Randall, Ann Arbor, Michigan
MARION LE ROY BURTON, THE NEW PRESIDENT
OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

this academic mind, freed from its aloofness, to the problems of the present and future of America, to harness it to the task of developing in America the spirit of unity, of welding divergent elements into a whole, of directing thought to the opportunities of American life, of interpreting America and the spirit and interests of its people. He has evidently no fear that the university by this task will lose its love for learning, but, on the contrary,

believes that it will find its love of learning stimulated by the application of its resources to the problems of the common life and by permeating the State with knowledge. The experience of students and instructors alike in the war, he pointed out, had developed a sense of the value of learning as something to be sought by the student and as a possession of the scholar which was valued by the world.

President Burton brings to his new post experience as President of Smith College and as President of the University of Minnesota. Before he had finished his preparation for Carleton College, while yet a boy, he had business experience, which has stood him in good stead as an administrator; and his experience as a minister in a Brooklyn parish and as a teacher in the Yale Divinity School has given him a philosophical grasp of educational problems. The position to which he has come is one in which a man can render a very distinctive service for American education; and Dr. Burton comes to it with special equipment.

UNCLE SAM'S FAMILY

VERY ten years Uncle Sam takes a

Event of his family. The final fig

ures for the 1920 Census have recently

been announced. It shows that Uncle Sam now has more than one hundred and five million nephews and nieces within the borders of the continental United States. His family has grown

nearly fourteen million since 1910.

There are probably some twelve million people living under the American flag outside the continental United States.

The percentage of increase for the last decade fell six and one-tenth per cent below that of the preceding decade. The director of the Census Bureau attributes this reduction to the almost complete stoppage of immigration during the war, an increase of emigration during the same period, deaths from influenza, and war casualties.

The most significant item in the Census Report shows that the trend of population from the country to the city has been greatly accentuated since 1910. For the first time in the country's history more than half its population is living in urban territory. Urban territory is defined as consisting of incorporated communities of more than twenty-five hundred inhabitants.

The Census statement also shows that the annual excess of births over deaths throughout the United States is approximately one per cent. It is roughly estimated that the increase due to excess of births over deaths in the families of foreign-born is approximately ten per cent.

BANKERS' ADVICE

UND

NDER the presidency of Richard Hawes, of St. Louis, ex-President of the Chamber of Commerce of that city, the American Bankers' Association has just held its annual session. Some of its resolutions should interest every reader.

First of all, it approves the operations of the Federal Reserve system; but disapproves suggestions to utilize the Reserve banks' resources to hold up or force down prices against the law of supply and demand.

It notes that, despite price inflation and unusual demands upon the banks for credit, money, as a commodity, has increased proportionately but little in

its cost to the consumer.

It emphasizes the fact that only by practicing thrift is our future assured. It calls attention [to the necessity of relieving the housing situation, asks for the immediate repeal of the excess profits tax and the revision of the surtax system, and condemns as a fallacy the so-called nationalization of industry.

It also emphasizes the necessity of an intelligently devised budget system

for the businesslike administration of Government finances.

EYWOOD BROUN, dramatic critic of the New York "Tribune," says that Galsworthy's new play, "The Skin Game," is an allegory of the Great War. He confesses that he did not arrive at this conclusion by his own observation, but that some kind person in England gave him the key.

We suspect that without reading Mr. Broun's criticism we would have failed to discover the hidden meaning, but we doubt very much whether we would have enjoyed the play any the less on that account. It is an extraor dinary drama which Mr. Galsworthy has evolved from the ancient conflict between the "haves" and the "hope to-haves" and between those whose posi tion is assured and those whose chief guaranty of success is their own assur ance. It is social warfare between static and dynamic, the immovable mass and the irresistible force.

Galsworthy pictures an English county family, a family which has occupied the home in which its descendants now dwell from the age of Queen Eliz beth. He brings into their lives a dy namic personality in the shape of a grasping, overreaching maker of pottery

whose will-to-succeed knows the restraint of neither honor nor convention. The potter buys a neighboring farm, guar anteeing with his word to protect the old tenants in their leases. He finds that he needs their cottages for his workmen and promptly ousts the ter ants. The county family and the ambi tious potter lock horns on the issue. Facing the unscrupulous opposition of the newcomer, the old family stoops at

JOSEPHINE VICTOR IN "THE SKIN GAME"

length to cruel blackmail. The potter's family is broken up, his daughter-in-law (whose past has afforded the county family with the weapon for their attack) attempts suicide. The ousted tenants are forgotten by both sides to the controversy. The curtain descends with the head of the old county family saying in bitterness: "What is gentility if it cannot stand fire?"

