ings. Quite recently the present Secretary of Agriculture, W. M. Jardine, dismissed the proceedings, holding that the consolidation did not create a monopoly or anything like one, and that if the law is violated by the consolidated concern he has ample powers under the Packers and Stockyards Act to punish the offender.

Two years ago there would have been widespread condemnation of this action by the daily press. Now practically all newspaper comment, from Republican and Democratic sources alike, commends the action of Secretary Jardine. Evidently the newspapers, at least, have realized the fact that the tide of consolidation is on the rise and that those who stand in its way are likely to be submerged.

The Shipping Board
Defies the President

THE United States Shipping Board

has embarked upon a dangerous course by withdrawing the authority conferred upon the Emergency Fleet Corporation to operate Government-owned ships and by removing Admiral Leigh C. Palmer as President of the Corporation and virtually sole director of operations. Direction of operations reverts to the Shipping Board, a semi-judicial body composed of a number of men who have never been able to agree among themselves. The action of the Board amounts practically to defiance of the President. It was at the insistence of President Coolidge that control of operations was placed in the hands of a single man, the President of the Emergency Fleet Corporation. That the President had not changed his mind and decided in favor of operation by the Board is proved by the fact that only a few days before the upset he had appointed a special investigator to make a thorough study of the whole situation, involving both the Shipping Board and the Emergency Fleet Corporation. Conceivably, the President might have been ready to recommend some changes upon the completion of this study. The Board, even if it had decided to defy the President, might have had the patience and the courtesy to await the outcome of the investigation. Instead, it warped the whole scheme. askew before the President's representative had time fairly to begin his work.

The theory upon which the action appears to have been taken is that the Shipping Board was by Congress created independent of Executive authority.

This theory, of course, is as fallacious as it is pernicious. Congress has no power to set up an executive agency and clothe it with power to act independently of the President's executive authority. If this sort of thing could be done once, it could be done endlessly. All of the powers of the President could be shorn away and the executive branch of the Government be dissipated through numberless independent boards.

The only sound theory upon which the Board's assertion of independence could be based is that it is purely a judicial and not at all an executive body. And this, of course, it is not. It has judicial duties, to be sure, but it has also executive duties. This very matter of operating ships is an important executive function. The Board might have gone some way toward making itself independent of Presidential authority by restricting itself to its judicial functions, but it loses that opportunity by the very act of resuming control of operations.

The point is sought to be made that the Shipping Board is in all respects like the Inter-State Commerce Commission. To a certain extent, the two are alike. Each of them has the duty of regulating rates and practices; but the Inter-State Commerce Commission does not operate any railroads, while the Shipping Board insists upon its right to operate ships. The Commission has no authority under the law to operate roads, but the Board has authority under the law to operate ships. It follows, therefore, that, while the Commission may not be subject to Presidential authority, the Board necessarily is.

This fact appears to be more clearly recognized by everybody else than by the Board itself. Already it has become fairly clear that public opinion is with the President and against the Shipping Board.

The Shipping Board Should Be
Mended or Ended

to the President of the Corporation, resigned. Not only has the Corporation lost heavily of its officials, but the Shipping Board itself has lost one of its members and another has been asked to resign.

Frederick I. Thompson, of Alabama, a Democrat, resigned with the candid statement that he wished to be free to fight for the policies he has advocated as a member of the Board. These are the policies which resulted in removal of Admiral Palmer and are directly opposed to the policies of the President. Mr. Thompson was one of the leaders in bringing about the upset. Plummer, of Maine, Vice-President of the Board and a Republican, voted with him. So did Benson and Haney. It is the latter, Bert E. Haney, of Oregon, who has been asked to resign, and has thus far refused to do so. The request for his resignation came before the ousting of Admiral Palmer and resulted directly from his criticisms of the President.

Both Thompson and Haney held recess appointments from the President. It is understood in Washington that the President probably will not seek to force Haney out, but will simply decline when Congress meets to submit his name to the Senate. It is said also that he will not submit any name for appointment to the place vacated by Thompson, but will deliberately leave two vacancies on the Board.

That the President will ask for repeal or drastic modification of the Shipping Board Act is hardly to be doubted. It is scarcely less a matter of doubt that he will call upon Congress to abolish the Shipping Board and set up some more adequate agency.

The Shipping Board Act was passed during the period of world upheaval. It has always been something of a monstrosity, but it served for an emergency. It should have been repealed or drastically amended long ago.

The City and the Child
As a result of a survey of health con-

ditions and teaching in eighty-six cities lately carried on by the American Child Health Association, of which Secretary Hoover is President, it appears that large differences exist in the way in which children are protected in cities and sections. The places studied were neither very large nor very small, but ranged from 40,000 to 70,000 in population.

