pension dependent on an endowed fund is necessarily inadequate. He says:

The essential facts to which the pension experiences of different nations seem to point are these. Any employer, whether a government or a corporation, that undertakes to carry the liabilities which accrue under a system of noncontributory pensions will in the end find the load intolerable. Employees, on the other hand, will be disappointed both by the diminu tion in the rates of pay and the uncertainty as to the payment of the pension which is likely to arise in the course of time.

Dr. Pritchett has therefore proposed to the trustees a modification of the original plan. Of this modification we gave some account in The Outlook of July 5, 1916. Its most essential feature was that the teachers to get the benefit of this pension must contribute annually to the fund, and in order to secure such contributions Dr. Pritchett proposed to make it compulsory.

from his report:

We quote

To the teacher working in one of these college groups a plan of co-operation in insurance and annuities offers enormous advantages; but in order to secure these advantages it is necessary that the participation of the teacher in any college that desires to share in the plan of co-operation should be a condition of his service to the extent of at least an agreed minimum. Without this neither the individual nor the general plan of co-operation can succeed, as the experience of all insurance and pension associations which have been contributory but not compulsory has proven. Any college, therefore, that desires to participate in such a plan would find it necessary to require those entering its service to participate in the programme of insurance and annuity to the extent of the agreed minimum; or, to put the matter in another way, the college having done its share would, if it were to be successful in its co-operation, require that the teacher entering its service should undertake a corresponding participation as a condition of employment. What would result would be not only a distinct separation between the question of pension and the question of salary, but an increase of salary to the extent of the participation of the employing college.

WILL THE PENSION FUND BE CHANGED?

This proposed change has given rise to wide discussion in the colleges and among those who had expected to profit by the original pension system.

Excellent reports have been made upon it, among them especially to be noted

one by a Committee of the Wisconsin University, and one by a Faculty Committee of Wellesley College. These reports have elicited three serious objections to the proposed change in the plan: (1) That the Carnegie Foundation, having raised certain expectations by its promises to teachersexpectations on which they have acted in their plans and their expenditures-has now no moral right to withdraw from the promises it has made without their consent. If, therefore, any change is made, it should affect only those who accept teaching appointments hereafter. (2) That it has no moral right to demand of the college as a condition of participation in the pension scheme that it require all its teachers to share in the plan of co-operation. If voluntary co-operation is impracticable, compulsory co-operation is unjust. (3) Both the Wisconsin Committee and the Wellesley Committee, working independently and comparing the amount of contribution required by the Carnegie Foundation and that required by commercial insurance and annuity companies, present figures which seem to show that the terms offered by the commercial companies are financially better than those which would be offered by the Carnegie Foundation.

Dr. Pritchett, in his eleventh Annual Report, has apparently accepted the first objection by recommending that every person now in the institutions connected with the Carnegie Foundation be given the option of continuing under the old plan or under the new.

The Board of Trustees has by its action indorsed this recommendation of Dr. Pritchett's, and clearly expressed its purpose to carry out with scrupulous regard the promises of the Foundation and meet fully the just expectation of all teachers now in those institutions, and it has referred the proposed changes in other respects to a Commission of Eleven, consisting of six trustees of the Foundation and five representatives of educational organizations.

The whole matter under consideration, therefore, will lie over for final action certainly until April, and perhaps until next November.

We think it safe to say that, whatever that action is, teachers who have trusted to this pension fund may rest assured that their trust will not prove groundless, and teachers may also rest reasonably assured that they will not be compelled

to co-operate in a pension plan against their will as a condition of retaining their positions.

THE FEDERAL COUNCIL
OF CHURCHES

The third quadrennial meeting of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, held in St. Louis from December 6 to 11, considered some important social, economic, and religious problems. This organization is a federation of thirty Protestant denominations (including almost all of the principal ones); and the delegates who attended the meeting were officially appointed by the denominations they represented.

The Council has entered the field of international relations. The General Secretary reported correspondence with the Government in Berlin concerning the attitude of Germany toward a league of nations. Resolutions were passed for the protection of aliens; calling upon the press for a sympathetic treatment of the Japanese question; expressing righteous indignation at attempting to incite race prejudice; appointing a Commission on Oriental Relations and expressing friendship toward Japan; making provision for the relief of the suffering in Mexico and directing the Executive Committee to consider the matter of a commission on relations with Mexico and Latin America.