In characterization and acting the play is one of the very notable productions of this season.

In

THE FOOTBALL SEASON IN THE EAST AND MIDDLE WEST HE football season is half over. the East it leaves Harvard, Princeton, West Point, Brown, Georgetown, Boston College (which again defeated Yale), the Virginia Military Institute, Pennsylvania State College, and Cornell untied and undefeated. Not a single eleven in the East has come to mid-season unscored upon. The University of Pennsylvania and Harvard both came through without being scored upon for four games. In its fifth game Pennsylvania suffered a 27-7 defeat at the hands of the Virginia Military Institute, and Harvard's goal line was twice crossed for touchdowns by Centre College, of Danville, Kentucky.

The Harvard-Centre game has so far been the most dramatic contest to be held in the East this season. Centre College, with less than three hundred students, about sixteen hundred graduates, and a single coach who has had at times to vary the routine of coaching by cutting the grass on the football field and repairing the uniforms of his team, was pitted against the highly organized Harvard coaching system and the unlimited resources of that great University. Outweighed and handicapped by playing in strange territory before a crowd of more than forty thousand, Centre nevertheless put up a game and sportsmanlike, fight which will long be remembered at Cambridge. Centre was at one time in the lead. The score of the first half ended 14-14. Only in the second half did Harvard succeed in assuring itself of the victory by a score of 31-14, but even then Centre, led by the brilliant Captain McMillin at quarter, forced the fight until the final whistle. We do not recall so equal and stirring a contest between such unequal forces in recent years.

In the Middle West three teams of the conference are tied for the lead, Illinois, Ohio State, and Chicago each having won two games from conference

(C) Keystone View Co.

A GREAT ELECTION

T

HIS article will, appear in The Outlook of November 3, the day after the election. It will be on the press a few days before the election. I am not a prophet, and have no better means for guessing who will be elected than any of the readers of these lines.

But, whoever is elected, I unhesitatingly call it "a great election."

Some of my friends, some of our readers, are depressed by it. I am exhilarated. It seems to me to bear a splendid witness to the poise, the sanity, the self-restraint of the American people.

I regard it as an issue between a pacific league of law and a military league of arms. I have just read the league of arms. I have just read the words of Stéphane Lauzanne, the editor-in-chief of "Le Matin," of Paris, in the October "North American Review:" "Although the written compact which was promised to us at Versailles had for its end to guarantee France against the horrors she had suffered, we will renounce it gladly. The covenant of the American conscience will suffice us." I have great faith in the pacific power of an American conscience inspiring an international conscience. I have small faith in the pacific power of a military alliance which America joins and to which she with reservations pledges her armies.

But it is very evident that not a few Americans as intelligent, as catholic, as international in their sympathies as any advocates of Mr. Harding's election hold a different opinion. They have great faith in a military alliance; have great faith in a military alliance; they have little faith in the value of an

international court and an international

conference unless there is an international army to maintain its authority. The fact that, as our columns have shown, the college presidents of the country are divided on this issue in about the ratio of six for a military alliance to eight for an alliance of law maintained by public opinion, and that an appreciable number were two weeks ago still uncertain, sufficiently indicates how perplexing this problem has proved to the American people.

But they have not been indifferent. They have thronged to the public meetings. They have bought and read the newspapers. And the newspapers have been devoted to politics; and politics has been largely devoted to the League. The platform discussions have not always been parliamentary. They have been occasionally vulgarly vituperative; they have often been lacking in courtesy. The press has always been enterprising; but it has often misinterpreted and occasionally misrepresented an opponent. But there have been no rows; the fighting has all been with the tongue, not with the fist. It has all been on the platforms, none of it in the audience. The people have kept a level head. Orators have appealed to the passions. "Will you dishonor your country for sordid self-interest?" this on the one hand. Will you send your boys across the sea to die for struggles you know nothing about?" this on the other. But the passions have not responded-the people have been thinking, thinking, thinking. The election will be decided by the thoughts, not by the emotions, of the people.

largest part of their time, but the best part of their thought, to a problem which is both National and international, and the world looking on to see what their decision is to be.

