ing in all forms. Admiral Scales, Superintendent of the Naval Academy, has characterized hazing as "an organized effort in defiance of discipline and the laws of the land."

Defenders of hazing have claimed that it promotes discipline by teaching the younger classmen to subject themselves to authority. The tradition of hazing at Annapolis has been so firmly rooted that there are many who have accepted even this lame excuse as an adequate defense of this practice.

We wonder whether a little ridicule might not be as useful in stamping out hazing at Annapolis as rigorous military discipline. Hazers are guilty of a real violation of law and contempt for personal honor, but sometimes laughter is more effective than a portentous charge as a curative agent. We wonder what would be the effect of addressing the midshipmen somewhat as follows:

"Young men, you have come here for training which will enable you to qualify as officers of the United States Navy. The acceptance of that training presupposes a willingness on your part to act like men., You have shown that you have failed to understand that obligation.

!

"You are not even worthy of being punished by court martial, for we courtmartial only people who are mature enough to be responsible for their acts.

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By adhering to practices which have died, or are dying, out of every civilian university of importance in America, by insisting upon a code which even high school boys are outgrowing, you have shown clearly and distinctly that you want to be treated, not as men, but as children. From now on, every midshipman found guilty of hazing will be dressed in children's rompers, given a rattle to play with, and stood in a convenient corner for an appropriate length of time. You will be treated as men just as soon as you show yourselves capable of acting like men.'

endure such treatment?

THE FIRST YEAR

vision of the New York City Public Library has tried to satisfy popular interest in Bible pictures. These are to be found both in illus

tudes as do Frank Craven and his bride in "The First Year," but all of them must undergo a process of personal readjustment. Perhaps it is the wide familiarity with this process of human adjustment which keeps most of the spectators at this play delightedly nudging each other through its three acts of sustained humor and comedy.

"The First Year" is called a comic

and have been arranged and classified so that a request for illustrations of any given Bible scene or portrait could be answered, not only promptly, but to a considerable degree, fully. The result has been that a singularly useful collection of pictures (especially of the Saviour) has been formed. It is supplemented by classified card catalogue titles referring to plates in books or prints in portfolios which may be shelved apart

Bible collec

from this particular tion. The collection has now, through the generosity of John Powell Lenox, of Oak Park, Illinois, received several thousand pictures dealing entirely with the life of Christ, the result of a quarter of a century of collecting by Mr. Lenox These pictures are mounted in fifteen volumes, and should command the atten tion of art lovers and Bible students everywhere. They cover the development of the portraiture of Christ from early representations in the catacombs of Rome, through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, to modern times.

KNUT HAMSUN

LFRED BERNHARD NOBEL, a

Swede, and the inventor of dyna mite, left his great fortune in trust for the establishment of five annual prizes. Interest on the property has made each prize worth about forty thousand dol lars. Three of the prizes were founded for excellence in physics, chemistry, and medicine. Another was destined for the person or society that during the year preceding the award had rendered the greatest service in the furtherance of

international brotherhood. Another was to be given to the person who had produced the most remarkable work of an idealistic character in the world of letters.

Peculiar interest has always attached to the award of the literature prize. Among those who have won it have been the poets Sully-Prudhomme, Mis tral, Echegaray, Carducci, Maeter linck, Hauptmann, and Tagore; the novelists Björnson, Sienkiewicz, Kip ling, Heyse, and Selma Lagerlöf; the historian Mommsen and the philoso pher Eucken.

This year the prize goes to the Nor wegian novelist, Knut Hamsun. He has been called the most distinguished living writer of imaginative prose in any Scandinavian country; indeed, it has been prophesied by no less a critic than Georg Brandes that Hamsun's name will rank with Ibsen's and Strindberg's

Here in America we know little of Hamsun's work, although his novel "Sult" ("Hunger") was translated into English two decades ago, and his "Shallow Soil" appeared a dozen years later, while his "Growth of the Soil" was published some months since. There is no question, however, as to the high rank of these and Hamsun's other romances.

What may be more remarkable to American readers is the fact that Hamsun (the son of a tailor and poverty stricken) once came to this country to

earn his living, and tried to be a streetcar conductor in Chicago. It is understood that he was not a success in this capacity. Then he lectured on literature in Minneapolis. Then he went before the mast on a Newfoundland fishingboat. And then he wrote his first great novel, "Sult" (1888). From that moment his reputation was made, and he published book after book until there is inow a goodly array of them. They have been translated into many languages.

