W

HAT will the South do in the 1924 Democratic Conven

tion? What will the South

do in the election?

Usually, the latter question is a superfluity. But this year some close observers of political conditions 'neath the famous and elusive Mason and Dixon's Line are convinced that under certain contingencies, such as the nomination of a "wet" as Democratic candidate for President, several of the Southern States would be doubtful in the election.

Nor is the South's position in the Convention as weak as might on the surface appear. Although the States of this section lack in themselves enough convention votes to nominate a candidate, they do possess, by virtue of the two-thirdsmajority rule in force, a strength amply adequate to veto the choice of any man obnoxious to them.

The sudden death of President Harding, with its consequent effect of changing the Republican Convention next year from a ratification rally into a free-forall scramble for the nomination, has not affected thus far the status of the various Democratic aspirants in the South, nor has it eliminated the grave danger to the Democratic party in the South of a "wet" candidate.

Thus far of course there are two outstanding contenders for the Democratic nomination: William G. McAdoo and Oscar W. Underwood. Their partisans are already actively engaged in "lining up" delegates for the Convention. But before going into a consideration of the political assets and liabilities of these aspirants it may be well to look into the qualifications which a large, and likely dominant, part of Southern Democracy is applying as a touchstone to the wouldbe standard-bearers.

In brief, the South wants the next candidate to be "right" on these matters:

1. Prohibition. Economically and politically, the South is dry, and intends to remain so. It would be more likely to split with the Democratic party on prohibition than on any other single issue. If a "wet" were selected as Presidential candidate to pacify the damp demands of Tammany, the loss might be greater than the gain. Tennessee's back

sliding in 1920, when the electoral vote of the Volunteer State appeared in the Harding column, should be remembered. Kentucky is not too firmly Democratic for a misstep not to alienate her. Republicans in Virginia carry the Ninth Congressional District regularly, and could perhaps put up a stiff scrap throughout the State if the Democratic throughout the State if the Democratic platform were wet. In Texas a "wet" for President, plus the Ku Klux Klan, might cause considerable trouble. The South won't be satisfied with a "wet" candidate, or even a "moist" one. A very appealing thing about President Harding's record to the South was his firm stand for thoroughgoing Volstead Act enforcement. President Coolidge's pronounced dry views continue this appeal, and may be a pillar of strength to the next G. O. P. nominee below MasonDixon's line, if he has a "wet" opponent.

2. League of Nations. Southern Democratic sentiment, in the main, is well convinced that America should in some way co-operate with the rest of the world in the world's rehabilitation. The League of Nations, the World Court, and other essays at this end have the cordial approval of the greater part of the party membership. The foreign vote is light; the native-born were, and are still, fired with the Wilsonian vision of what could come to the world through international co-operation. They still believe it possible, and will not take over-kindly to a candidate who emphasized his determination to balk them in this hope.

3. Liberalism of Spirit. There is a general feeling of unrest, of uneasiness, and of dissatisfaction with the politicians who have been prominent and influential in the past three or four years. There is a tendency to consider them the servants of the interests, rather than of the public; to think that certain powerful corporations have their attentive ear. This isn't voiced or understood by the lesser machine politicians, but by the lowly voters, and the ward heelers and errand runners are as ready as ever with their "me too" to Old Guard pronunciamentos. Often there are none so blind to popular feeling as the lesser politicians, who should be practical psychologists par excellence. The farmer, laboring man,

man on the street, in the South want a candidate whom they think can't be bought or influenced; a man who isn't a Wall Street lawyer or friend; who will do what he can to keep the high surtaxes high; who will batter down the tariff wall, promote better markets for farm products, stop sugar and gasoline gouges, lower railway rates, and reduce taxes. It's a big order, but that's what the masses are talking about.

