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knowledge of the note itself. That was published for the world to read in February, 1917. In it Zimmermann informed the German Minister in Mexico that Germany was about to begin again her unrestricted submarine warfare; that she would try to keep the United States neutral; failing this, she would make an alliance with Mexico and together make war upon the United States; that Mexico's share of the profits was to be Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona; and that it would be agreeable if Mexico would patch up a peace between Germany and Japan. What Mr. Hendrick reveals is the method by which this delightful note came to be known, and some of the results thereof.

Germany sent the message by three routes: by wireless through Sayville, Long Island; by the Swedish diplomatic service; and by the American State Department. The British Government was in possession of the German wireless code, and was accustomed to read the voluminous messages with which Berlin was filling the air. The British captured or decoded all three messages. The Sayville wireless was being used by the Germans in defiance of the fact that Washington had forbidden it. The Swedish diplomatic service was more than accommodating to all German requests. But it may be questioned whether a message proposing war against a country, and partition of its territory, was ever before conveyed by the diplomatic service of the country plotted against! Zimmermann handed his message to the American Embassy at Berlin and asked for its transmission to Ambassador Bernstorff in Washington. He said it was a reply to President Wilson's peace efforts. Contrary to all custom and common sense, the American Embassy was transmitting messages without knowing their contents. Mr. Hendrick absolves Ambassador Gerard, and says he could have acted thus only on orders from President Wilson. The Americans asked for no translation; the message was telegraphed in the German cipher, but read by the British officials as it crossed England. The British did not have that faith in Germany's innocence which characterized our Government up to the spring of 1917. Bernstorff's relay message to Mexico was actually found by our State Department (after the tip came from Ambassador Page in London) in the cable office in Washington! And Mr. Page gained his first knowledge of the message from the British Government.

Some of the results were amusing.

Pro-German persons in America denounced the message as a British hoax. They were left in a ridiculous position, however, when Zimmermann acknowledged the authorship. Americans were given the credit of having captured and deciphered the despatches. British newspapers assailed the British Secret Service, as less efficient than the American, since in this instance the Americans had won

out.

Both British and American Governments let this misconception go undisputed, as the possession by the English of the German code was still a secret. And the German Minister in Mexico, von Eckhardt, was extremely unhappy, despite the "storm of cheers" with which he was being greeted in the streets and the "three faint hisses" which formed the chilling reception of the American Ambassador. One copy of the message was actually bought in Mexico City-presumably by an agent of the British Secret Service. Von Eckhardt explained at great length to Berlin, and his messages were read with mirth in the American Embassy in London and in the British Foreign Office. These messages show where Mr. E. Phillips Oppenheim gets the material for his novels. The good Herr von Eckhardt was deeply distressed. Despite all the efforts at secrecy, despite his Government's betrayal of confidence about the Sayville wireless, there was a leak somewhere. Probably in the German Embassy in Washington, he suggests. Not in his Chancellery! His secretary had burned the despatches and "scattered the ashes." They had been read to him "at night, in my dwelling-house, in a low voice," and, until destroyed, kept in a "steel safe." Ah, was it not so shameful?

Senator Lodge's Posthumous Evidence

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MONG the multitude of books that tumble from the presses into obscurity there occasionally emerges one whose publication is a pub

lic event. Such was Winston Churchill's "World Crisis." Such have been the volumes of the Page letters. Such now is "The Senate and the League of Nations" of Henry Cabot Lodge.'

No historian of the World War and its aftermath will find that he can afford to pass it by. It is more than a notable public document of the times; it is a

The Senate and the League of Nations. By Henry Cabot Lodge. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. $4.

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portraiture of two men whose struggle with each other profoundly affected, if it did not determine, the course of the United States at one of its critical periods.