The report of the Social Service Commission placed the chief emphasis upon economic justice, although it dealt quite fully with social welfare, unemployment, housing, recreation, commercialized vice, prison reform, and the equal status of women. The economic aspects of the liquor problem were given a large place in the report of the Commission on Temperance.

Family life in its various relationships was comprehensively covered by the commission dealing with this subject-marriage and divorce, the decline in the birth rate, and the factors in social and economic life which result in the disintegration of family solidarity.

Gifford Pinchot, Chairman of the Commission on the Church and Country Life, pointed out the necessity of greater co-operation among the churches in the rural districts, the recommendation being based upon a somewhat extensive study of the country churches in Ohio. "Churches in the country ordinarily work against instead of working with

847

each other. They compete rather than cooperate," said Mr. Pinchot.

William Jennings Bryan, who was a delegate to the meeting of the Council, spoke to immense audiences in popular meetings, chiefly on peace and arbitration and on temperance. Addressing the Council itself, Mr. Bryan said: America should stand at the door and knock, saying to the nations at war that any day we are anxious to bring them together in an honorable peace. If this Nation cannot take this step, why can't the churches of this country appeal to the churches of both countries to stop this war?"

The Rev. Dr. Frank Mason North succeeds Dr. Shailer Mathews as President of the Council for the next quadrennial.

THE CONSUMERS' LEAGUE

At the seventeenth annual meeting of the National Consumers' League, in Springfield, Massachusetts, last month, the President, Mr. Newton D. Baker, better known to the country in his more familiar rôle of Secretary of War, described the League from its initial days when its function was that of the "teaching and preaching brotherhoods.and sisterhoods," under the leadership of John Graham Brooks.

Mr. Baker dwelt effectively upon the importance of the legal defense of labor laws before the Supreme Court after that significant day in the year 1908 when, upon the invitation of the Attorney-General of the State of Oregon, Mr. Brandeis appeared before our highest National tribunal and created a new methodthat which we have come to call the "atmospheric" method of trying cases.

Mr. Baker contrasted dramatically the old and the new methods. "When I was a young man, I studied law, and I was taught twenty definitions of the law-all equally dead. . . . If you go into an old-fashioned court, where a case is being tried by the old method, you will find the judge sitting with his hand on a book a thousand years old, and a deep furrow on his brow. You will see and hear a weary lawyer drearily pleading his case, citing only the law and the precedents. If you go into a court where a case is tried in the modern way, you will see the judge sitting on the front of his chair, leaning forward over the bench, eagerly listening to the facts that relate this case to the lives of working men and women. Now counsel says to the judge, 'Do not hang this waist or skirt upon the wall and say, Ab

stractly considered, this is a desirable garment," but view it in relation to this man or this woman.' Never again in the history of the world can jurisprudence be what it was before Mr. Brandeis pleaded the Oregon case."

For the coming year the new feature of the League's work is indicated by the resolution suggesting to President Wilson that he include in his legislative programme a bill, modeled on the Federal Child Labor Law, to establish the eight-hour day for women who work on goods subject to inter-State commerce. A second resolution pledged the League to support any bill appropriate to this purpose which may be introduced. A third resolution recommended to the hundred Consumers' Leagues in many States that they continue the efforts begun in 1910 to promote laws for the shorter working day during the coming winter, when forty Legislatures will be in session.

THE OPEN SEASON FOR GLASS EYES

At this same meeting of the National Consumers' League Mrs. Davis R. Dewey, the woman member of the Massachusetts State Board of Labor and Industry, called to the attention of both organizations a vice common to many laws limiting the working hours of women. This consists in bestowing upon a State commission power to extend the working day beyond the limit specified in the statute in the case of seasonal trades. Mrs. Dewey quoted the question of a candy manufacturer: Why is manufacturing glass eyes a seasonal occupation? Why can't people who make glass eyes wait? Candy has to be rushed for Christmas; then the trade dies down in Lent. It is dead all summer. In hot weather people want cool drinks, not candy. But what's the hurry about glass eyes?"

The astonished Board to whom this query was addressed learned, in the end, that the glass eyes in question are prepared not for people but for animals, and are in great demand, occasioning "rush" orders, at the close of the hunting season, when successful hunters are impatient to have the skins of their trophies stuffed and mounted.