4. Aid for the Farmer. On the whole, the South has been the least unprosperous part of the country, agriculturally, for the past two years-largely because the ravages of the boll weevil, a real menace to the section's weal, have not been aided by a total closing of the world market for cotton. The Southern farmer does want the "spread" between producer's price and consumer's price narrowed. He doesn't like the middleman to get such a large part of it. He doesn't know exactly what's the matter, but he wants something done about it. He is beginning to suspect that the rebuilding of markets is what is needed, instead of tariffs, loans, free seeds, or political pana

ceas.

5. Muscle Shoals. The South wants Henry Ford's offer for the great unfinished hydroelectric plant accepted. It I wishes it because Ford has fired the imagination of the people with his vision of an industrial city in the Tennessee River Valley seventy-five miles long. The aspirant for the nomination who does not make a definite and favorable statement as to his advocacy of the Ford proposal will not arouse a great deal of enthusiasm in the central South. The man on the street thinks that politicians have side-tracked this offer; that it has been a dirty piece of work.

As to Candidates. One might as well dismiss John W. Davis, of West Virginia and New York; the South doesn't know him, and isn't strong for a candidate to whom it will have to be introduced. A few of the Old Guard, inclined to the interests, tried to boom him in 1920, and didn't get very far with it. The name of E. T. Meredith, the former Secretary of Agriculture, doesn't rouse a ripple.

Then there is Governor Alfred E. Smith, of New York. A liberal; a poor

boy who has worked his way up; a candidate whose career is of the Lincolnesque type, usually so appealing to the masses. But Smith is a wet. He has signed the Prohibition Enforcement Repeal Bill in New York State with a lengthy appeal aimed at "States' rights" support, which fell flat in the South. He eliminates himself. Prohibition and liberalism go hand in hand in the South, where here it was always the reactionaries, the hard-shells, the tools of the interests, who fought prohibition. Again, Al Smith is a Catholic. There is no use discounting the Ku Klux Klan in politics. The order of hooded knights has had a few defeats in recent elections, but it is representative of a considerable body of Southern belief which has imbued itself with the belief that the Catholic Church is seeking control of the American Government, that it is corrupting the schools, and so forth. However mistaken such ideas, they are widely and fervently held, and the nomination of a communicant of the Church of Rome would alienate thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of highly valuable votes.

Oscar Underwood, Alabama Senator, has announced his candidacy for the nomination. His support comes largely from the machine politicians, ultra-conservatives, and reactionaries, aided by what remains of the Southern "wets." Despite his declaration for enforcement of prohibition, there is considerable disquietude as to Senator Underwood's record and position on prohibition. His record of opposing ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment and of fighting a State Constitutional amendment providing prohibition for Alabama is well known. Despite his accidental geographical position, Underwood would not command the strong support of Southern "drys." His economic views are considered somewhat illiberal.

Underwood's ability, likability, and power of leadership are universally conceded. He is a forceful speaker and personally popular. But outside of the Old Guard, who wish to see a return of the "good old days," his candidacy has aroused no great enthusiasm; even in Alabama it does not seem spontaneous. The Senator has been a protagonist of the Ford offer, but not quite as active as north Alabamans have wished. His League of Nations views are orthodox enough, but not of the determined nature generally desired.

Control of Alabama political machinery gives Underwood a good chance at those delegates unless Ford still makes a fight or the McAdoo organizers alter their policy of not invading other candidates' native States except for secondchoice instructions. Underwood has

Women

are acting as executive heads of the Republican and Democratic parties.

Women

are urging a policy of aloofness from partisanship and the doctrine that enrollment in one party is not necessarily a life

sentence.

Women

are fighting for a separate party of their own, working

for women against men.