The picture drawn of actual conditions shows increasing civic attention to the

subject, but with plenty of room for improvement. The small city, says a digest of the survey, "provides its children with good water to drink but feeds them milk of doubtful quality. It surrounds them with regulations to curb communicable disease, but at the same time withholds much of the real protection that it is possible to provide. Its human bookkeeping records are faulty and it fails adequately to teach the child and his parents how to be healthy. It does not equip the official health departments with people who are trained for the work and who are paid enough to give their entire time to the position, nor does it appropriate funds that are adequate for the serious duty of promoting public health. The bright spot, the committee adds, is that most communities realize their shortcomings, and some have already progressed very far in their health advancement efforts."

Specific findings relating to the subject of communicable disease are interesting as showing typical weak spots in guarding children, and the urgent need of bringing up the whole country to standards set in well-controlled places.

Typhoid fever is two or three times

as prevalent in the cities of the South Atlantic and East South Central States as in other sections.

Hospital provisions for cases of communicable disease are provided in most cities, but eighteen are still without local facilities.

In forty-nine cities with compulsory vaccination a question test of several hundred fifth-grade school-children in each city indicated that 87 per cent were vaccinated. In the cities where vaccination is not compulsory a similar test indicated but 56 per cent vaccinated. Judging by this index, the cities of New England are best protected against smallpox. In one city of the Central West but 16 per cent of the children questioned reported having been vaccinated.

The prevention of diphtheria by immunization of children with toxinantitoxin has been undertaken by the organized health agencies in forty of the cities, one city having a record of 4,900 children thus protected in the preceding year.

The American Child Health Association deserves credit and praise for providing the facts from which American communities may learn upon just what lines organization of health work, with the selection of an adequate personnel to enforce it, may be best carried on.

At Locarno

A

nor

DECIDEDLY hopeful tone marks the reports of the informal discussions at the Locarno Conference over the proposed security pacts. No formal action had been taken up to October 13, any definite drafts of agreements made public, but this meeting is largely one in which the give and take of negotiation must precede action. As Mr. Chamberlain pointed out, such private negotiation is not "secret diplomacy," like hidden treaties, but the necessary prelude to fai: united action, or, as he put it in homely simile, "We cook the meal in the kitchen, but when it is ready it will be served openly in the world parliaments."

One interesting development has been Italy's consent to join in the establishing of neutrality in the Rhine section as desired by Great Britain and France, and without acceptance of German amending demands. There had been some question as to whether Italy was quite in line with her former allies on the security pact question, but this action of hers seemed to show the contrary.

There seems to be no unadjustable difference as to the measures for the security of the western (or Rhine) fron

tier, but Germany's eastern frontier is, as we write, still a troublesome question. One possible outcome is that France should simply base its right to protect Poland and Czechoslovakia on Article XVI of the League Covenant, without asserting it in the security pact, and that Germany should withdraw her proposal for an agreement of the Powers to consider changes in the Versailles Treaty and League Covenant.

If Germany becomes a member-nation of the League, she will be equally liable with other nations to be called upon to enforce by economic boycott or in the last resort by armed force penalties against a country which should flatly disobey the League. Germany thinks Germany thinks that she should be released from this obligation because of her presnt weakness, both military and economic. But, if she is to be so released, the door is opened to tampering with League and Covenant. The likelihood of Germany's being called on to act thus as defender of the League against disobedient members is not great.

Probably some way can be found to reconcile the right of Germany's eastern neighbors to receive protection from France against future German attack and the admission of Germany into the League. On that point the negotiation

seems to turn.

Mosul, the League, and the Powers

т

IT may seem out of proportion as to

world importance that a part of one of the three vilayets of Irak (Mesopotamia) should be a dangerous and disturbing element internationally. Yet the Prime Minister of England in his recent speech at Brighton declared that, much as English sentiment hesitated as to the cost involved in renewing in 1928 the mandate over Irak, Great Britain was committed to insure Irak's stability and progress. Not to admit this, as Colonel Amery had done before the League of Nations, would have been, said Mr. Baldwin, "to prejudice fatally the cause of Irak before the League, and it would have been an act of folly from the point of view of those who urged economy to sacrifice the richest part of the territory of Irak, and the substitution of an indefensible for a defensible frontier would have undone all the great work of recent years and left us with complete chaos in Asia."

King Faisal of Irak, during the recent

elaborate study of Mosul by the League's Commission, said that British military occupation was established after the Armistice and after the retreat of the Turks in Mosul as well as in the other two vilayets of Irak, and that it is impossible both strategically and economically for a government in Bagdad to live if Mosul is detached from it and held by another government.

In this disputed section of Irak live Kurds, Arabs, Christians, Turks, Yezudi, and Jews, in that order as to numbers. Turkey holds that this section never did pass over to Irak after the war. The League's Commission seems to think that Turkey has some legal basis for that claim, but that she should renounce any such right because of her agreement to accept the Commission's report, the main finding of which is that the status quo should be maintained and with general consent Great Britain's mandate be renewed for twenty-five years after its expiration in 1928.

The principal question that the Council of the League has laid before the Permanent Court of Justice at The Hague is whether the Council is competent under the Treaty of Lausanne to give a binding arbitral award. Turkey asserts that she was given to understand the contrary, and she also asserts that Lord Curzon at Lausanne promised Turkey, not only that the League's Council would not act on Mosul except by a unanimous vote, but also that Turkey, if the case arose, should have a seat and a vote-all of which British authorities deny and she adds that she means to assist and defend her claim to the disputed territory.

