce the enemy to impotence" will sound to many academic people at once harsh and illusionary. Its harshness I will not debate. That depends upon one's judgment of Prussia. But the conception of reducing an enemy to impotence only seems illusionary to academic people because they are not academic enough. Anyone with a sound grasp of history knows that if you win a war the issues of which are fundamental, your enemy after that war can, and in history usually does, decline either for centuries or to extinction. He may remain as a political organism. But his particular power to do you that hurt which provoked you to arms you may WALTER LIPPMANN. very well eliminate for centuries or forever. If it be further contended that there are no wars of this fundamental character, that even this war has not this fundamental character, all history is there again to disprove such a thesis. Nearly all great wars have risen upon questions which the victor thought vital, and in nearly all of them the victor has achieved his end. To take a brief list of a few such issues at random: The question of national unity in your own country a lifetime ago; the quarrel between Rome and Carthage: the quarrel between the Protestants of north Germany and Holland and the Catholic empire: the quarrel between the Revolution and the old régime: the quarrel between mediaeval civilization and the Mohammedan invasion of the West-I might extend the list indefinitely. The victory of the North resulted in the maintenance of your national unity. Carthage disappeared and Rome supplanted her. The Protestants of north Germany and Holland under the protection of the French beat off the Catholic empire with results which have increasingly gone in their favor until quite recently in the history of Europein other words, with results that lived and even grew in power for three hundred years. The Revolution destroyed the old régime in Europe. Mediaeval civilization turned the Mohammedan out of the West and he will not return. Now the thing for the great neutrals, of whom the chief is the United States, to get clearly into their minds is that this present quarrel in Europe is of that type. If the Prussian tradition now controlling the fighting men of from 140 to 150 millions of human beings is allowed to survive, the old and rooted civilization of Europe is doomed. All of us in the older nations feel this instinctively in our blood, and many of us can give a reason for that instinct and are whole-heartedly supported by our fellow citizens when we formulate that reason in the terms of history and of Christian morals. It is open to a neutral to dispute our position. It is open to him to say that we cannot make it good in the field. But it is folly for any neutral to accept the view that we have some other less historical, vaguer or less certain position. What one of your correspondents says, that the French soldiers in the hospitals desire the war to come to an end without a complete victory, is simply false. You might just as well say that the United States were Catholic in religion or Greek in speech. What another of your correspondents says, that the mind of the English is turning in favor of an inconclusive peace, or that this term means nothing to them and that they are in favor anyhow of allowing Prussia to survive, is as false as if you were to say that the United States were a small mountain republic in the Balkans. Both statements are utterly divorced from reality. And I think it is the duty of one who has some experience of what real opinion is upon this side in the present stage of the war, to emphasize the gulf that separates such statements from the truth. Let me repeat that it is open to any neutral not only to doubt our moral right, but to doubt the possibility of our success. What would be fatal for the future understanding of Europe by instructed opinion in your country would be to doubt that we upon this side are occupied in a task not of mere wrestling, but of execution. If the matter were not very urgent and very practical I would not occupy your space with this letter. But it is most urgent and most practical. It is urgent because at S 1 any moment the breaking down of the enemy's far too widely extended front may bring American opinion rapidly face to face with the temper of the Allies as the only force they will have to reckon with in Europe. And it is practical because a misunderstanding on the part of educated opinion often runs through a whole nation. I should think it of little purpose to write such a letter as this to the press, that is read by millions, because that press publishes nothing but silly fairy tales about the war, or reproduces the opinion of men over here (professional politicians and others) whose ideas are ephemeral and carry no weight. But a misstatement of fact in an organ soberly read by the instructed few is a much more serious matter. It may go very deep indeed, and it is in order to correct such misstatements that I have written this letter. Shipley, Horsham, England. CORRESPONDENCE In Behalf of Albania IR: The plight of one race of innocent sufferers from the war has been almost overlooked-the brave Albanians. A few words ought to be said about them, because the fate of Albania will have a bearing on the future of Europe and on the question of future war or peace far out of proportion to the numbers of the Albanians. Several months before her entrance into the war Italy seized the Albanian port of Valona; while at nominal peace with all the world Greece occupied the port of Kortsche, while Montenegro and Serbia made several raids into northern Albania which had no plea of military necessity. The soldiers of all these races seized provisions and so interfered with agriculture that people are starving. Unfortunately, although there are forty thousand Albanians in this country, they are widely scattered and have no means of attracting attention to their unhappy homeland. Consequently America has not been aware of the Albanian situation, and only one relief-ship, a sailing-vessel, has been sent there. For a long while this was held up on its errand of mercy at a most critical time, by the refusal of the Italian government to allow it a passport through the illegal blockade which it is maintaining on the ports of Albania. Unless the American government induces the Italians to remove their illegal blockade, there does not seem any possibility of helping the Albanians while war is raging all around them. Now, however, is the time for getting the story of the Albanians before the public, in order that when the new map of Europe is made, Albania will have justice. The Albanians are the oldest people of the Balkans, and have been in possession of their mountains from time immemorial. They claim descent from the ancient Pelasgians and their language gives a clue to the names of Homer's gods and heroes. No other races have any valid claim to the territory occupied by the Albanians, and if any other race should try to enter into possession of their ancestral soil, the Albanians in their almost impregnable mountains would wage a costly guerilla warfare which could only be ended by their extinction. Although this is a very small part of the human race, the civilized world ought not to allow it to perish, because civilization is already indebted to it, and will be again when the splendid powers of the Albanians are allowed development. Under Scanderbeg, H. BELLOC. this warlike people saved Europe from the Turk, and it has produced King Pyrrhus of Epirus, Alexander the Great, Saint Jerome, Constantine, Pope Clement XI, and the Italian, Crispi. Apart from the question of justice is that of political expediency. Albania is in such a strategic position that it is coveted by all the neighboring races, but since none have any valid claim, if it were given to any one country or divided in any possible way, the result would be another war in the Balkans which might again embroil all Europe. For this reason the Friends of Albanian Independence has been formed, an organization which has two objects: to get as much publicity as possible for the cause of Albania, and to get as many people as possible to sign the pledgecards as a token of interest and sympathy in the Albanian cause. The pledge-cards contain the following statement: "Current history shows that there can be no permanent peace in Europe until the Balkans are tranquil. A free and independent Albania is necessary as a buffer state between rival powers, if there is to be peace in the Balkans. Therefore, I believe that when the new map of Europe is made after the war, the London Conference of 1913 should be respected and the territory of Albania confided to its lawful owners who have possessed it from time immemorial; and I hereby enroll myself among the Friends of Albanian Independence." The prominent endorsers of the Friends of Albanian Independence include Miss Jane Addams, Prof. Emily G. Balch, Mr. George W. Coleman, Mr. Edward W. Deming, Prof. Samuel T. Dutton, Mr. Hamilton Holt, Mrs. Haviland Lund, of the Forward-to-the-Land League, Miss Mary White Ovington, Prof. Herschel Parker, Prof. Edward A. Steiner, Prof. Radislav A. Tsanoff, Mr. Oswald Garrison Villard, Mr. George Fred Williams and Dr. Evangeline Young of the Boston School of Eugenics. The pledge cards can be obtained from 97 Compton Street, Boston, Mass., the headquarters of the Vatra or Pan-Albanian League of America. If anyone desires to give financial assistance to this movement, contributions should be sent to any of the organizers, Father Fan Noli of 97 Compton Street, Boston, Mass.; Christo A. Dako of 18 North Street, Southbridge, Mass., or the undersigned at Elbowoods, North Dakota. Elbowoods, North Dakota. JOSEPH F. GOULD. |