and-brick Carteret. It is a Hungarian community, a Portuguese community, a Polish community, three or four other kinds of communities. Each speaks its own language. Each has its own irritations, possibly its own aspirations. They are churned together, but they do not mix. There is, of course, an American community, but it does not-could notact as a cement. There is also a Jewish community. And this last-named does, in a certain sense, hold things together, not by causing them to blend but by corking them up together, like soda and vinegar, in the same bottle.

Into this conglomerate there was poured during a period of ten years or so the Negro. And, after more churning, the thing exploded. The Negro church was stoned with the congregation inside of it. Then the building was burned, and finally the foundation stones were pried apart until hardly one remained upon another. The mob-white, but otherwise unlabeled-ordered the Negroes out of town, and emphasized its order by beating some of them up. Many of them had been beaten up previously, mainly by a particular pugilist for whom the whole of Carteret was a squared circle and Negroes indiscriminately his victims. One Negro finally declined to be beaten up, and the pugilist died the death. That was the match that started the blaze. Afterwards it was never exactly clear who did what. The daily press, however, indicated that most of the Negroes had gone and that the few who remained were in deadly danger.

I

WENT down to see if any of my Negroes were there, but I found none that were peculiarly my own. Carteret drew its colored labor mostly from the coastal plain, hardly at all from the Southern regions west of the mountains. If any of mine had been there, I certainly should have told them to go home. Carteret did not impress me as any sort of place for a self-respecting Negro.

Of course, I was butting in where I had no business. Carteret can attend to its own affairs. So can any other community. But within my recollection scores of correspondents Northern born and bred have gone South to see why Southern communities were imposing on the Negro. So far as I know, I was pioneering the very first Southern-bornand-bred correspondent to try to find out why a Northern community did not treat its Negroes right. So I felt justified in assuming an interest in Negroes not my own merely because they were Negroes.

I found exactly what I believe an impartial investigator could find wherever, North or South, there is trouble between whites and blacks-that the trouble was caused, not by good whites and good blacks, but by the low elements of both races. This does not mean that some good people did not become involved. Good people always do become involved in such things, because the whole community is involved. And good people And good people always suffer for the misdeeds of the bad. We have felt at the South that it is the good white people who suffer most from race troubles, because they are blamed for whatever is done. At Carteret it was the good Negroes who suffered most. The attack was not launched against bad Negroes or the resorts of bad Negroes of which there were enough and to spare in Carteret-but against the Negro church. After all, Northern and Southern communities do things somewhat differently. A Southern community might have lynched the Negro who killed the pugilist possibly. Southern lynchings are not always for the unspeakable crime.

once

In my own little town of Lebanon, Tennessee, a Negro was lynched for killing a policeman. Neither are the victims of Southern lynchings always Negroes. The only one that I ever saw in my career as a reporter had as its victim a white man.

Yes, a Negro might have been lynched in any one of many Southern communities for killing a pugilist. But I doubt if a Negro church would have been burned and Negroes, regardless of character, maltreated and chased out of town. I am not saying that one way of violating the law is better than the other. Both are unspeakably bad. I am merely pointing out the difference. Southern violence is likely to fall upon a Negro; very rarely does it fall upon the Negro in the

mass.

I am not going to insist that Southern communities and Southern men understand the Negro and that Northern communities and Northern men do not. I am not especially trying to irritate anybody. Besides, I think that some people in Carteret did have some understanding of the Negro.

be said that the manufacture of fertilizer is Carteret's principal industry, and that much of the work of a fertilizer factory is such that native white labor shuns it.

A

s nearly as I could ascertain, the Negroes and the factories were getting along well enough together. But the fact remained that Negro laborers first came.to Carteret ten or more years ago as strike-breakers. There had always been the feeling that they had taken white men's jobs and that they were working for less money' than white men would demand, all of which appears to be true.

But, while alien white Carteret resented the presence of the Negro as a laborer, a part of alien white Carteret extended to the Negro a certain sort of social recognition. There was no Negro section. Most of the thousand or so Negroes in the town were quartered in a section inhabited by Hungarians and others. Many of them lived in single rooms-three, five, and sometimes seven in a room. Many of the whites in the same section lived under conditions somewhat similar. And the color line was not at all clearly drawn. They say

nearly everybody to whom I talked except the police that a very common sight in that section before the outbreak was white women lolling on the shoulders of Negro men.

Some of these philandering Negroes were workers, others were not. There was a group of perhaps a hundred parasitical Negroes who lived on the backs of those who did work-expert crapshooters, card sharps, confidence men.