What part will these conflicting elements play in the coming elections and the future development of America? A forthcoming Outlook article gives the views of such women as Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont, National President of the National Woman's Party; Mrs. Maude Wood Park, President of the League of Women Voters; Mrs. Emily Newell Blair, Vice-Chairman of the Democratic Party; and Mrs. Harriet Taylor Upton, of the Republican National Committee.

always been strong with Old Guard Georgia politicians, but with the people, in a primary, McAdoo might lead him. He is primary, McAdoo might lead him. He is weak in the Carolinas and in Tennessee, where, significantly enough, his adherents are largely the friends and followers of the irreconcilable Senator John K. Shields, a fact much commented upon in the State.

Underwood has a friend in Senator Robinson, of Arkansas, but McAdoo is generally stronger in that State. Underwood's real hope for delegates is in the "wet" East--New York, New Jersey, etc.-and not in the South. The attitude toward him was expressed the other day by a typical man on the street: "Oh, yes, Underwood's got ability, but he's been too wet to suit me."

McAdoo is the second candidate now, before the public who demands consideration. He is Southern by birth, born at Milledgeville, Georgia, the old State capital; educated at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville; a young lawyer in Chattanooga. He has a host of personal friends and a few personal enemies in the South. His subsequent residence in New York and his present affiliations in California give him a Nation-wide hold geographically. McAdoo more nearly fits the qualifications the South requires

than Senator Underwood. He is a strong "dry;" Mr. Bryan, whose tepidity toward McAdoo at the San Francisco Convention in 1920 contributed to the latter's defeat there, is now thought to have been assured of McAdoo's soundness on prohibition. The great majority of Bryan men in the South are now fighting for McAdoo with ardor and determination.

On the League of Nations McAdoo's position is more conciliatory than that of Mr. Wilson; yet it is unswerving on the fundamental belief that America must co-operate in the rehabilitation of the world by membership in some type of world association or league. Nor does McAdoo see why "the League" isn't still a possibility. He is an internationalist in the finest sense. A liberal at heart, his theories of low tariffs, taxes distributed in proportion to ability to bear them, better markets for farm products, firmer control of monopolies and trusts by the Government, agree excellently with traditional Democratic theories.

The main ground for opposition to him is the fear that he will seek Government ownership of railways. Adherents of other aspirants are already making the welkin ring with denunciations of Government ownership--and of McAdoo. It is a position, by the way, which Mr. McAdoo has not, and will not, take. It can be stated with authority that he never has been and is not now committed to a policy of public ownership of railways. In recent discussions with his political advisers he has made it plain that he won't be caught in this pitfall. His attitude on it is that, while ultimately conditions might perhaps make such a step advisable, they have not yet arrived; that while war conditions made Government operation a necessary measure for the successful prosecution of the war, peace-time factors are different; that private ownership has not exhausted. its capacity for operation, and must, under strict supervision, have another chance.

Throughout the South labor is extremely friendly to McAdoo; Negro labor remembers that during the war McAdoo put Negro railway engineers and firemen on the same pay status as the whites. The Southern farmer, whose crop prices were not limited (cotton, a non-food crop, being the main output), has no dislike for McAdoo.

In a nutshell, Underwood's Southern strength is largely political; McAdoo's, It personal, political, and economic. is more likely to grow to a powerful organized force. At any rate, the bubbling of the South's political pot between now and June, 1924, will be well worth the watching.

P

ERHAPS from no author have we

derived more pleasure without pain than from Charles. Lamb. His "Essays of Elia" have been familiar to all lovers of fine literature for a century. A truly literary atmosphere had just been created for him by Thomas Gray and Smollett, by Chatterton and Sterne, by Richardson and Fielding, Swift and Pope. Only twenty-five years before Samuel Johnson had lit his torch and literary London was still being scorched by it when Lamb made his appearance. Burns, Wordsworth, and Scott were each under eighteen, and Jane Austen was born the same year, and she, more vividly than any other, portrays England of Lamb's day.