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In the first place, it is a portrait of Lodge himself. As no other book that has appeared, or is likely to appear, it explains to the reader of imagination the animosity which Senator Lodge aroused in his political opponents, and particularly in Mr. Wilson and his more devoted followers. Complacent ignorance was a trait in others which Senator Lodge could not well forgive, and this scorn was a feeling (his opponents would say one of the few feelings) which he took small pains to conceal. And not infrequently he found President Wilson ignorant of important matters and undisturbed by his ignorance. Thus when Mr. Wilson proposed to subject Mexico to a blockade without declaring war, to Mr. Lodge it seemed incredible that the President of the United States should not know that without declaring war no blockade could be established, for the fact that a general blockade is a purely belligerent right is "the A B C of international law." Mr. Lodge's comment upon the one classical illusion he could find in Mr. Wilson's speeches or writings, in which Mr. Wilson confused Hercules and Antæus, is a case in point. After giving the true version of the myth, Mr. Lodge adds:

The story is as popular as it is old. It is in every classical dictionary and in all the books which boys used to read about the Greek mythology. But as Macaulay says in one of his essays, "I have no desire to detain my reader with this fourth form learning." The point is that it seems incredible that Mr. Wilson should have made a blunder of this sort, which not only would be impossible to a scholar but, one would think, impossible to an educated

man.

This scorn led Mr. Lodge to the use of irony calculated to infuriate its victims.

A single example must suffice here as typical. In the Senate committee's report on the Treaty of Versailles Senator Lodge, in reply to the "clamor for speedy action" by the Senate, referring to the fact that neither France, nor Italy, nor Japan, had yet acted,

wrote:

Persons afflicted with inquiring minds have wondered not a little that the distressed mourners over delays in the Senate have not also aimed their criticism at the like shortcomings on the part of France, Italy, and Japan, an act of even-handed justice in fault

Henry Cabot Lodge

finding which they have hitherto failed to perform.

Not less vigorous than his portrait of himself, however, is the portrait which he has painted of President Wilson. It is hard sometimes to distinguish between the act of ascribing motives to a man and the act of delineating his character. What Mr. Lodge does in this book is to show how his estimate of Mr. Wilson's character, and incidentally his estimate of his dominant motive, guided him as Senator in dealing with the President. It is only incidentally, if at all, that Mr. Lodge undertakes to pass moral judgment upon Mr. Wilson; but throughout the book he shows how his judgment of the President's mind and attitude served in successfully putting through a National policy. Mr. Lodge does not rest his case upon mere surmise. He adduces evidence, and he reaches the conclusion. that, "as the strenuous days which were filled by the contest over the League of Nations passed by, almost every one bringing its difficulty and its crucial question, I made no mistake in my estimate of what President Wilson would do under certain conditions." This estimate was based on the view that throughout his career Mr. Wilson was guided by his "overwhelming thought of self." And in this Mr. Lodge found the key to all that Wilson did.

In the contrast between these two men

is to be found in extreme form the contrast between the two parties they represented. Mr. Wilson is commonly called an idealist. There is no doubt that he was governed by ideals. Whether they were sound ideals or unsound ideals is not to the point; they were not actualities, but something imagined for the future. On the other hand, Mr. Lodge

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throughout is governed by his sense of reality. What offends Mr. Wilson most is an affront to his emotions as aroused by some imagined future; what offends Mr. Lodge most is an affront to his common sense and his knowledge of facts. The contest between Lodge and Wilson as pictured in this book was in dramatic and extreme form the contest between those two types of character and conceptions of government that have divided American parties. In the words of William Garrott Brown, this is the conflict of "the universal and the visionary against the specific and the practical, the kingdom of the air against the kingdom of the earth."

The bitterness of this struggle would have been avoided if men of the type of Lodge could have seen in the Wilsonian some measure of common sense, and if the men of the Wilson type could have seen in their opponents ideals, none the less ideals because they were not their

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Those Good Old Times

By LAWRENCE F. ABBOTT
Contributing Editor of The Outlook

UCH talk there is nowadays of the widespread degeneracy resulting from the World Warnobody wants to work; those who do consent to worgive scant quantity and low quality for high wages; woolen cloth is half cotton; silk is loaded with lead and cracks and breaks in a way that would have scandalized our grand mothers; Havana cigars are made of Connecticut tobacco; steam laundries ruin our collars and shirt bosoms; the customs and manners of our children (to say nothing of their morals) are far more rude and boisterous than our own when we were their age; the House of Representatives is composed of illiterates and the Senate of rich boobs; statesmen of the Senate of rich boobs; statesmen of the type of the Bleases and the Vardamans have taken the place of the Lamars,

the Lees, and the Henry Clays in the South; the New England race of the Daniel Websters, the Rufus Choates, and the Charles Sumners is extinct. Such are some of the lamentations of the modern pessimist.