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ン

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HATEVER excuses may be made for the Greeks, the fact

remains that they have allowed their greatest statesman to be exiled, their Government to fall into the hands of very ordinary politicians, and their country's honor and interests to be the possession and plaything of people who have forfeited all right to confidence. Having profited enormously by the victory which others won over Germany, the Greeks turn their country over to the friends of the Germans. Having, by the aid of the Entente, escaped from the rule of the Turk, the Greeks give the keys of their Kingdom to men who backed the Turk's ally. And the Greeks gain nothing in dignity from the fact that they have allowed their nation to be upset because their King Alexander was killed by a monkey bite.

For centuries Greece was a province of Turkey. The former center and soul of European civilization was the camping ground of a horde of Asiatic parasites. Then came the deliverance of Greece. In 1830, with the aid of France, backed by England and Russia, Greece

won her independence.

At first a little feeble country, of a people of rather low repute, Greece grew mightily in power and esteem under the statesmanship of Eleutherios Venizelos. It was he who, more than any other man, wrote her Constitution. He reformed the administration of justice, reorganized finances and the army, procured the passage of laws improving agricultural and sanitary conditions, secured workmen's insurance, and prohibited child labor. As to his foreign policy, he succeeded in doing what no one had been able to do-he formed and maintained a Balkan league, consisting of Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Montenegro; it successfully withstood the Turk in the war of 1912 and took from him most of his territory in Europe. In 1913, to cheek the inordinate

Wide Word Photos

KNUT HAMSUN, OF NORWAY, AWARDED THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE

ambition of Bulgaria, Venizelos formed a new league consisting of Greece, Serbia, Montenegro, and Rumania, and this was no less efficient and trium. phant. In 1914, at the outbreak of the World War, he reminded his country of the treaty concluded with Serbia two years before, to stand by that country in case of attack. He was equally insistent on grasping the unique opportunity for Greece to settle her remaining quarrels with Turkey by allying herself with the Entente Powers, of whom

Serbia was herself now an ally. He knew beforehand that Turkey would ultimately become Germany's ally and that Bulgaria's neutrality was for sale to the highest bidder. But King Constantine blocked Venizelos at every turn, and compelled him to remain out of office for two years. Then Venizelos boldly established his own Government. The immediate result was the ejection of Constantine, and the ultimate result the doubling of Greece both in area and population. Venizelos had won for Greece Crete and half of Macedonia; he now won Thrace, the Smyrna region of Asia Minor, and the Ægean Islands. When Venizelos began his public career, Turkey was overlord of his native Crete. He has lived to reduce Turkey to a mere army of refugees ; he has even brought Greece within sight of her century-old ambitionagain to occupy Constantinople.

All this Venizelos accomplished with the aid of France and Great Britain. The fact that these achievements were in accord with the interests of these two. great free nations, and contrary to the interests of their enemies, does not lessen Greece's obligation to her helpers.

It was a part of Greece's good fortune that her progress was in line with the safety and welfare of free nations throughout the world.

And now, in spite of this history, the Greeks have turned out Venizelos, made it dangerous for him to live in his own country, and have made almost inevitable the recall of Constantine.

On November 8 the Greek voters elected members for the Chamber of Deputies in the Bulé, or Greek Parliament. They elected an overwhelming majority of Deputies opposed to Venizelos and supporting the ex-King. The majority was about two to one.

When this result was verified, Admiral Kounduriottis, the Regent, sent for George Rhallis, a former Premier, eighty years old, to whom he intrusted the formation of a new Ministry. A Rhallis Ministry, immediately formed, thereupon named Queen Olga, mother of ex-King Constantine, as Regent. She, in her tnrn, issued a proclamation to the Government and the courts to act in the name of Constantine.

Venizelos's defeat is in part a consequence of his services, and in part a consequence of his failure to keep in close contact with his people. He has brought territory and prestige to Greece; but in doing so he has been absent from his country. His absorption in Greece's foreign affairs has led to alienation from his fellow-countrymen. In ability he has been a mountain in a plain of commonplaceness; but the people have felt far away from the mountain and comparatively near to the plain. So they have lost the great statesman and have now the services of the commonplace Rhallis, the new Premier.

The success of Constantine's adherents is due, however, not merely to Venizelos's absence and absorption in foreign policies, but to conditions of which the Constantinists have taken advantage. The Greeks, like other peoples, are war weary. Why, ask the anti. Venizelists, should Greek lives and treasure be sacrificed in the protracted wars sure to come, merely to feed the appetites of Great Britain and France? Why, they ask, is not the army demobilized and the farmer boys of Thessaly brought back home? Why are the young men still in Thrace and Asia Minor when they are needed to harvest the crops at home? The shopkeepers in Athens have, moreover, been irritated because they have lost the trade they had when Constantine and his family and all the Court spent their money freely in festivities. Some Greeks have resented the fact that

Venizelos declined to sanction the proposed transformation of the new Chamber of Deputies into a Constituent Assembly to decide whether Constantine should be recalled or not. Many Greeks feel that decrees issued during the recess of the Bulé were autocratic and subversive of the popular will..

