European international agency. None of the questions of large policy before the League has vitally affected countries whose seats of government are outside of Europe. The more confined the League's membership is to those countries which have a direct interest in the questions that the League discusses and undertakes to decide, the more likely will the League be to succeed.

The Farmer's Is the Nation's Business

T

HE enactment of laws does not often solve economic problems. The problem of American agriculture will remain unsolved if Congress

at this session enacts a farm relief law or if it does not. No law could be framed that would effect a cure. No bill pending, if enacted into law, could be more than a palliative, if, indeed, it could be as much as that. Agriculture is, perhaps, justified in seeking even a palliative. But, on the other hand, agriculture should not be offended if others assert the fact that no law can operate as a panacea.

The situation of farmers generally is undoubtedly bad. Studies made by organizations not composed of farmers tend to show that the net income of the farm family is not, on the average, large enough to support what we have come to think of as the American standard of living.

If that is true and efforts to disprove it have not succeeded-it constitutes a grave danger not to rural life merely but to the National life. If it continues long enough, it will be disastrous, first to the country community, and then to the urban community, which must, of necessity, recruit its strength from young manhood and young womanhood of country birth and upbringing. But long before the deterioration of rural life is felt in the character of men and women urban industries will find it reflected in their balance-sheets.

Here, quite clearly, is a problem in the right solution of which industry and finance and trade and transportation are quite as much interested as is agriculture. It is not the farmer's problem, but the Nation's problem. And this would be just as true even if it could be shown that the farmer brought his troubles upon himself.

The mere fact that the farmer's net

income is too small for his needs as the head of an American family would not of itself prove or even indicate that his gross income is too small. If this were all, the argument might be sustained that the farmer suffers solely from the effects of poor business judgment in buying high-priced land and the like, thus increasing interest and other charges until his outgo is raised out of proportion to his income. With many farmers that undoubtedly is an element. But price indexes show that the ratio of farm prices to general prices is below what it always was in times of normal prosperity generally distributed-show, in other words, that the commodities which the farmer produces buy too little of the commodities which other men produce. The verity of the indexes is sustained by the fact that those farmers who are beyond question good business men and who own their farms free of debt have had a hard time making tongue and buckle meet during the past several years.

It is not worth while to attempt here an analysis of causes. They are many. As to that practically all men are agreed, but few can be found to agree as to just what things should be admitted and what excluded as causes. If we mention a few of those that are urged, it must not be taken to mean that we regard all of them as genuine causes, but merely that we are trying to show what is in the minds of serious men who have given thought to this problem.

It is said

That the farmer suffers because his industry is not organized and, consequently, he must sell in a buyer's market, having nothing to say himself as to what the products of his labor shall bring.

That agriculture has never had a selling agency worthy of the name.

That farmers have indulged in an orgy of buying, mainly on time, boomsold lands at prices out of all proportion to their productive worth.

That no effective thought is taken toward adjustment of production to consumptive needs.

That bankers and financiers generally have discriminated against the farmer borrower.

That the protective tariff does not protect agricultural producers equally with other producers, that it increases the price of many things which the farmer must buy without at all increas

ing the price on the things he produces. To this latter two notable exceptions are made-wool and sugar.

That freight rates, regulated by Federal authority, bear too heavily both upon farm products and upon farm-used articles such as machinery, and that the farmer has to pay the freight both.ways.

If the suggested causes are numerous, so are the suggested cures. We list a few of them without subscribing to any. It is urged by one group or another

That Congress enact a law under which the Federal Government will assist farmers, by the appropriation of a revolving fund and otherwise, in finding markets abroad for a sufficient proportion of their crops to enable them to sell the remainder at home in a tariff-protected market.

That the freight-rate structure be readjusted in such a way as to lighten the burden now borne by agricultural products and farm supplies.

That farmers be encouraged and supported, both Governmentally and otherwise, in their effort to organize the agricultural industry in such a way that it can command a sellers' market for its products.