Here again was economic competition between white and black. For there was a gang of white parasites, too, upon the backs of the Negro workers. Bootleggers, skin-game artists, petty hold-up Whatever the black parasites took reduced by just so much what the white parasites could suck in. The pugilist who was killed may or may not have belonged to this gang. I was told positively that he did and I was not told positively that he did not.

conditions such as these. Good Negroes may be made bad, however. And many of the Carteret Negroes were bad to start with. The factory bosses admit that they started with a poor lot and that they always had many rovers. But they insist that they had gradually accumulated a nucleus of good Negroes.

I talked to some of the good ones. I did not talk to any out-and-out bad

ones, but I talked to some of the kind who are made bad by environment. One of these latter told me that he liked Carteret, not because it paid him more money than his native village in Georgia would have paid him, but because of the associations with white people. Save the name!

Another Negro, black as Egypt but with the dignified, open face that belongs to a certain sturdy type of Negroes, told me that he stays in Carteret solely because he can make more money, and that he has nothing to do with any white people except his superiors at the plant.

I wonder how long this last-mentioned Negro will hold out.

A

grew to be a missionary for industrial education among Negroes. In an interview with him which I wrote for The Outlook two years ago or so Charles Plummer said, "The morals of my people simply will not stand up under the conditions which they sometimes have to face in industrial towns of the North."

I do not know whether Plummer ever visited Carteret or not, but I am certain that what he said applies here; that the morals of the Negro will not stand up under the conditions which many of them face in Carteret. Sooner or later this high-grade Negro that I have spoken of will very likely fall to the level of the lowest-class whites.

For it is a fact beyond all question that the Negro tends to become what the white people are to whom he has access. He may not rise quite as high. He may

War Debts

not fall quite as low. But he absorbs the mental and moral quality of the white community around him. Negroes South have no social equality with any white people, but most of them do have the counsel and guidance of good white people. A Carteret Negro, so far as I could see, has only the counsel of the white man who happens to be his boss at the plant. He has a sort of social equality with a set of alien whites who could not counsel an American cow.

There may be a way of working out satisfactory industrial conditions with Negro labor in towns like this. I hope there is. The plants need Negro labor. The Negro laborer needs the better wages that the Northern plant offers. But I am very sure that the problem will never be worked out by giving the Negro a white woman to fondle instead of white men to pattern after.

GOOD deal is said just now in Congress about collecting our war debts. We had better make our settlements quickly and get what money we can, for as sure as people dislike to pay for dead horses so surely will they stop paying us in a few years. I will put ten years as the limit. After that we will collect at our peril. We will need a navy as large as the combined navies of our debtors. We are already being called Shylocks in more than one European capital. Now Shylock had the law on his side, but he didn't have a sufficient military force, so he didn't collect.

We have heard much in America about "no more war," and from some of those who want the war debts paid with interest in full. If we insist on such payments, I believe we will be involved in the first war that Europe produces. But it is not likely that we will insist to the point of shedding our blood to collect our debts. Creditors are not built that way. I read here in London an alleged speech by Senator Howell, of Nebraska, howling about the billions of dollars in interest that we will lose if we only collect part of the interest he has in mind. You would think it might occur to a real statesman that an amount of money which seems large to rich America seems infinitely larger to poor Italy, if they have to pay it.

There is psychology in this whole matter. Already there are some millions of young voters in Europe who say: "We had nothing to do with contracting those American war debts; why should we pay?" By 1936 that element will come near dominating elections in Europe. That is the reason I predict that what we don't collect in the near future will never be collected at all. It is also obvious that if we don't get payments started soon from Italy and France those countries which are now paying will shortly find excuses for stopping. The recent speech of the British Chancellor on this subject should be a sufficient warning tc American Congressmen.

The despatches from Washington seem to indicate that the Democratic Party has taken the Shylock side and proposes to make a political issue of the collection of war debts. of war debts. Just imagine the next Democratic campaign banner emblazoned on one side," "We wish to serve no selfish ends'-Woodrow Wilson;" and on the other, "Allied war debts must be paid with interest in full." In summing up I wish to ask those who want to collect from Europe principal and interest in full, How do you propose to enforce the collection of that which will not be paid voluntarily? At the end of this, my fifth visit to the principal European countries since the war, I find that both business

and politics are in an unhealthy condition-there is a shortage of real liquid capital. No political economist can contemplate the attempt of the United States to take from Europe over ten billion dollars in principal and no one knows how many more billions in interest without a shake of the head and a wonder at the folly of it.