The effect of such an election on human character it is impossible to overestimate. It has enlarged our knowledge. The plain man who has never traveled beyond the boundaries of his own country, perhaps never beyond the boundaries of his own State, may know more to-day of European geography than some tourists who have spent a summer abroad. It has broadened our sympathies. Never again shall we think that a great European war does not concern us. It has enlarged our horizon. We are both more National and more international, more American and more cosmopolitan, because of this election. We have a new pride in our home land and a new ambition for her. We read with a thrill Stéphane Lauzanne's declaration that "America is the justest nation in the world;" we believe that he speaks for France; and we wish to make his words good. Doubtless we shall go back again when the election is over into something of our old provincialism, but never so far back as when Charles Dickens wrote his "American Notes" and his "Martin Chuzzlewit."

Yes! whoever is elected, this has been a great election. LYMAN ABBOTT.

THE HAITIAN REPORT

T

HROUGH the courtesy of the Navy Department, The Outlook has now received the full report on the Haitian situation, which was discussed briefly in last week's issue.

This report, as a whole, conveys a different impression from that given by the excerpts from it which were published in the daily press. It confirms our conjecture that the headlines which the daily papers published over the excerpts from this report were sensational and misleading.

Briefly, the report is an official history of the American occupation of the Haitian Republic as recorded largely in official despatches. It is a record which contains much of heroism and much of which America may be proud. It indicates that the Marines in Haiti have in the majority of instances conducted themselves with marked credit. In the main their failures have been failures of judgment, not of purpose. Instances of individual depravity, lawlessness, and tyranny (and there undoubtedly have been serious cases of this kind) now await the judgment of

the somewhat tardily appointed Board of Inquiry, headed by Admiral Mayo. We have confidence that this Board will not whitewash the offenders.

The report, however, indicates a problem very much beyond the scope of a military inquiry. It is a problem of policy and of administration which goes over the heads of the Marine and Naval officers in Haiti to the Government at Washington itself. If the Marine and Naval authorities in Haiti have pursued a mistaken policy in their efforts to pacify the black republic, the final responsibility is not theirs, but belongs to the civil authorities of our Government.

This larger problem may prove to be one which cannot reach final settlement or even satisfactory exposition until the incoming of a new Administration. The problem is important enough in its relation to American tradition and the establishment of mutual trust and good will throughout our hemisphere to warrant investigation by a commission of the first rank. Men of experience in dealing with problems relating to outlying island territories ought to be selected for such a commission. America has developed in the past twenty years a group of such men, among whom might be named William H. Taft, Cameron Forbes, Dean C. Worcester, Regis H. Post, Franklin K. Lane, Luke E. Wright, Lindley M. Garrison, and Major-General Leonard Wood.

In a later issue we shall have more to say concerning the history of the American occupation of Haiti and Santo Domingo and the problems which such a commission would face.

DON'T BE A POTTERITE

W

HAT is Potterism? The word is new but the thing is old. Thackeray, caustically in "The Newcomes," good-naturedly in his "Roundabout Papers," held up to view the Potterites of his day in contempt and in tolerant amusement. Samuel Butler, he of the "Note Books" and "Erewhon," might well have been a high priest of the Anti-Potterites, for he loathed smugness, humbug, and cheap sentimentalism-and of such is the essence of Potterism.

In a dryly satirical novel called "Potterism" (Boni & Liveright, New York)-and, by the way, it is a novel York)-and, by the way, it is a novel and not a disquisition in disguise-Miss Rose Macaulay pictures the perfect Potterite in all his self-complacency. his devotion to Mrs. Grundy, and his adoration of the God of Things as they

Are. There are infinite varieties of the tribe of Potterites, but they all adhere to the commonplace, distrust anything that endangers old traditions, abhor progressiveness, love to glide through life smoothly, avoid thinkers and think ing. You can't fight a Potterite, he is too placid; you can't sting him with ridicule, he is impervious. No Potterite has a sense of humor.

In the novel the leading exponents of this anti-social, anti-spiritual deadness are Mr. and Mrs. Potter, the first the head of a group of popular periodi cals, the second the author of common. place, aimless novels. By a league of people formed to fight the idea of Pot terism the two are taken to typify its spirit. Oddly enough, twin Potter ch dren, Jane and Johnny, are ard Anti-Potterites. "Our family" th say, "is responsible for more than share of the beastly thing; the least can do is to down it." And one of cleverest touches in the book is the fact that in the end both Johnny and Jane, despite their early fierceness, do de velop certain distinctly Potterish traits.

