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areas eastward to the Atlantic seaboard is ebbing and the flood tide of transportation setting in strong towards the adolescent ports of the Pacific. The big boom in shipping due to the war, the realization of new markets in the Orient and Latin America, and, above all, the waking up of long-haul shippers to the advantages of the Panama Canal are bringing about something like an economic revolution in Alberta and Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and the Northwest States. The effect of the change is felt severely as far east as Winnipeg and Duluth.

Practically all of Alberta's grain and cattle move west now over the grades of the Rockies by the Canadian

Pacific or the Canadian National. Old distributing centers, upset by the change, distributing centers, upset by the change, are beginning to turn to manufacturing industries, and in the inevitable readjustment several communities are weathering some comparatively hard-but eventually healthy-times.

In 1924 Vancouver shipped 55,873,788 bushels of wheat and 936,033 barrels of Canadian-milled flour, mostly to the United Kingdom and the Orient. Shipments of that size and character have called into existence during the have called into existence during the same period a gross shipping tonnage of 14,473,518, over a million tons in excess of the figures for 1923! A chorus of pile-drivers, concrete-mixers, and steel

riveters, building millions of dollars' worth of docks, elevators, and warehouses, advertise the growing port more impressively than the printed or the spoken proud words of Boards of Trade and Publicity Bureaus. These and other factors in the hearty commercial and economic thriving of British Columbiano mention of mines and lumber, fisheries and agriculture provide an adequate justification in fact for a grateful state of mind. But it is the conviction of one uncommercial traveler that, even without these material evidences of a beneficent Providence, Vancouver and Victoria would go right on saying "K'you!" just the same.

Southeastern Europe
Europe in Resurgence

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By LOUIS E. VAN NORMAN

E who have been fortunate enough to grow up in the United States sometimes seem to have short memories. It took the new American democracy-on the whole, a rather homogeneous unit and with a high moral background-some thirteen years after its Declaration of Independence to adopt a Constitution, and one point of difference over that famous instrument was not settled without blood and tears for more than half a century. We are apt to forget this in criticising the Europe of to-day.

It is now a little more than six years since the Armistice put an end to the "official" fighting of the Great War. That is not very long. But time has already begun to show its curative power, and this power has induced the changed mental attitude necessary for Europe's healing.

The Hard School of Bolshevism W EALTH, the wherewithal to secure things materially desirable and the opportunity to pursue intellectual ambitions, has always been the product of brains.

Conversely, labor is productive only as it is guided by intelligence.

This is the lesson which the people of eastern Europe are learning from the extraordinary events which have taken place during the past six years in what was formerly known as Russia. It has been a hard lesson to learn. The evidence, however, is all to the effect that it is being learned, from Finland to Turkey, all along the frontier of Soviet territory, from the Baltic to the Adriatic and the Black Seas. It would seem that

even the Russian masses themselves have although Bulgaria even now occasionally begun to sense it dimly. has a new spell.

We who have watched the working of the Bolshevik experiment in Soviet Russia from near by have had no illusions as to its meaning. No amount of horror at the old régime, no honest sympathy with the efforts of a real people's republic, have blinded us to the facts. Workers, without skilled direction, do not

The leaders who are at the front in these countries are more practical men than formerly, more rational. They are no longer the emotional leaders of early post-war days, warped by years of brooding over ancient wrongs.

The Peasants' New Leaders

create wealth. They do not even pre- E

serve it. The new extreme radicalism as exemplified in Russia was hailed as a paradise in practice, first of all, for the industrial workers. But let us face realities. If every industrial establishment in the United States from, let us say, the United States Steel Corporation down to the smallest home factory on any side street in any American city, should pass overnight from the experienced management which had made its successful operation possible under the control of the hired hands themselves, if the employees chosen for direction were selected not by virtue of their skill or fitness for the task before them but because of their loyalty to the political party in power, if the motto "Workers of the World, Unite," meant (as it has meant in Russia) "unite" for anything but work, we should begin to have an idea of what Bolshevism has done industrially for the Russian people. This the Russian folk themselves have begun to understand.

An indirect effort to do the same thing took place in Italy, but the Italian workman himself saw the light. There have been hankerings after this extraordinary negation of progress in other European countries, but not for long. The fever in the Balkans has probably quite passed,

XTRAORDINARILY interesting it is to watch the sure, if slow, peasant mentality of southeastern Europe as it awakes to the necessity for leadership, for intelligent direction and guidance in matters that affect its own welfare. The peasant in these countries has now learned that the larger land holdings and the freedom to roam where he will have not brought the salvation of which he dreamed. A new line of thought and action is necessary. Not more land, but better cultivation of the land already in his hands-that is the pressing need. In short, what he must have is not extension, but intensification of his economic situation. He must have intelligent leadership, brains.