Thus during the absence of Venizelos, and using against him the advantage of various forms of popular discontent, there has continued a subtle propaganda put out by Constantine and his adherents in Switzerland. The following excerpts will give an idea of this propaganda:

King Constantine was dethroned against the will of ninety per cent of the Hellenic people. Had he given the word they would have fought the whole world to retain him. But he is too patriotic, too good a Greek. Not his throne, but his people, was his first

F there is one type of mind that annoys me more than another," the Young-Old Philosopher was saying, "it is that which states consistently that nothing matters,' that 'all is well,' and 'what difference will it make a hundred years from now?" In war time this was the same gleeful and placid person who contended that the Hun invasion amounted to nothing at all.

"I recall a certain artistic friend of mine who was at heart a violent pacifist (by the way, why are most pacifists violent?); but he never would admit it. He knew that would make for unpopu larity; and if there was one thing he dreaded and steered clear of, it was the chance of becoming unpopular. For his bread and butter depended upon the number of people he could induce to sit for a portrait. He hadn't a single honest conviction, except that it was

all.

"I was talking to him one afternoon at the club, and he contended that it was foolish to worry about the mess the world was in; for it would come out all right. It always had. You couldn't keep the nations from progress; and wasn't it absurd to take seriously these murders of archdukes, for it was all in the day's work, and life was queer, and people were queerer-particularly those who were concerned over such piffling matters. But his pictures, now-why didn't the world think he was a great artist, he'd like to know?

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you

Then it was that I reminded him that nothing mattered '-not even the abhorrent fact that he was perhaps born to blush unseen; and should have caught a glimpse of his face. "Art is different, art matters a great deal,' he had the lack of humor to state.

"But why art more than murder, particularly if the murder is artistically conceived and carried out?' I inquired, falling into his foolish vein.

"You see, it all depends upon what we hit as to whether or not anything matters. I suppose my friend (though I really hesitate to call him that, he pains me so) would think it nothing if a baby were abandoned on a doorstep. But if his portrait of a baby were wrecked in a fire-ah! then his eyes would flash, his blood would boil! For art is more important than life!

"As if the real kind of living were not an art! For we who are inarticulate are all potential artists with wordsall seekers after that divine something of which we hope to become a part.

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'Things matter very much indeed. We are placed in this world to fight some sort of battle every moment. We fight for our education, for our families, for our very existence. It is only in sleep that we receive that anodyne which banishes our struggle and our pain. We can beautify the struggle itself by entering it in the right spirit. That is why a brave soldier who dies gladly for a cause which he feels to be just is glorious. He has not wished to fight; he has not cared to be part of a conflict that devastates the world: but if the call comes in the high name of humanity he answers it.

"Yes, things do matter very much, as I said. It matters to me, for instance, that any one can feel, as my artist acquaintance does, that nothing matters at all. What is the matter with him? Or doesn't that matter?" And he smiled.

LIGHT

HE coal consumer is clamoring

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for heat to protect him from the winter's cold. Perhaps light in the way of knowledge about coal production and distribution would help his heat problem. An article elsewhere in this issue throws the kind of light that is needed on the conditions of life and work at the mines. Its writer, Mr. John A. Wetzel, some years ago spent his vacation as a student in loading coal in a bituminous mine. The experience gave him the right material to tell us how the miner works, lives, and thinks. It also impressed him with moderate and fair-minded views as to the industrial questions that are involved.

Just now the anthracite problem is acute-how to get the coal into the bin, how to avoid the recurrent danger of a coal famine, how to prevent coal profiteering. The light that might solve these questions should come from a thorough investigation by the Government through the Inter-State Commerce Commission, the Federal Trade Commis sion, or a special Congressional committee one or all. The plain people want a plain statement of the reasons why they should be harried with threats of coal famine, forced to beg as a favor for a half ton here and a ton there, made to pay prices half again as large as in the stress of war time, while they read that the same coal is sold at $20 and $15 a ton by different retailers in the same city. In Union County, New Jersey, the County School Superintendent, Mr. A. L. Johnson, made a canvass or survey through the schools and reported to the Washington authorities that 3,500 families in that county were in immedi ate need of coal to burn. From New York City, Mr. E. J. O'Malley, Commissioner of Markets, telegraphed to President Wilson: "There should be a crusade of reform waged by the Depart ment of Justice, aided by the Inter-State Commerce Commission, against the coalcarrying railroads, the manipulators of the wholesale coal trade, and the mine operators."