0

With others, the Potter twins go o a tour of investigation of the causes and cure of Potterism, and collect illustrative cases. Thus a landlady dis approves of a clergyman who fishes on Sunday. This might have been "merely respectable bigotry," but, as they knew she had no conscientious scruples about anything, it was actually "propriety and cant, in brief, Potterism." On the other hand, Gideon, a Russian Jew whose father called himself Sidney instead of Gideon (a purely Potterish thing to do), declared that Potterism did not exist in I Russia-" The Russians were without shame and without cant, saw things as they were, and proceeded to make them worse. That was barbarity, imbecility, and devilishness, but it was not Potter ism." As for religion-" The Potterites have taken Christianity and watered it down to suit themselves, till they've produced a form of Potterism which they call by its name; but they wouldn't know the real thing if they saw it;... the Pharisees were Potterites." On the intellectual side Potterism is "incoherent, muddled emotion that passes for thought."

But if the reader wants to know the limits of Potterism in all its smug, passive resistance against advances in taste or thought or human effort, he will do well to read Miss Macaulay's excellent story entire. It is a notable piece of work, clear cut and crisp in manner, sharp in character depiction, and not without dramatic situations. Read, reflect, and don't be a Potterite.

a

血

'o by Goodyear News Service

KRON, Ohio, is the center of the rubber industry in the United States. There is no reason for it cept that old Dr. Goodrich, who homed the secret of vulcanizing raw ober, happened to live in Akron. t in time of full production close one hundred thousand employees w produce tires and tubes and all ms of rubber utilities in factories Tiny, great and small, some of which marvels of light and air and comt and economical machine organizan. The three great names are the restone, the Goodrich, and the Goodpar. The Miller and the Mohawk repsent a smaller group which by themves in a lesser environment would be ckoned vast enterprises, but which in kron are content to keep step more or s firmly with the great trio, the value whose annual production in each case us towards one hundred millions of llars, and whose workers range in imber from seventeen thousand to yenty-eight thousand in each plant. Akron has grown so rapidly in the st few years that, although it lies in the heart of the Middle West, it bears me earmarks of a hurriedly set up ining camp-the excess of men, the reponderance of young men, the surgg crowds in the streets, the plants in peration when times are good in three hifts of eight hours each, except on unday. This great rubber town is just ow subject to its first economic jar. he Federal Reserve banks seem to ave decreed a deflation of credit in the utomobile industry. At least automopile dealers all over the United States ind it suddenly impossible to obtain he usual loans in advance of sales.

Orders have therefore fallen off to an unheard-of degree, and the great motor unheard-of degree, and the great motor town of Detroit and the great rubber town of Akron are feeling the first pinch that may precede a world-wide return to a more stable equilibrium of wages and prices and standards of living. Thirty-five thousand workers have been laid off, and great numbers of them have left Akron in the last three months. It is far from being altogether an evil. In Akron, for example, it is said to be sifting out of the great rubber organizations a very considerable percentage of undesirable and inefficient floaters among the workers, and is turning the mind of the management toward further improvement of process and lessening of the cost of production instead of toward demand and sales and feverish extension of manufacture. Nearly all great producers in America have been on a joy-ride during the last few years, and the day of sobriety and reckoning is on the way.

In an industry in which, on the whole, the management has shown such capacity to read the signs of the times in the matter of a modern sympathetic and human treatment of the workers, it is astonishing to find the vast extent of the labor turnover in Akron. The demand for rubber products in the last few years has so grown by leaps and bounds, and the need for workers at any cost has been so great, that management has gone out into the byways and hedges, into the mountain States of the South, in every direction where the normally intelligent common laborer might be secured. The very high wages have attracted large numbers of young men from the farms of Pennsylvania

and the Middle West, from the far South, from Alabama, from Mississippi as well as from Tennessee and West Virginia. Great numbers of these young men men were unused to inside factory monotony, unacquainted with factory precision and methods, restive under the give and take of association with factory comrades, heartsick for friends and relatives, and when a reasonable money surplus was quickly accumulated, many have gone back home periodically to see the folks and expend the excess profits.

One of the chief factory managers told me his experience in hiring new workers at the peak of need. He said: "Out of seven men, we will say, I would lose two in the first forty-eight hours. These men were thin-skinned, strangers, who couldn't stand the goodnatured kidding of their fellow-workers about the color of their hair or the cut of their clothes. They hadn't the stamina to stick. We give every new man special instruction for six days. At the end of that time his teacher has to back more or less away from him in order to pay some attention to somebody else who has come in meantime. And at this point two more men of the seven would go, thin-skinned ducks who hadn't followed the instruction or grasped the operation, and felt lost when the teacher let up on his attention a bit; a letter comes from home, or the room and board aren't just what they should be, whereupon these drop out. Then we have three left of the seven, and if we can hold two of these ofer a period of seven months and carry the third on indefinitely we think we are doing well." Of course this was at