He is still very suspicious of the townsman, for he believes that this city dweli. is living at his-the landsman's-expense. But the land worker himself is gradually increasing his wants. He is becoming a consumer of many things which in former years he never thought of or, perhaps, even never knew existed.

Perhaps as yet sufficient stress has not been laid upon the meaning of the plight of the hundred million human beings and their wants and aims in the new countries growing out of the war, those lands through which the Danube flows.

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Down to the time of the war this territory (with Russia) was the granary of Europe. In normal times both Poland and Rumania could feed their populations and still have a surplus for export. Moreover, the non-food-producing and densely populated industrial areas of Germany and Austria are so close at hand that there never should be any lack of a market. Realizing this, even the most radical advocates of these agrarian reforms have always insisted that changes in landownership be effected with a view. to increasing, not diminishing, production.

Even when these countries "come back" with agricultural production into the markets of the world on the old scale as they most certainly will in the not far distant future-the effect of their Competition as food producers on the inuustrial countries will most assuredly be lessened by their stimulated, increased consumption of manufactured goods.

Even the problem of finance, that black beast of all post-war periods since history began, is gradually losing its terrors. Americans are accustomed to blame the Finance Ministers of Europe because they do not pay their debts, cut expenditures, disband their armies, tax more heavily, and "balance their budgets." Those of us who at close range have watched the struggles of the gov

The scene of resurgence

ernments of the eastern half of the Continent to follow out these praiseworthy injunctions realize that up to the present their failure has not been wholly due to lack of either earnest desire or honest effort. The reason for failure is to be found very largely in a combination of conditions-economic, political, financial, social-utterly beyond the power of these governments to overcome without outside assistance.

The Finance Ministers of these new nations are not stupid. Many of them are more than ordinarily intelligent and capable men. They realize only too well the magnitude of the task before them, and are putting forth Herculean efforts to accomplish it. More. They are accomplishing it, slowly, with many mistakes and (it must be admitted) a good deal of apparently unnecessary interference with the workings of sound economic laws, but in the end achieving. It is being perceived that the time and energy heretofore spent in fighting the other fellow might be utilized much more profitably in co-operating with him for mutual advantage.

The "Island" of Rumania

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broad general lines what he has just attempted to set forth.

The old Rumania was, generally speaking, the alluvial valley of the Danube a western extension, as it were, of the famous "Black Lands" of Russia. The new Rumania is bisected by the Carpathians, or Transylvanian Alps, which form the southern rim of what used to be known as the Hungarian basin, one of nature's most bountiful granaries.

One eminent Rumanian historian and author (perhaps humorously) has claimed that Rumania is an island, bounded on all sides by water-the rivers Dniester, Tisza, and Danube, and the Black Sea. The political boundary on the west does not actually coincide with the Tisza, but the comparison is not a wholly misleading one.

The historians tell us that at the time the Romans arrived the land which is now Rumania was inhabited by a people exclusively pastoral, and that later these herdsmen were driven into the mountains by the succeeding wave of barbarians from the East. Bucur, the shepherd, who-according to traditiongave his name to Bucharest, was a typical Rumanian of the country's infant days.

As time went on, Rumania became more and more agricultural, interested

chiefly in cereals. When the Great War broke out, the old Rumania was so predominantly agricultural that nearly ninetenths of its population were engaged in growing grain. So generous had nature been that the Rumanians could live on a

themselves as Rumanian and going eastward, instead of westward, to their logical seaboard outlets at Galatz, Braila, and Constantza.

American passports (properly viséd) evi+ dently did not suffice to allay suspicions at that time and place.

My letters from Bratianu-"happy thought"! After reading them, the cus

A Cap of Fleece in the Moonlight toms man, addressing the semicircle of

forty per cent crop and send sixty THE writer's introduction to the pas

per cent abroad for sale.

The natural economic evolution of the human race is working out in Rumaniafrom herdsman to farmer, from farmer to industrialist. With the acquisition of Transylvania and the Banat of Temesvar, the negligible industrial capacity of the old Rumania was very considerably increased. To the oil, lumber, and salt riches of the old Kingdom were added the metallurgical and textile resources and equipment of Transylvania and Bukowina. There are in these new provinces coal and iron in fairly close proximity to each other. There is in the mountains a considerable amount of un

developed water power. These facts, considered in relation to the large supplies of oil and gas, indicate attractive future possibilities for industry.