Candy and glass eyes are merely two of a long list of products for which exemptions are demanded under the labor laws of many States. Baby carriages, traps for wild beasts, costly jewels, Easter bonnets, and many other

objects are put forth as seasonal products whose makers should be granted exemptions. Granting and refusing them is a difficult task for State commissions. Commissioners who oppose granting exemptions lengthening the working day are always in danger that at the expiration of their first term of office they must give way to more pliant officials. Mrs. Dewey therefore besought the advocates of the eight-hour law to oppose all exemptions. If, however, any are provided, the responsibility for them should be shouldered by Legislatures, and the terms clearly placed in the statutes. The National Consumers' League indorsed Mrs. Dewey's position.

THE UNIVERSITY AND
POLICE STANDARDS

On the list of special lecturers at Harvard University this season will be found the name of Raymond B. Fosdick, of the Rockefeller Foundation. His theme will be "Police Administration in Europe and America." He will speak as an observer and investigator who, at close range, has studied the problem about which he speaks.

Inclusion of this topic in the course of lectures on municipal government to which the public is now invited by Harvard University is not a chance affair, for Harvard College has always interested itself in the affairs of the city in which it exists. Added interest is aroused by Mr. Fosdick's lectures from the fact that the Mayor of Cambridge is planning to increase greatly the efficiency and special training of the local police force, and he intends to have men of the department present at the lectures by the New York expert. It will be strange if Boston's progressive Police Commissioner, Mr. O'Meara, does not show equal alertness and order some of his subordinates to take the course.

European universities have long since made provision for this form of education, in which Harvard now has the chance to pioneer. If, as the outcome of this initiation of formal relations between a university and a police force, either Cambridge or Boston or both communities alter the traditional attitude of their citizens toward policemen and come to see them in their right light as potential educators as well as protectors of life and property, they will do a National service. All other callings that have come under the influence of universities have broadened and deepened their ideals. Policing will not be an exception.

1916

GERMANY'S OFFER OF PEACE

Germany is now willing to take part in that general European conference which, on the part of Great Britain, Sir Edward Grey proposed in the last days of July, 1914. At that time Germany flouted the proposal, preferring the appeal to arms. After two years of experiencing this appeal to arms, she admits it (in the words of her Chancellor) to be "a catastrophe . . . which injure the most precious achievements of humanity,” and she now proposes to talk the matter over.

In estimating this offer of peace we must acquaint ourselves with the causes of the war, the "obscure fountains from which its stupendous flood has burst forth," and the purposes of those who are responsible for the war. If the advocates of Germany are right-if England, France, and Russia were leagued together to destroy Germany; if she saw them contriving to hem her in, preventing her normal development, and planning to destroy her, as a traveler sees bandits lurking in ambush in the road before him, and she attacked them in self-defense, and has now succeeded in thwarting their murderous designs then her peace proposals may be regarded as magnanimous.

But we do not so read history. On the contrary, we believe that Germany inherited the ambitions of Frederick the Great and imported the ambitions of Napoleon the Great. Germany believed that the Teutons should dominate Europe and control the civilization of the world. Her overweening ambition poisoned her miseducated conscience. She was as conscientious as Philip II of Spain and Louis XVI of France. Democracy was as abhorrent to her ruling powers as Protestantism to the Duke of Alva. She prepared to crush democracy and watched for her opportunity. Her preparation was made with extraordinary efficiency. Her navy, her military railways, her army register including every man capable of bearing arms, her extraordinary equipment prepared and ready for every possible contingency, made clear her designs to the few thoughtful men of Europe, but were all disregarded by the thoughtless-that is, the majority. She waited and watched for the opportune moment and the justifying occasion. The discontent in Ireland and India, the factional fights, religious and political, in France, the rising revolt of the repressed peasantry in Russia, made the time opportune. The assassination of

849

the Crown Prince of Austria furnished the occasion. The offer to arbitrate the question of Servia's responsibility for that crime, the urgent request of England, seconded not only by France and Russia but by Germany's own ally, Italy, to attempt a peaceful settlement by an international conference she promptly, not to say haughtily, refused. Her time had come, and she struck the blow for which she had been long preparing.

In the war which followed she was as ruthless as her military leaders could have desired. She violated treaty rights, disregarded international law, made war upon non-combatants, perpetrated murder on land and piracy on the high seas, by her methods drove Italy into the ranks of her enemies, and set the moral "sentiment of practically all neutral nations against her. She has failed. True, she has kept her enemies off her soil; true, she has won some dramatic victories. But she is a nation besieged. Her colonies are gone. Her fleet is bottled up.

