A newspaper recently published a cartoon which portrayed an American family standing on the sidewalk between a butcher shop and an automobile agency trying to determine whether they should buy a turkey for a Thanksgiving dinner or a motor

car.

Those who have seen the price of foodstuffs increasing during the last year may not unnaturally be moved to ask what was the joke in this cartoon. For those who are contemplating the necessity of paying forty cents a pound for their Thanksgiving turkey there is little humor in the comparison of the price of a turkey and the price of an automobile.

The rise in the price of foodstuffs, however, hits hardest of all those who are contemplating neither the purchase of a turkey nor the purchase of an automobile.

The New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor has recently published the results of a study which it has been making to determine what the recent increases in the cost of food mean to the poor families of the city. The New York "Times publishes the list of food prices compiled by the Association. The figures in this list are taken from the actual purchases of staple foods made by families in November, 1915, and in November, 1916.

The average increase in the cost of staple food products is shown by this investigation to be practically thirty per cent, and it is to be remembered that this list is made up of necessities and not luxuries.

Some of the most startling increases are the following: Codfish, which in 1915 cost ten cents a pound, now costs fifteen, an increase of fifty per cent. Eggs have gone up fifty-eight per cent in cost, butter thirty per cent, bread twenty per cent. Oatmeal, macaroni, and rice show respective increases of twenty-five, thirty-three, and twenty per cent. Beans, which in 1915 cost eighteen cents, now cost thirty cents. Cabbage has gone from eleven to fifteen cents a head. Potatoes, eighteen pounds of which could be purchased for forty-two cents in 1915, now cost ninety cents, an increase of 114 per cent. This is the largest jump shown in the records of the Association. Apples come next; for twelve pounds, which cost in 1915 thirty cents, it is now necessary to pay sixty cents. Only barley, molasses, tomatoes, coffee, tea, cocoa,

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chuck steak, and bacon have not increased in cost to the consumer during the present year. Not a single item, according to the figures of the Association, has decreased in

cost.

TAGORE

At Carnegie Hall, New York City, on November 21, Sir Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian poet and philosopher, delivered a lecture on the cult of nationalism. The religious spirit, the poetry, and the drama of this notable visitor will, we believe, find readier acceptance throughout the West than his exposition of what he regards as the fundamental evils of Western civilization.

Tagore's address, delivered in eloquent English, was, in the main, a denunciation of Western national organization as a fundamental evil in itself. According to Tagore, the old-time famines of India, the tyrannies of despot princes, the wars which swept India for so many centuries, are infinitely to be preferred to the soulless efficiency of our Western society. Western government Tagore defined as organized self-interest. He seems to feel that from this organized self-interest no good fruit can come. Indian civilization he compared to the hand loom, the product of which possesses spiritual individuality. Western civilization he compared to the unceasing shuttle of the power loom, producing a surplus of product, colorless, uninteresting, and dehumanized. He called the history of Japan to witness that the adoption of Western civilization could not be made without a sacrifice of spiritual qualities and the loss of the finer things in human nature.

This is a brief and perhaps an inadequate presentation of the main theme of Tagore's notable address. All that Tagore said of the dangers which can spring from over-organization is perhaps true. We believe, however, that, together with opportunities for evil which undeniably exist in the new spirit of organization which has been born of the West, there are compensating and almost unlimited opportunities for the development of the spiritual qualities of mankind.

The organized government which has the Prussian spirit as its ideal finds no stronger condemnation than has been visited upon it by Western civilization itself. Yet France has not lost her soul in changing from the world of irresponsible despotism to that of an organized democracy. Without organization of the Western stamp, the steamers, rail

ways, and even the lecture bureau which brought Tagore to America could hardly exist. In this, at least, the New World should tend to be content with some elements of that spirit of organization which Tagore so strongly condemns.

"THE YELLOW JACKET"

There has recently returned to New York City a play which attracted attention in the metropolis some time ago. It is about to depart again for a tour of the country, and the fact that many parts of the United States are to have a chance to witness its fantastic humor, its strange and curious conventions, its poetry, and its appeal to the imagination, makes it doubly worth while to call it to the attention of our readers at this time.

The play to which we refer is "The Yellow Jacket," staged by Mr. and Mrs. Coburn. It is a play written by an Occidental, but presented in the costume, the spirit, and with the conventions of the Chinese stage. The setting for the play is a replica of a Chinese theater in San Francisco.

There is, despite the unfamiliar setting of the play, something curiously Elizabethan in the manner of its presentation. For the author and players are bold enough to take it for granted that their audience possesses imagination. We are so used to having our plays presented to us like a ready-cooked breakfast food, prepared for digestion and with no opportunity or need of masticating the ideas presented, that it is a delightful relief to see a play to which the audience is obviously expected to bring something more intangible than tall hats and operaglasses.

If, on the one hand, "The Yellow Jacket" appeals to the imagination by the things which it leaves unsaid and unseen, on the other hand it is much more direct and simple than the plays which the average Occidental is accustomed to.

According to the Chinese convention, a character must not only display his virtues and vices by his acts, but upon his first appearance upon the stage he is required to give a brief sketch of himself-such a statement of his career as might well be included in "Who's Who."

We had hoped that this admirable convention might free us of one of the greatest curses of the modern drama, but we were doomed to disappointment. Even with every legal and moral justification for his customary

monologue destroyed, the Man Who Sat Behind Us carefully expounded the purpose and character of each of the actors as they appeared. Perhaps those of our readers who see "The Yellow Jacket " may have better fortune in this respect than the editorial envoy of The Outlook. We fear, however, that the instinct for spoiling good drama by bad explanations is too deeply rooted in the American people for even "The Yellow Jacket" to drive it thence.

SHERLOCK HOLMES IN NEW YORK

The reports of some of the feats of detective work accomplished by modern policemen are as entertaining and no less bizarre sometimes than the feats accomplished by Sherlock Holmes and Monsieur Lecoq in the pages of fiction. Romance is not dead. The report of a remarkable piece of detective work by Sergeant John F. Brennan, of the New York City Police Department, as published in "Motor Life" and republished in "Motordom is as thrilling as a tale by Conan Doyle or Gaboriau.

On June 24, 1916, at about midnight, Foreman John McHugh, of the New York Street Cleaning Department, while driving in a light buggy near Sixty-ninth Street and Park Avenue, was run down and killed by an automobile speeding on him from behind. No one saw the accident, and there was no description of the car to provide a clue for the police, but Patrolman John G. Dywer, who discovered the wreck of the buggy, had the presence of mind to examine the street for even the minutest evidence. This is what was found: Twenty-one pieces of glass, none more than two inches long; a nickelplated lamp-rim six inches in diameter, stamped "Ham Lamp Company, Rochester, New York;" a piece of automobile tire about three inches long.

With this material Brennan went to work. In the Police Headquarters Training School he had been teaching members of the Traffic Squad that to the expert automobiles have almost as much individuality as human beings. Trying to put his own theories into practice, this is what he learned: The pieces of glass proved to be from three lenses, one a plain glass, one a mirror lens, and a third a concave-convex lens. Measurement of the curves of the glass fragments led him to believe that the first two lenses were eight (Continued on page following illustrations)