It is not necessary to take an alarmist view in order to urge that the methods of handling the fuel that saves us from suffering and wards off illness should be brought out into the open. We have had a fair and mild November: coal is now being rushed to localities where there is a shortage; very prob ably, but not certainly, December will see normal conditions in the anthracite supply. But, all the same, the coal con

mittee of investigation made up of real estate men and Board of Health officers was the lack of "all-season deliveries," and, the committee adds, "the purchase of coal at mines by speculators and middlemen who sell a car over and over again before it reaches the consumers. On this point, too, read what Mr. Wetzel says in his article in this issue, to the effect that even soft coal may safely be stored under proper precautions; certainly hard coal can be stored safely, without loss, and at small cost. Note also Mr. Wetzel's statement as to the miners' agitation for steady employment and the novel suggestion made to him by a working miner that the Government should own and

run one experimental coal mine so as to learn what the business is really like. Making all allowance for hindrance in transporting coal because of strikes and car shortage, there seems to be a general belief that the anthracite industry avoids summer carrying and storing of coal because it finds the other plan (entailing rumors of shortage, lifting of prices, and a rush of coal at the last minute) more profitable.

There is a strong feeling against Governmental fixing of prices or interference with normal trade methods. The way to keep agitators from demanding such things is to show citizenconsumers that they are being treated fairly.

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10 what extent does a platform survive election day? Has it the value and enforceability of a covenant? If so, by whom can the rights of the electorate be asserted?

Our political history leaves these questions still open.

Thus Mr. Wilson, the political comet of 1912, was elected upon a platform containing the following frankly elastic and adjustable plank:

"We demand a reduction in the number of useless offices"! (sic.).

The figures are not at hand, but the number is said to have been increased by over 100,000, and the office furniture of administrative Washington-spurmarked during the war-accommodates an appalling number of "studies in still life," available for the pen or brush of the Allied Artists of America.

This merely illustrates the point that planks are jettisoned by some parties.

The election of a party candidate on an agreed platform constitutes the people's acceptance of his pledges, and it becomes the duty of the Congress, which represents such people, as against the other party to the covenant, the elected President, or in co-operation with him, to enforce the terms of the agreement.

This warrants a brief review of the agreement as to our National programme for the near future, so overwhelmingly entered into on November 2. It has positive clauses. Thus :

1. To uphold our Constitutional =scheme of government, and its guaran ties of civil, political, and religious liberty.

This pledge every Republican Administration since Lincoln has kept, and the new Administration can be trusted to protect our citizens at home and abroad, missionaries or merchants, travelers or refugees.

BY HENRY W. JESSUP

2. Preparedness for defense.

The Republican record on this issue is satisfactory. Mr. Hughes was its standard-bearer in 1916 on this very point, and many of its most distinguished members, later on, sank political considerations in their patriotic efforts to cure the evils resulting from the contrary Democratic attitude of 1912–17.

3. Early and systematic return to a peace-time basis.

The party is pledged to put an end to the persistent clinging to and assertion of war-time executive autocratic powers.

It is pledged by its platform, and more unequivocally even by its candidate's speech of acceptance, to “formal and effective peace as quickly as a Republican Congress can pass its declaration for a Republican Executive to sign.

The formal pledges (which appear in the Campaign Text-Book at page 67 et seq.) are explicit :

To end executive autocracy.

To end our present humiliating for eign policy based upon no principle or definite conception of our Nation's rights or obligations.

Friendly and firm Mexican policy.

Help to Armenia in proper ways.

An international association to preserve the peace of the world without compromising our National independence; but, on the other hand, expressly recognizing our peculiar constitutional organization, and the rights of our country which it possesses as "against all the world."

Continuity of Republican activity in readjustment to peace conditions.

This brings us to the legislative programme outlined in the platform, covering budgets, taxation, reorganization of the departments, banking, regulation

of industry and commerce, etc. Upon these matters we must be content to leave the working out to the representatives of the people. It is their business. They are chosen because the people believe they know what their constituents desire and need, and until they actually convene it is idle to preach and advise and admonish.

The extent to which the present Congress can anticipate performance in part of the pledges made is limited by the veto power of an adversary Executive.

There are non-contentious subjects of legislation, such as revision of our immigration and naturalization laws, the treatment of anarchic aliens, the conservation of National resources, the improvement of our means of communication, reclamation, civil service, and immediate restoration to efficiency of the postal service, the granting of those equal rights to women in industry that are a corollary to their right of suffrage-these it is hardly conceivable would, if dealt with by immediate legislation, excite the antagonism of the present Executive.

We have as guaranties the prior record of Republican National Administration, the effect on the Congressional mind of the colossal popular vote, insuring an unusual degree of the feeling of accountability; but, above all, we have the character of the President and Vice-President-elect and their joint determination to restore representative government.

There will be substituted the judg ment of men for the arbitrary decis ions of one man. Advisers will advise and will be consulted. The Congress, through the Vice-President, will be, we are promised, in touch with the Cabinet and the President. Ça ira!