The hundredth anniversary of the "Essays of Elia" is being, one might almost say, hallowed in various ways this fall. The Grolier Club, of New York, is having an exhibition of "Lambiana" where one can see displayed the various editions of the "Essays of Elia," those given by Lamb to his friends inscribed in his hand, and much valued material relating to their conception and publication.

one of the Elia essays. After Christ's Hospital, the India Office claimed the best years of his saddened life. There is an almost forgotten verse written at this time by his early friend Charles Lloyd which hints at the hidden sorrows of Lamb's life:

Perhaps it is the old inns and temples of London that more than anything else link Charles Lamb with the present. In the Middle Ages the Knights Templars made the Inner Temple their stronghold. History tells us that the Red Cross Knights walked there at eve, and the gallants of Tudor and Stuart times paraded their powder and ruffles. And here once grew, according to Shakespeare, in deadly rivalry, the fatal white and red roses of York and Lancaster. But the Temple has an added charm, since Charles Lamb was born there in 1775. From his earliest years he breathed the poetry and romance of such surroundings. From here to the monastic atmosphere of the School of Christ's Hospital, one of the few foundations which escaped Henry VIII's acquisitive zeal, Lamb went to receive his education in the Chaucerian atmosphere of friars, pardoners, and priests. It was here he met Coleridge, who remained his lifelong friend. The other friendships he formed here and the merits and demerits he detected in the arrangements, manners, and customs of the school are already familiar to us in his essay "Christ's Hospital Five-and-Thirty Years Ago,"

He walked along his path in steadiness,

In solitude, and in sublimity;
None ever knew his desolate distress,
And none shall ever know it now from
me.

Between Lamb and his admiring friends Charles and Robert Lloyd existed a very unusual friendship. It was this friendship which inspired the following letter, which might easily be called Lamb's "Essay on Friendship." It was doubtless inspired by Lamb's knowledge of his own weaknesses and his reluctance to have any one put him on the heights that

Robert Lloyd had erected for him. The kindliness of Lamb and what the Scotch would call his "humeelity" make the letter most interesting:

My dear Robert, Mary is better, and I trust that she will yet be restored to me. I am in good spirits, so do not be anxious about me; I hope you get reconciled to your situation. The worst in it is that you have no friend to talk to-but wait in patience, and you will in good time make friends. The having a friend is not indispensibly necessary to virtue or happiness-religion removes those barriers of sentiment which partition us from the disinterested love of our brethren-we are commanded to love our enemies, to do good to those that hate us-how much more is it our duty then to cultivate a forbearance and complacence towards those who only differ from us in dispositions and ways of thinking there is always, without

our

very unusual care there must always be, something of self in friendship, we love our friend because he is like ourselves, can consequences altogether unmix'd and pure be reasonably expected from such a source -do not even the publicans and sinners the same? Say, that you love a friend for his moral qualities, is it not rather because those qualities resemble what you fancy your own? . . . this then is not without danger. . . . The only true cement of a valuable friendship, the only thing that even makes it not sinful, is when two friends propose to become mutually of benefit to each other in a moral or rcligious way-but even this friendship is perpetually liable to the mixture of something not purewe love our friend, because he is ours so we do our money, our wit, knowledge, our virtue, and where ever this sense of appropriation & property enters, so much is to be subtracted from the value of that friendship or that virtue. Our duties are to do good expecting nothing again, to bear with contrary dispositions, to be candid and forgiving, not to crave and long after a communication of sentiment & feeling, but rather to avoid dwelling upon those feelings, however good, because they are our own-a man may be intemperate & selfish, who indulges in good feelings, for the mere pleasure they give him. I do not wish to deter you from making a friend, a true friend, and such a friendship where the parties are not blind to each other's faults, is very useful and valuable-I perceive a tendency in you to this error, Robert. I know you have chosen to take up an high opinion of my moral worth, but I say it before God, and I do not lie, you are mistaken in me. I could not bear to lay open all my failings to you, for the sentiment of shame would be too pungent. Let this be as an example to you.