That corporate capital take a hand in developing agriculture by acquiring large tracts of farm lands and operating them through corporate management, as most of our manufacturing industries are now operated.

That the United States frankly abandon agriculture as a played-out game, depending mainly for its food and fabric supplies upon countries of cheaper lands and cheaper labor and relying for a favorable trade balance almost solely upon manufactures.

In the reasons urged for most of these suggestions there is something of truth. In many of them there is no little of fanaticism. But all of them must be reckoned with, more or less seriously. All of them are entitled to be received with a measure of tolerance. If a man is inclined to be impatient with what he regards as the radicalism of those who would put the Federal Government into the business of exporting farm products, let him remember that some of the measures urged on the other side are not without their element of radicalism.

Above everything else, all of us should remember this-that agriculture must be readjusted into conformity with modern American standards of life and of business and that such a readjustment can

be brought about only by the best thought of America as a whole, that the problem is not solely the farmer's problem but a problem of individuals in all lines of endeavor, a problem of communities, of the States, of the Nation.

A Fight for Justice

R

EASONABLE and moderate people, North and South, have long been convinced that satisfactory advance in the race problem in the South must come from within rather than from without. That this kind of progress is being made is shown by the large success of local or State interracial committees to adjust difficulties that are capable of friendly arrangement. Fair play gains thereby and mob violence loses. Now the North has Negro problems of its own, as the recent rioting and violence at Carteret showed, and maybe it has thereby become aware that the race question in the South is not simple.

It was a Southern writer, Henry W. Grady, who made perhaps the strongest plea ever put forth for justice to the colored people. He said in the Atlanta "Constitution:"

Let us give the Negro his uttermost rights, and measure out justice to him in that fullness the strong should always give the weak. Let us educate him that he may be a better, a broader, and more enlightened man. . . . And let us remember this-that whatever wrong we put on him shall return to punish us. Whatever we take from him in violence, that is unworthy and shall not endure. But what we win from him in sympathy and affection, what we gain in his confiding allegiance and confirm in his awakening judgment, that is precious and shall endure-and out of it shall come healing and peace.

To-day a son of Joel Chandler Harris, Mr. Grady's editorial colleague, has carried on a fight against racial prejudice, religious intolerance, and social tyranny in a small city of Georgia. We have already noted that Julian Harris, editor of the "Enquirer-Sun" of Columbus, received the Pulitzer prize "for the most meritorious public service rendered by a newspaper during the year." The complete story of Mr. Harris's bold attack on illiberalism and injustice is told in the current "Forum" by Thomas Boyd, vividly and pugnaciously, as might be expected from the author of "Through the Wheat."

The title is "Defying the Klan," but, as the article states, "the routing of the

Klan from Columbus and badly damaging it throughout the State was only a small part of the work that Mr. Harris has done." By means of an editorial under the title "Thirteen Little King Canutes" he struck at a legislative committee which recommended a "narrow and archaic" bill to forbid the teaching of evolution in Georgia. The paper lost circulation in the anti-Klan fight, and lost more when the Dayton case was tried. Harris went right on; for, says Mr. Boyd, "he knew that while a poor newspaper is made by its public, a good newspaper makes its public."

So with the race question. Mr. Harris for years advocated a State anti-lynching law and approved in theory of a Federal anti-lynching law. When a Negro lunatic was lynched in Georgia, he broke into bitter invective. We give a passage quoted in the "Forum" as an example of his audacity:

Georgia has given her sister States a mark to shoot at-lynching a lunatic! What if Georgians in the past have tarred and feathered men and women-what if Georgian gangs have assassinated women, among them the wife of a preacher-what if Georgia mobs have taken a Leo Frank from the penitentiary and hanged him, or burned Negroes at the stake? What of all that? Have not the mobs of other States tarred and feathered, assassinated, and burned at the stake! But it was left to Georgia, the State of the new masked-gang spirit-the State whose chief executive and the majority of whose State officials are members of the Ku Klux Klan-to the State of Georgia was left the undying infamy and sickening disgrace of lynching a lunatic.