Down to 1867 the Rumanian peasant -practically a serf and chained to the soil-could not move freely enough to work in a factory. The early days of industry in Rumania furnish material for romance. Sixty years ago, for example (as one of the oldest inhabitants tells the writer), there were in the country only three factories-one for making tallow candles, one distillery, and one flour mill. Then it was the custom for the merchants of Bucharest to make semiannual trips to western or central western Europe for their goods. It was their custom-a party of six or eight of them -to start out from Galatz, Braila, or Bucharest in a carutza (somewhat like the old time "diligence"), which they bought outright, and journey for eight days to Brasov (then Kronstadt in Hungary), where there was railroad connection. There they usually sold the carutza, and when they returned they bought another for the journey to Bucharest. It is significant to note the fact that at least a proportion-and a growing proportion of the goods these merchants journeyed abroad to purchase at that time is now being made in the new Rumania.

In the face of enormous difficulties and discouragements, the transportation systems of the country, both land and water, are adjusting themselves to the needs of the Rumanian people. The routes of trade are slowly changing. Many of the products of Transylvanian mills-notably timber-which formerly flowed along the old Hungarian railroad lines to Budapest and reached the sea at Trieste and Fiume, are now refinding

toral age in Rumania and the Rumanian peasant's respect for forcible leadership was in March, 1919, and this age was symbolized by one of the Rumanian caciulas (chapeau de mouton) or sheepskin caps which, in the picturesque descriptive phraseology of my Irish secretary, resembles nothing so much as a bouquet of cold-slaw.

We reached Rumanian soil by a boat journey down the Danube from Belgrade to Turnu-Severin. We carried with us letters from Premier Ioan Bratianu (whom I had met in Paris) to his brother Vintila, then a private citizen, now Minister of Finance.

It was a perfectly gorgeous moonlight Sunday night at nine o'clock when the panting, laboring boat drew up at the wharf of Turnu-Severin. We were the only passengers for the stop, and were whisked off the boat in what seemed a second. Almost before we knew what had happened we were on the dock with our luggage-three trunks and a boxed typewriter-and we could see the boat gliding away across the river in that exquisite moonlight.

We looked up at the gently rising shore where the town began. It was like a scene out of grand opera-the marblecolumned custom-house, the snow-white residences stretching up the hill, and the boat slipping across the river in that soft light. No human being was in sight. It was beautiful but weird.

Then suddenly, as though out of the earth at my feet, arose a strange form with a high Rumanian cap of fleece. With a cruelly long and needlelike bayonet leveled at my chest, this being jabbered at me in an unknown tongue. I hastened to assure him politely but firmly that I was not the guilty one. Then another form, also surmounted by a cold-slaw cap, came up out of the ground, with a stiletto it seemed. Then another, and still another, until we were surrounded by a dozen or more of the most tatterdemalion banditti that ever wrecked a train or scuttled a ship. Bayonets, knives, poniards, ancient rifles - they were armed, almost literally, to the teeth. Hostility in suspense was their attitude towards us.

My secretary flew off to find some one who could speak some language we knew. He returned in a few moments-it seemed hours to me-with a polite customs official, who questioned us in French as to our business and credentials.

motley soldiery, informed them (so I learned afterward) that we were friends of Rumania, that the great Bratianu in Paris vouched for us, that they must show us every consideration, and that if they even demanded backsheesh from us woe betide them!

The effect of this harangue was magical. Benignity replaced belligerency on the faces of the pirate crew. Somehow, from somewhere, they produced two trasuras (Rumanian carriages), assisted us to get in one and put our luggage in the other, and, accepting nothing except a few cigarettes, transported us up the hill in a manner that might have befitted old Trajan himself. The cabman even declined any fee. It was all but a Roman triumph.

At the hotel the proprietor gravely informed us that the Rumanian masses always trust leaders "who can think." The great Bratianu was thinking for them in Paris, and they respected any one he recommended.

D

Linking up the Balkans

IFFICULT as it may be to believe, while the newspapers are still spilling oceans of ink in telling us of the wrongs, injustices, prejudices, and paganism of the war-torn old Continent lands, it is nevertheless a fact that the conviction is slowly forcing itself upon the European mind that national safety does not depend upon the suppression, or oppression, of others, and that national welfare can be built up with some regard for the welfare of one's neighbors.