What is the history of the collection of war debts? Has any European country ever paid anything heretofore except under military compulsion? Has the United States collected any debt from any country anywhere? I believe not. But where before in all history has the question of interest come up?

I think we are traveling a dangerous road. You must admit we are traveling a new and unknown road. One of the charges against Lloyd George in the London papers two or three years ago was that "he made friends of enemies, and enemies of friends." I doubt if there is any friendship of enemies to be placed on the credit side of the ledger. There is, of course, a surface show of cordiality where people are receiving from the United States financial investments or loans. If America is wise, she will be generous in collecting war debts-even to the point of compromise and partial cancellation.

London, England.

E

VER since the coal strike was settled without benefit to either side, after it had inflicted six months of expense and discomfort on the public, the natural question has been, "Why not a Labor Court?" Now we have the rebellious Passaic strike. In a previous period of vexation Governor Henry J. Allen, of Kansas, devised a tribunal in the Sunflower State, which was declared unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court. Nothing has been created since to take its place in Kansas or elsewhere. The problem of adjusting labor disputes by legal means remains unsettled, but is no less pressing.

Labor unions in all countries where they are strong have successfully kept themselves outside the law, where the rights of the public and employer alone suffer. In Australia a scale of wages, when agreed upon or forced by a strike, is accepted, becomes law, and can be enforced by the state. The right of the employer cannot be so sustained. With all sympathy for labor, this is manifestly unfair, but, being an advantage, is difficult to eliminate from the situation by any co-operation on the part of the unions. In the case of coal, having a stranglehold on the industry, they incontinently reject arbitration. A union is not a trust. Therefore the law as it stands is powerless. So the public suffers, while, in fact, no one benefits.

There should be an orderly way out. Government ownership of mines would breed worse conditions. To add to the already over-swollen number of public employees is not in the interest of the country at large. There are too many now with fixed tenures and no sense of obligation to the rest of us.

Labor is not a commodity, according to the United States Supreme Court. Therefore a union does not become a conspiracy unless it unites with some other union having no direct interest in a quarrel in order to produce a more effective boycott or other form of coercion. Yet when a union establishes the system of collective bargaining there ought to be some legal way of enforcing a responsibility and a continuance of it beyond contract dates. The late General Charles H. Taylor, of the Boston "Globe," used to say: "We [the employers] do the bargaining; they do the collecting." Which is about it.

With all his merits, and he had many, the late Samuel Gompers always held his

By DON C. SEITZ

following above the law. He would never permit his American Federation of Labor to come under its ægis. Yet I recall, when it was very small, how clever employers used Mr. Gompers and his organization against the very powerful Knights of Labor, engineered by Terence V. Powderly.

It is one of the curiosities of the relations between labor and capital that they should fight at all. Logically, they should combine and trim the general public. This they rarely do, while in public. This they rarely do, while in fights the public usually sympathizes with labor and opposes the employer, whose only course, when defeated, is to pass the bill along to the consumers. I know of only one case where employer and union are united-that is the Employing Association of Photo-Engravers and the Photo-Engravers' Union, in New York. This was brought about by the union, whose committee makes up, not only the scale of prices the employer must pay its members, but arranges the prices that the former must charge his customers. The result has been prosperity for both.

It is obvious that, with everybody organized against everybody else, the resistless force must in time meet the irresistible object, with the public in between. Is it to be continually crushed in labor conflicts? Have we not become sufficiently civilized to elevate the unions above the level of buccaneers or banditti? I think we have. The unions themselves are active enough in watching legislation. Mr. Gompers's successor, William Green, is a man of level head and broad mind. Eventually, it would appear that he could see the unfairness of the existing situation. If he and his associates do not deal with it, sooner or later, a long-suffering public will.

The nations across the sea have boldly joined the World Court, and the United States has just timidly crept in. If these great interests can have faith in justice, why not the labor unions? The answer is that in all too many instances corporation-controlled judges have sat upon the benches in this country. Some are there

now.

So the unions prefer their own power to justice.

Yet it would seem possible to devise a labor court that would fairly and honestly guard the interests of both sides. Merchants have succeeded in shortening legislation by the appointment of civil arbitrators, whose work in New York

City has given great satisfaction. The newspapers of New York and Typographical Union No. 6 have a court to sit on cases of discharge that has been eminently successful in obviating friction and doing justice. Why not go further in the interest of that great third partythe public?