One feature of the "Enquirer-Sun" was a column devoted to the local news of the colored people. This cost not only circulation, but advertising. Harris kept on. To one protesting merchant Harris said that perhaps if the Negro could get his name in the paper without committing a crime Columbus would be a better community. Finally, he told the merchant that the column might be dropped if the merchant would print an advertisement declining to take Negro trade. The result was the starting of a weekly paper by the colored people.

It may be objected that there was more of attack than of conciliation in all this, but the conditions in the place of publication were backward and dangerous, and plain speaking was needed.

In his conclusion, summing up the result of what Mr. Harris accomplished,

Mr. Boyd, the writer in the "Forum," goes far beyond the facts in the case when he writes that by "provoking free discussion, free opinion, and enlightenment from the outside world, the 'Enquirer-Sun' has been of incalculable benefit in prodding the South out of the ignorance and backwardness in which it has wallowed for years." Mr. Boyd totally overlooks the fact that there are all kinds of communities and all kinds of people in the South as well as elsewhere in this world, and that nowhere has there been more conscientious, more selfsacrificing, and more competent dealing with the Negro problem than among the best communities and among the best people of the South. What Mr. Harris did was, not to prod the South out of backwardness, but to prod his community to rise above its worst elements. In that respect many Northern communities might well take example from what Mr. Harris did.

Evils of Democracy

W

HEN the movement for the direct primary began, high hopes were held for it as a cure for notorious abuses. Those hopes have been broken on the hard rocks of experience. Pennsylvania has proved that the nomination of candidates for the Senatorship by popular vote is no substitute for vigilance against corruption.

In the presence of the evils of the present primary system it is easy to forget evils of the system or lack of system that it supplanted. It is easy to forget the deadlocked Legislatures which left States. unrepresented in the United States Senate. It is easy to forget the log-rolling that went on in county and State conventions. It is easy to forget the secret caucuses that chose candidates without any regard to the public will or interest. What avail was it for the voters to have the right to choose among candidates for office if the candidates themselves had been selected by bosses and their henchmen to serve private ends? The direct primary came in response, not to an academic theory, but to a demand for the eradication of real wrongs.

In getting rid of those older evils, however, we have created new ones. The popular primary as practiced in Pennsylvania has this year produced a scandal that is a repetition on a larger scale of what has happened in other States. The Senate Primary Investigating Commit

Rimsky-Korsakof in music, and Tolstoy and Turgenev in literature. There is an element of despondency in their work which some critics have ascribed to the inherent character of the Slav nature. It may perhaps be as reasonably ascribed to the social and political sufferings of the Russian people for centuries. But there is also an element of joy and spiritual penetration which indicates that the Slav has a creative power that may in time show itself in the field of sociology and politics as well as in the field of the fine arts.

Turgenev alone is a basis of hope for Russia. A country that could produce him is capable of producing other great creative minds in other fields of human activity. He was born of a family of the gentry or aristocracy and had a university education in Russia and in Germany. His father died when he was a boy, but he got his impression of the social injustices of Russian despotism from his mother's harsh treatment of her serfs. As a young man he went into the Government service, but left it, much against his mother's wishes, to make literature his profession. His first book, which was a vivid and realistic account of the unhappy condition of the Russian peasants, is said to have had much influence with the Czar Alexander II, who was born in the same year with Turgenev and who finally emancipated the serfs in 1861.