The whole question is complex and bids fair to keep the Hague Court, the League of Nations, and the diplomats busy. That it will end in warfare is improbable, but not impossible if the Turks continue their repeatedly reported deportation of non-Turks from the disputed territory a positive infraction of definite promises made by them as to Mosul at Lausanne.

is planning a reorganization of industry on a basis of partnership between capital and labor. There is to be, we are told, one big federation of Fascist labor unions and one big federation of employers' organizations. All questions between employers and employees are to be settled between these two bodies. It is the supplanting of the class war by class cooperation.

This plan involves the abolition of the secret shop committees and the substitution of committees appointed by the heads of the Fascist unions.

Over the two big organizations will stand the state to see that each treats the other fairly and that both regard the rights of the public.

But Mussolini is not content with this change. He is making his reorganization of Italy not only industrial but political. The Grand Fascist Council has decided to make the Italian Senate an elective body. At present the Senate consists of princes and of members nominated for life. Rome is to be administered by a governor, chosen by the Italian Government, assisted by two vice-governors, by ten technical experts called rectors, and eighty consultors chosen by such bodies as the Chamber of Commerce, Bankers' Association, and Professors' Association; and each municipality of 5,000 inhabitants or less is to be administered by an executive chosen also by the Central Government and called a podesta.

Machiavellian Mussolini

ALL

LL this seems to come rather too suddenly and too perfectly as a well-rounded plan of class co-operation and political reformation to be accepted quite at its face value. Even, however, if it is not accepted as an accomplished fact, it is significant enough as a new development in the Fascist programme. Both the new plan of municipal government and that of changed relations in industry indicate that Fascist Italy looks to the past for life, for guidance, and for the hope of progress and prosperity, rather than to its recent experience as a modern constitutional state.

Similar in some respects as the methods of Mussolini are to those of the Bolshevist oligarchy in Russia, they are essentially different because they are essentially Italian. It must not be thought that Mussolini is driving out democratic government from Italy; for it would not be accurate to say that Italy has had democratic government in the sense in

which we understand it. Italy has little to lose by scrapping many of its more recent experiments and theories, especially of the imported kind, and much to gain by searching for guidance in its own past. Fascism may not be able to revive in modern industry the organization, the life, and the aims of its ancient guilds, but it may learn from a study of them the spirit which made them great and helpful in the economic life of the past, and it may utilize that spirit as a force in the modern industrial state. Similarly, Fascism may find in the records of its signories, its communes, and its little republics material for fashioning a form of government more nearly suitable to Italian life than what has been called parliamentary government.

Mussolini is an avowed disciple of Machiavelli, but there is little indication. that any other Italian politician has much more real faith in democracy than he has. A recent official communiqué refers to the "absurd presumption of general governmental capacity." In America, as in England, that presumption is based upon generations of experience in self-government which has never existed in Italy. Mussolini's programme would be outrageous in America, but that does not lessen its value as a subject for openminded study.

In the meanwhile Signor Mussolini might at least relax the rigor of the pres

Exit Baseball, Enter Football

THE

HE World Series (a grandiloquent title, perhaps, as the world outside of this country and Cuba takes little interest in baseball) is undecided as we write. The score of games was then: Washington, 3; Pittsburgh, 3. The tie, weather permitting, was to be settled by the seventh game on Wednesday, October 14.

The many thousands who have watched the games and the many more thousands who have listened to the radio broadcasting play by play have certainly had their full of excitement, for there has been free batting, extraordinary plays in the field, and many tense moments. As to the last, it would be hard to find in baseball records anything to beat the exciting moment in the first half of the ninth inning in the third game when, the Pirates at the bat and needing one run to tie, there were two men out, three on bases, two strikes, and three balls. Washington won; but the crisis was one more often read about in boys' stories than seen in the field.

The country at large has, we think, rather enjoyed the fact that the biggest cities and richest clubs have been out of this contest. The pep and skill of Washington and Pittsburgh have shown that

like New York and Chicago. And now for the football season, from which radio fans as well as stadium onlookers will draw excitement and entertainment. A Fighting Veteran

W

ALTER JOHNSON, pitcher of the Washington American League team, furnished a new reminder during the World Series that professional sports have been, perhaps, too insistent upon the first flush of youth as a necessary equipment. Johnson, in his later thirties, is an old, old man in baseball. But, old and seriously injured, he accomplished in the series against Pittsburgh what few, if any, young men could have done.

Last year, when Washington contended successfully against the New York Nationals for World honors, was supposed to have been Walter Johnson's final year as an active player.

This year, through a strenuous season, "the old man" did his full share toward pitching and batting Washington to victory in the American League. He pitched the first game against Pittsburgh, at Pittsburgh, and won it easily. He pitched the fourth game at home, and won easily over Pittsburgh, despite the fact that Johnson was so seriously injured in the fourth inning that his team mates did not believe he could go on.