Robert, friends fall off, friends mistake us, they grow unlike us, they go away, they die, but God is everlasting & uncapable of change, and to him we may look with chearful, unpresumptuous hope, while we discharge the duties of life in situations more untowardly than yours. You complain of the impossibility of improving yourself, but be assur'd that the opportunity of improvement lies more in the mind than the situation-humble yourself before God, cast out the selfish principle, wait in patience, do good in every way you can to all sorts of people, never be easy to neglect a duty tho' a small one, praise God for all, see his hand in all things, & he will in time raise you up many friends-or be himself in stead an unchanging friend-God bless you. C. LAMB.

&

This expressive letter was written in Lamb's early youth, when he was un

consciously storing his mind with observations and experiences which were later to be incorporated in his "Elia Essays." His first essay consisted very largely of material gathered in his seventeenth year. It is probably unique for a man who all his life had meant to be a writer not to find himself until he was fortyfive, and then to do so with material fetched from his teens.

The "London Magazine" made its first appearance in January, 1820, and Lamb was invited to contribute occasional essays. The first, "The South Sea House," appeared in August. When writing the essay, Lamb remembered an obscure Italian clerk in that office of the name of Ellia, and as a joke appended that name to the essay. In subsequent essays he continued the same signature, which became inseparably connected with the series. "Call him Ellia," writes Lamb, to his publisher John Taylor, and it seems probable that the name was really thus spelled. Between August, 1820, and December, 1822, Lamb contributed twenty-eight essays, thus signed, at the rate of about one a month. The success of the series was so great that in 1823 Taylor and Hessey induced Lamb to publish them in a volume entitled "Elia, Essays, which have appeared under that signature in the London Magazine." Lamb states that he should have received thirty pounds profit, but that he never received the money. The essays in their magazine form brought him only one hundred and seventy pounds.

distinction of having passed into one hundred different editions during one hundred years. This honor has not been. granted to any of Lamb's contemporaries, among whom were Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, and Carlyle. Some of these were Lamb's dearest friends, but most of them were full of reforms-religious, moral, and politicaland, although Lamb lived in his own time fully, he was never of it. During his fifty-nine years he lived through the American Revolution, the career and death of Napoleon Bonaparte, the Battle of the Nile, the Irish Rebellion, the Battle of Trafalgar, the War of 1812, and the Battle of Waterloo. He saw George III, George IV, William IV, the fall of Louis XVI, and also the rise of Fox, Burke, and Pitt. But, as Pater so truly. says, he succeeded in catching and recording more frequently than others. "the gayest, happiest attitude of things.' It is because he succeeded in touching the heart rather than the intellect that one hundred years after, in a world full of new conquests, deeper sorrows, worldwide distress, when one asks the question, "Why is 'Elia' so treasured a volume?" that one must answer, "Because Lamb describes with so much sympathy most of the normal feelings of mankind, because he understands so truly and is so cheerful to the lowly, so companionable to the luckless. Because he is always on the side of those who need a friend."

Lamb, above all others, possessed the

W. Hazlitt

material into gold. "A Dissertation upon Roast Pig," "The Praise of Chimney-Sweepers," "A Bachelor's Complaint of the Behaviour of Marricd People," "Grace Before Meat." Who but a master could treat such commonplace topics with confidence of success? Lamb makes them fresh and beautiful. The fashion to-day is to sexualize great and noble sentiments, but Lamb elevated the commonplace instead of degrading the excellent.

We are all familiar with the essay on "Roast Pig," the original manuscript of which found its way last year into the library of J. P. Morgan, who paid the large sum of $12,600 for its possession.

Lamb's first panegyric upon "Roast Pig" was written in a letter to William Hazlitt:

Dear Hazlitt, We have received your Pig and return you thanks, it will be drest in due form with appropriate sauce this day. . . . Mary has been very ill indeed since you saw her, that is, as ill as she can be to remain at home. But she is a good deal better now, owing to a very careful regimen, she drinks nothing but water and never