The recent despatches in our newspapers from London about the new controversy which has arisen between the British and the Soviet Governments led me to turn to an English edition of the novels of Turgenev which was published twenty-five or thirty years ago and which has been standing on my shelves unread for a long time. In the introduction to

M

the novel "Smoke" I find the following significant passage from the pen of Edward Garnett:

"Smoke" is an attack, a deserved attack, not merely on the Young Rus-. sian Party, but on all the Parties; not on the old ideas or the new ideas, but on the proneness of the Slav nature to fall a prey to a consuming weakness, a moral stagnation, a feverish ennui, the Slav nature that analyzes everything with force and brilliancy, and ends, so often, by doing nothing. "Smoke" is the attack, bitter yet sympathetic, of a man who, with growing despair, has watched the weakness of his countrymen, while he loves his country all the more for the bitterness their sins have brought upon it. "Smoke" is the scourging of a babbling generation, by a man who, grown sick to death of the chatter of reformers and reactionists, is visiting the sins of the fathers on the children, with a contempt out of patience for the hereditary vice in the Slav blood. And this time the author cannot be accused of partisanship by any blunderer. "A plague o' both your houses," is his message equally to the Bureaucrats and the Revolutionists. And so skillfully does he wield the thong, that every lash falls on the back of both parties. An exquisite piece of political satire is "Smoke;" for this reason alone it would stand unique among novels.

Those who want to know something about the puzzles and contradictions of the Russian character, which have given rise to the most tragic political struggle of modern times, will find it interesting and useful to abandon temporarily American "best sellers" and turn to the novels of Turgenev-such novels as "Runovels of Turgenev such novels as "Rudin," "Fathers and Children," "Smoke," "The Torrents of Spring" (a title, by the way, calmly, perhaps ignorantly, appropriated by a recent would-be "bestseller" in this country), and "Virgin Soil." While they illuminate some of

the political puzzles of Russia, they are not, in the sense of propaganda, political or sociological. They are first of all creations of the highest literary art. Turgenev had no sympathy with the Nihilists of the latter part of the Romanoff régime, or at least took no active part with them. It is indicative of his power as an artist that Stepniak, one of the ablest leaders of the Nihilist group, who defended Nihilism and Terrorism as the only recourse against depotism, was a great admirer of Turgenev. He expressed this opinion of him:

By the fecundity of his creative talent Turgenev stands with the greatest authors of all times. The gallery of living people, men, and especially women, each different and perfectly individualized, yet all the creatures of actual life, whom Turgenev introduces to us; the vast body of psychological truths he discovers, the subtle shades of men's feelings he reveals to us, is such as only the greatest among the great has succeeded in leaving as their artistic inheritance to their country and to the world.

This passage occurs in the introduction to "Rudin," one of the simplest and most perfect of Turgenev's stories. It is scarcely fifty thousand words in length and on its face appears so artless in construction that the reader at first scarcely appreciates its encyclopædic power. Rudin, the character from whom the novel takes its name, says Stepniak again, is "a man who is almost a Titan in word and a pygmy in deed; . . . but it may be truly said that every educated Russian of our time has a bit of Dmitry Rudin in him."

Is this not really the trouble with the theorists and philosophers who are trying to administer the Soviet Government of Russia?

ARQUIS CURZON of Kedleston rose to great eminence. He was Viceroy of India; he was British Foreign Secretary; the only great office he missed was that of Prime Minister. He was disappointed, but he never complained; he bowed to Fate.

Lord Curzon stands for prodigious success in life, and yet, maybe, in years

to come say in a hundred years-the high offices he held may be merely regarded as symbols of his success, and his book on Bodiam Castle, Sussex, which he completed just before he died, may be the indicator which will keep his memory green.

It was a labor of love, as were his other four books on other great houses

and castles with which he had been associated, and which he did not live to finish. This most industrious man had worked upon all five, but "Bodiam Castle" was the only one of which he was able personally to correct even the type script.

The hobbies of eminent public men are always interesting. In an age when

many of the castles and manor houses of England are being dismantled, or hired by the new rich because the owners cannot afford to live in them, Lord Curzon devoted much of his leisure to restoring castles that he had purchased, not to reside in, but to bequeath to his countrymen. Of the five already referred to - Bodiam Castle is the chief example, and the subject of the noble book which has been published under the title of "Bodiam Castle, Sussex: A Historical and Descriptive Survey by the Marquis Curzon of Kedleston." (Jonathan Cape. 30s.)