Her hopes of conquest are destroyed. Her people, wonderfully submissive to her authority, wonderfully loyal to their Fatherland, are perplexed. They are still submissive; they are still loyal; but they do not understand, or, to speak more accurately, they are beginning to understand. She cries, Halt! and calls for peace.

This is our reading of history. If we read it aright, the object of her proposal is clear. It is to unite her people, to justify herself to the mind and conscience of the neutral world, to introduce dissension in the councils of her enemies. The answer of the Allies should be prompt. And it should include some statement of the lines upon which they are willing to negotiate for peace. Those conditions should at least include the following:

The immediate evacuation of all foreign soil by the German armies.

A declared readiness to make some compensation for the irreparable injury inflicted upon Belgium and northern France.

The expulsion of the Turk from Europe. The freedom of the Dardanelles for the commerce of the world.

And a council of European Powers, perhaps of world powers, to consider what measures should be taken for protecting the rights and well-being of the people of Alsace and Lorraine, Poland and Lithuania, and the Balkan States; and pre-eminently what measures can be taken to prevent future wars

between civilized nations, and to lift off the burden of an intolerable militarism from the overburdened people.

It has been claimed by some English newspaper writers that Germany should be punished for her crime against humanity. It is not the business of other nations to judge and punish a sovereign nation. Judgment and punishment may be left to God. The example of the United States may be pointed to as one which worked well and is worth following. The North made no attempt to punish the South, or even the leaders of the Southern revolt. But it is the duty of the nations to take such measures as will forever make it impossible-or at least improbable that the spirit of Frederick the Great or Napoleon will ever inflict another such tragedy on Europe as the war of 1914. Justice and mercy unite in demanding that the war, terrible as it is, go on until that protection for future generations is assured. Peace without that assurance would be more terrible than war.

THE WAY TO WIN

The remaking of Cabinets which has been going on in Great Britain and France has a common cause and a common purpose. It does not mean despondency; much less despair. It means determination. The Allies were never more fixed than to-day in their purpose to fight the battle of civilization and democracy until that cause is won. This Germany and her dependent nations will speedily find out in the answer of the Allies to any proposals of peace that Germany may make which aim at German ascendency over Europe and ultimately over the world.

..

In a word, this political change in France and England means concentration of war leadership. This does not involve the overthrow of democracy; it means the application of the power of democracy effectively. As in this country a school of political thinkers urges the doctrine of the short ballot " in the belief that democracy can often best accomplish its ends by deputing its power to a small executive body, so in France and England democracy is true to itself when it asks that the vast issue of war and the still vaster issue of the future of Europe be controlled by a centralized executive power.

It is not a question of a man or of men, but of methods. Thus in France, where Briand has

been a splendidly efficient leader, the change does not disturb him in his power, simply because he is the right man in the right place. In England the people- that is, the democracy (for England, with its King, its House of Lords, and its aristocracy, is none the less truly democratic)-has become convinced, first, that a large War Council is cumbrous, and, secondly, that the one man in England who should be at the head of affairs is Lloyd George. The change in England, therefore, unlike that, in France, involves the retiral of Mr. Asquith and the placing of the war power in the hands of a small council.

This does not discredit Mr. Asquith; nor in France will it throw discredit upon General Joffre if, as reported, he is replaced by General Nivelle in command of the Allied armies in France. Mr. Asquith's services in bringing all England together politically at the outset of the war will always be remembered. General Joffre's services in organizing the French army, in planning to meet the terrible German onslaught at the beginning of the war, and in turning retreat into victory at the Battle of the Marne will never be forgotten by a grateful nation. Viscount Grey also; who gives way to Mr. Balfour as Secretary of State, has. splendid achievement to his credit for keeping Great Britain's record right in trying to prevent the war, and later in ranging herself in behalf of Belgium and justice.

But every day brings its own problem in a world crisis like this. England and France must do now that which is the best thing for the immediate problems and the immediate future. What is being done in both countries is well epitomized in a phrase in a despatch from Paris, which says: "New blood for old, economy and efficiency for wastefulness and lack of concentration in governmental administration-this is what Premier Briand is aiming at in reconstruction." 'Carry on" and "Stick it out " have been watchwords of the British private soldier; Mr. Britling Sees It Through" is the title of the most significant English war novel. England means to carry on, England means to stick it out, England means to see it through. And so does France.

66