The answer will be that there is no body of statute law dealing with labor questions, and that without this all would be vain. This is a good point as far as it goes.

To this there is an answer. There exists in the international laws of the several great unions a rather remarkable amount of good sense thus codified, which, understood by unions and employers or properly interpreted by a court, could be used to great advantage in making a start. Neither employers nor local unions know as much about it as they should. It is well thought out, well phrased, and sound as far as it goes. It would form a base for further development and provide a way out of many existing difficulties.

How can the country safely continue to tolerate vast labor organizations, controlling thousands of men and capable at any time of stopping great industries, without some form of a tribunal in which its interests can be protected? A coal strike of 158,000 men has in it all the elements of civil war. All too often violence and death have accomplished labor conflicts. Have we not progressed far enough on the road of civilization to prevent this? If we have not, the Nation is not free and the Government does not rule. If New York, the greatest user of coal, should rise and march over into Pennsylvania to help itself to coal, what a mighty how-de-do it would raise! Yet in what way, so far as actual effect goes, does the late action of the Miners' Union differ? Practically, it seized the fuel supply of all the States using anthracite.

The labor of the individual workman may not be a "commodity." But the combined labor of many men has been made such through the practice of collective bargaining. It represents the power to make or break industry in its own selfish interest. This right is denied capital. It ought to be repressed in labor. The welfare of the individual workman and of the public ought not to be left at the mercy of either capital or the union bosses. It is a duty the public owes to itself and the laborer to devise a method by which both can be protected.

Courtesy Union Pacific System

Pack up your troubles, though the sun may dodge,

And smile, smile, smile. Count yourself lucky you're at Zion Lodge;

Smile, dudes, that's the style. Give a look at the scenery, 'Twill make you grin a mile

So pack up your troubles, be a sport to-night,

And smile, smile, smile.

T

HIS lively parody of a war-time song came from a quartet of girls swaggering in the light of a camp-fire in the open-air theater in front of the stone lodge in Zion Canyon, Uncle Sam's newest National Park in southern Utah. Lady Mountain and Mount Majestic, rising sheer thirty-five hundred feet above the valley floor, sent the words reverberating up the mighty gorge until they were banging against the Great White Throne and doubtless shocking any angels who chanced to be lingering on Angels' Landing. They also shocked a mature lady of highly proper mien who sat with other guests before the camp-fire.

"That girl on the end there!" she exclaimed, as she indicated one of the singers. "Isn't she the waitress who served me my dinner?"

"Sure thing, ma'am," replied an easygoing cow-owner who had drifted in for the evening from his ranch house down the Mukuntuweap. "She and the pink warbler next to her are heavers. The third one is a sheet snatcher. The blackhaired queen on the far end is a pearl diver."

'Heaver'? 'Sheet snatcher'? 'Pearl diver'? Why, what in heaven's name are you saying about these young women? They must be worse even than their crude song would indicate."

"Excuse me, ma'am," apologized the cowman. "I hadn't noticed you were a raw dude."

"I a dude?" The lady visitor's face was the color of Mount Majestic when the morning sun is revealing all its coats of red paint.

"Sorry, ma'am, if I guessed wrong. You're a sage-brusher, you mean?"

The lady's stare was colder than the air in Refrigerator Canyon on the way up to the West Rim. "I'm a schoolteacher in the city of Boston!" she cried.

"Well, of course!" The cowman waved an understanding hand and smiled his tolerance. "I can speak Bostonese too when I try. 'Dudes' is just polite National Park for folks who come to see

the wonders on the auto stages, and 'sage-brushers' is high polite for folks. who come in their own cars. The four young ladies who've been getting off their low song on us are college girlsthe diggingest kind of digs-in the fall, winter, and spring; but when they're out here for the summer, hustling their heads off so as they can go on being college girls, they are proud to be 'savages." You've guessed it about those heavers; they're waitresses. That sheet snatcher will begin to caress your bed the minute you're out of your cabin in the morning, and if you meander out to the kitchen after breakfast that pearl diver will show you how fast she can fish dishes out of soapy water. By the way, if you're waked by a bass voice hollering, 'Fire!' you needn't get excited; it'll be one of the pack rats who's out here on parole from Yell College. All he means is he wants to breeze in and put something inflammable in your little tin stove."

The lady from Boston was assisted in her return to normalcy by the fact that the quartet broke into a new song that was far from frivolous. It had a glorious swing to it, and the singers showed that they were trained vocalists by the way they went after it-"Oh, Zion, dear Zion, home of the free." It was a song