Political and economic conditions in Europe are as yet far from what was hoped for or justifiably might have been hoped for six years after the close of the war. Measured by the point to which they are tending, these countries east of Vienna have not gone very far. Judged, however, by the distance they have covered since the starting-point, they have made if one is to be quite fair an scientific-some really remarkable prog

ress.

In most of these new states growing out of the war, in the new economic as well as in the new political units, there were problems most intricate and irritating growing out of different business practices, differing codes of laws, different social, political, and economic ideas, railroad systems built on different plans and with different aims, and many other widely conflicting social, political, and economic conceptions. In all these re

spects there has been considerable improvement. There is not quite so much nationalistic sputtering at the frontier lines as there was six years ago. The passport and customs examination nuisances still continue, but have been some-, what softened. Telephone connection is now in working order between the principal capitals of southeastern Europe and tariff tangles are being smoothed out. Direct through trains are increasing in number, and aviation is linking up the Balkans with the West.

A Dawes Plan for Every Nation

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THERE

HERE are still millions of Europeans who firmly believe that no salvation can come for their muddled and prostrate Continent except from America.

This

belief is just as firmly shared by many Americans. Rightly or wrongly, wisely or unwisely, a very large section of mankind believes that America must and will "save" Europe. Europe, however, is beginning to realize that she must do something for herself, and that it is not by corruptible things, such as silver and gold, that she can be redeemed. As an English writer recently put it: "It is her hatreds, her prejudices, her petty pride, her paganism, and her infantile sense of geography that she must surrender. When she repents, she will be saved, and not until then."

The Dawes Plan, the first expression of American active, practical participation in the "saving" of Europe, has aided Europe a good deal along this line. Psychologically, the older Continent was in a bad way until this plan was put into operation. Now, not only is there an actual Dawes Plan at work between Germany and her former enemies on the field of battle, but every little new nation of the Continent is working for a Dawes Plan of its own.

The stabilization of the European economic situation will not only result in a revival of world trade (which in itself cannot fail to be of interest to Americans), but it will settle the economic mind of the older Continent and that is what the older Continent needs. In the long run, political and economic sta

ty in Europe, reinforced by this more rational state of mind which has already begun to show itself, will bring with it a rise in thinking and living standards all over the world, and this will make for peace and normal intercourse, and thereby for the restoration of a demand on our national productive capacity upon which millions of our American people depend for material prosperity. The new peace and international intercourse, finally, will be a more intelligent peace and intercourse than formerly. The world has been through the fire.

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Vinland was forgotten when Columbus "discovered the New World"

West-West to Iceland-West to Greenland -West to Frisland-to Vinland, with its gentle clime, its grapes, its fertile soil! Such was the path of the Vikings to America and New England five hundred years before Columbus touched San Salvador. When these settlements disappeared, Vinland became forgotten-became a myth like Atlantis.

Had the Vikings conceived the idea of mapping the course of their travels, the history of the world might have been different. Then others could have followed them to the land that lay waiting with its promise of liberty and wealth.

The advance of civilization is dependent on the ability of man to put down his progress for others to use. For more than half a century it has been the proud, inspiring work of RAND MCNALLY & COMPANY to compile information of all the varying activities of man and to present it in convenient and attractive form for home and business use-official auto trails maps, mileage maps, radio maps, city guides, commercial maps, historical maps, biblical maps, atlases, globes. You will find that they are always most reasonably priced. For sale at all leading bookstores and stationers.

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270 Madison Avenue, New York San Francisco Los Ang

In writing to the above advertiser, please mention The Outlook

D

Edited by EDMUND PEARSON

Comedy and Melodrama

1

Novels Reviewed by H. W. BOYNTON

OODAB" is a brilliant young

study of pathetic middle age. Poor dear Henry Doodab is the well-known fellow of brilliant (if vague) possibilities and of dull certitudes. Our industrial system, has snared him and our institution of marriage has bound him hand and foot. His wife is a busy fool. His daughter is beyond his comprehension. They talk, however, like two books by the same author. When he says to his daughter (apropos of her complacently acknowledged unchastity), "One morally judges an action by the intent, not the result," Luella responds: "My dear Dab, such antiquated ethics. Why, your great-grandfather probably listened at his mother's bustle to the adage about hell's pavements, which, if I am not mistaken, your favorite William James brought up to date and made fashionable under the name of pragmatism.”

Doodab's only satisfying experience is in a fantastic world of dream, a sort of parti-colored monkey paradise where his subconscious or subliminal self (I suppose) has no end of rather maudlin fun. Well, Doodab loses his job, leaves home, and tries to "be himself," and failing, leaps at a freight engine which he imagines to be a creature of the monster of his private jungle; and that is the end of Doodab. Pathos, or bathos, of the hu

man misfit.