Those who have motored through southern England can hardly fail to have been impressed by this Plantagenet knight's stronghold, which was begun in 1387 A.D., and which looks to-day unchanged as regards the exterior; but the interior has long gone. Thereby hangs a tale.

This stronghold, which really looks a stronghold, is situated on the borders of Kent and Sussex, just above the little river Rother, which winds to the sea at Rye, a distance of nine miles. Bodiam is usually approached by car or carriage from Hastings, but the pleasantest way is to hire a small motor boat at Rye and make the journey by the Rother. The castle is surrounded by a moat-still filled, and I suppose swans and water lilies have always been there.

It is all the more imposing because you come upon it suddenly. It looks like a castle in a hollow. In the summertime the slope upon which it is built is encompassed by trees and foliage. If you

look down upon Bodiam from the ancient Kent town of Sandhurst, it appears to be lurking in woods, defying time. The reason of this situation is that it was built to protect the surrounding level lands or marshes from sea marauders.

There was a Saxon settlement at Bodiam, evident from the name, which indicates the ham or home of one Bod or Bode; but our interest in it is the present castle, which was built by Sir Edward Dalyngrigge in the years following 1386. This knight stood high in the estimation of King Richard II, and it may be interesting to quote the royal license which was granted to him in 1386, of course in Latin. The translation runs:

"The King and all to whom, etc., greeting. Know ye that of our special grace we have granted and given license on behalf of ourselves and our heirs, so far as in us lies, to our beloved and faithful subject, Edward Dalyngrigge Knight, that he may strengthen with a wall of stone and lime, and crenelate and may construct and make into a Castle his manor house at Bodyham, near the sea, in the County of Sussex, for the defense of the adjacent country, and the resistance to our enemies, and may hold his aforesaid house so strengthened and crenelated and made into a Castle for himself and his heirs forever, without let or hindrance of ourselves or our heirs, or of any of our agents whatsoever. In witness of which, etc. The King at Westminster 20 October."

The reference to "resistance to our enemies" probably refers to the French,

who nine years before, in 1337, had landed at the mouth of the Rother and burned the town of Rye. The Rother in those days was a much larger river than at present, and was navigable up to Bodiam by vessels of some size.

Bodiam is a perfect place to dream away a summer afternoon with a book, and it is a pleasure to show it to strangers, for the surprise it gives them. You enter by the modern drawbridge, noting the frowning eight towers, but when you arrive inside you find nothing but grass hillocks and fallen masonry. There is a legend that it was never inhabited, even that the interior was never finished. Lord Curzon in this remarkable book has disproved that, but even he, with all his knowledge and researches, cannot definitely say when the interior was destroyed. He presumes that it was dismantled by the Parliamentary forces between 1643 and 1648. Lord Curzon made no attempt to rebuild the interior; it could never be suitable as a place of residence; he determined to make it a national possession.

For long he had loved Bodiam. When he became the owner of it in 1917, by purchase, he at once proceeded to make a thorough survey of the castle, and in the summer of 1919 he began the work of research and excavation. For more than a year a staff of twenty-five men were employed in strengthening and repairing the foundations and superstructure, and after that, after he had given everything his personal attention, came the book; but let Lord Curzon speak: "If I had attempted to write this book after owning and studying Bodiam for six months, it would have had a very different value. It was not till I had dug and examined and reflected for five years, that I began to tell the tale."

The tale is told with astonishing particularity and with personal reserve. Everything that could be discovered about this Plantagenet knight's stronghold, its owners, and its vicissitudes through the ages is described.

Bodiam Castle now belongs to the British nation, and he who reads the book must feel the pathos of this passage on page 50: "With me, therefore, the long line of private owners of Bodiam Castle, which has lasted for five and a half centuries, will come to an end."

He founded a small museum within the castle; his book may be obtained there. So the name of Curzon will forever be associated with Bodiam-a gift of love.

Could a public man desire a finer monument?