2

"Peter Vacuum" is a young study of youth which, for an agreeable change, keeps to the plane of romantic comedy. These young people are foolish but not loathsome; and this I suspect to be a fairly normal situation, current literature to the contrary. Anthony Gibbs (son of Sir Philip) endears himself to us in this first novel by believing in us-that is, in the inherent decency of the human nature which is our one common and inalienable possession. Not much can be said for the Earl of the piece, but we all know what an earl is. The rest of these amusing companions grow steadily on us from the beginning, even Lord Bertie, who is unpromising enough to start with, in all conscience. What looks like undergraduate farce turns into a pleasant romantic comedy, with a salutary under

1Doodab. By Harold A. Loeb. Boni & Liveright, New York. $2.

Peter Vacuum. By Anthony Gibbs. Lincoln MacVeagh, New York. $2.

current of satire upon Anglo-British relations. The young American millionaire who seems such an easy mark at Oxford is given his full innings before the game is over. An agreeable performance,

witty and kind.

A lighter and more rollicking bit of British comedy is "Mischief," by Ben Travers, the new English humorist whom William McFee discovered for us not long ago. This is much the best of his four novels. The fun is mellower and the action more spontaneous, and we are too much amused all round to keep thinking, "Well, this man is being funny!" Be it frankly admitted that the humor is of the broad "Charley's Aunt" style, with a plenitude or even plethora of improper situations; the fact remains that there is nothing in it to shock this well-cooked generation of novel readers and theater-goers. The performance may be vulgar, but you don't snigger over it; you laugh from the bottom of your diaphragm--if your constitution. happens to be robust enough to relish the performance at all. Remember, delicate reader, that your grandmother used to cry with laughter over "Josiah Allen's Wife."

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"Bindon Parva," by George A. Birmingham. We open the book with joy, looking for some new piece of spoofing by the irrepressible Canon. Not this time. The dedicatory letter to the author's wife at once prepares us for something different from this well-known hand. Canon Hannay has attempted that most difficult feat for an accepted humorist-a serious serious book. Jerome Jerome never got away from "Three Men in a Boat." Mark Twain's later melancholy was lost upon his twinkling audience. The present dedication has to be in some sense an apology. "Very likely I shall lose my friends by offering them these stories. Those who used to like to laugh with me will be disappointed; and very solemn people will not be able to shake off the contempt they have always felt for me. So it seems likely that no one will read these stories except you."

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The book proved

He was wrong. popular in England, and this edition contains a sober preface to American readers. Here the main theme of the book is defined as "the influence of emotion on inanimate things and the survival of passion after its agonists have passed away." These stories, in short, deal with an old church which is more or less tangibly haunted for one person, the incumbent priest, with the presences and memories of his predecessors. (A similar theme has just been treated in that striking first novel "The Rector of Maliseet," by Leslie Reid.)

Lovers of the fiction of romantic and exotic adventure know what to expect of Henry Milner Rideout. He began as a realist, and a mighty good one, in the days when Howells set the standard for American practitioners. You had to know how to write then, and Mr. Rideout didn't forget the art in turning definitely (I still wonder why) to romance. "Dulcarnon" is one of his best adventures in the fairyland of the Orient, which still has plenty of romantic glamour and more tangible loot for those who can find. One thing, rather refreshing, I note about this action; there isn't a woman in it, really in it, from first to last. A man's yarn, sufficient to itself, with its feats of mind and muscle, its disguises and ciphers and ancient palaces and hidden treasure; this last the treasure of the Great Alexander, no less! "Ek rupia sub-log ki wasti," as the fellow says on page 75.

"Mellowing Money," by Francis Lynde, is a readable story with too good a moral. At least the moral, or idea, is too insistent. The author keeps rubbing in his grand truth; to wit, that while sudden wealth is supposed to ruin a man, it may sometimes work the other way. The man of this tale is a sad case-a youth of breeding and talent who goes to pieces after the war and becomes a typical hobo. Chance strands him in his native town, where fate picks up the pieces of him and begins to build them together with the aid of a girl, of

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course. The romantic-didactic kind of

thing, for whomever it may concern.

I am disappointed and puzzled by "The Kenworthys." The author, Margaret Wilson, wrote "The Able Mc

Dulcarnon. By Henry Milner Rideout. Duffield & Co., New York. $2.

Mellowing Money. By Francis Lynde. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. $2. 'The Kenworthys. By Margaret Wilson. Harper & Brothers, New York. $2.

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