Now I do not want to list myself with those self-satisfied persons who are entirely content with things as they are. There is beyond cavil room for considerable improvement in the present scheme of things, and some of the improvement might be made by considering the fine standards and achievements of the past. But to those who profess to think that the present is wretched and the future hopeless it might be pointed out that the past is not always as bright as they like to paint it. John Jay and Gouverneur Morris once agreed, in a reminiscential

after-dinner talk, that there were a lot of "damned scoundrels" in the Continental Congress. A friend of mine, who is interested in the history of the development of written and printed language, told me not long ago that one of the oldest known manuscripts in syllabic characters is an essay written on papyrus several centuries before Christ by an Egyptian and preserved in either the British Museum or the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris. This Egyptian author deplores the manners of the young people of his timethe flappers and the fresh guys of Tutankhamen's day-and implores them to go back to the higher standards of their fathers. When I heard that, I said to myself: Why worry? That Egyptian moralist was suffering, I am afraid, from what a very modern young lady I know of calls "the Parent Control Complex"!

Is it not possible that the Tories of the days of the English Reform Bill may have deplored the fact that England was going to the dogs because it had no statesmen capable of producing a Magna Charta? It certainly is quite probable that lovers, or would-be lovers, of literature when Shakespeare was an insignificant actor-manager at the Globe Theatre thought that English literature had come to a melancholy end because there were no more Chaucers. And it is not a matter of possibility or probability, but a matter of fact, that Beethoven was denounced by some of his contemporaries as a rude and boisterous innovator, forgetful of or disrespectful to the nobler standards and traditions of his fathers.

Some years ago a well-known artist of New York-if I remember correctly, it was the late Kenyon Cox-had an exhibition of studies of the nude, made somewhat in the manner of Botticelli or Arthur B. Davies. A humorous critic in one of the newspapers confined his comment to saying that the studies were repellent alike to the artist, the moralist, and the sensualist. So it was with the French innovators Millet and Monet. Their pictures were repellent alike to the artist, the scientist, and the sociologist. The artists objected to their violation of tradition, the sociologists to Millet's depiction of the hard lot of the peasant, and the scientists to Monet's new treatment of the effects of light and color in nature.

Twenty-five or thirty years ago, when Monet's impressionistic pictures were first exhibited in New York and were the talk of the town because of their startling effects of light and color-no longer

startling because they have been adopted by almost every modern painter-a distinguished Professor of Physics in Columbia University went to the exhibition. He came home saying:

"I have just been to see the most outrageous pictures by a Frenchman named Monet. Such colors! Such light! Such reflections! All contrary to the laws of nature! He must be insane!"

"Well," replied his daughter, "I'm afraid you are partly responsible, for Monet says that he is greatly indebted Monet says that he is greatly indebted to your book on optics and the spectrum, of which he has made a careful and scientific study."

Such is the effect of traditional dogma and habit even on the scientific mind!

But if the pessimist is wrong who thinks there is nothing good except in the traditional past, what shall be said of the man who wants to preserve all the discomforts of the past because they were picturesque? A contributor-one of my favorite contributors to the excellent "Atlantic Monthly," whom its editor rightly calls "an 'Atlantic' philosopher," professes such a doctrine, although I more than half think that he is indulging himself in some amiable fooling. In a recent issue of the "Atlantic" he says:

How well I remember my first trip abroad, my first sight of England! I was fearful it would not come up to the advance notices. I savored every scene and incident that was peculiarly and indubitably English. I relished even the discomforts. I should have been disappointed if the rooms had been warm, the beer cold, or the coffee good. I drank tea for breakfast, scorned the Paris edition of the New York "Herald," and took in the "Morning Post." I rejoiced that a sensational murder-story should be hidden behind so noncommittal a head as "The Pimlico Affair." At Tilbury where we docked was a P. & O. steamship tied up alongside. From a porthole protruded a gayly turbaned head, with a black-bearded East Indian face beneath it, a timely symbol of Britain's far-flung empire. I felt as if this gorgeously illuminated footnote had been set just here at the beginning of the very first chapter of my English experiences for my sole delectation.

And now, he pretends to complain, all this charm has been destroyed by the introduction of iced drinks, the telephone, electric lights, elevators or "lifts," the taxicab, American agricultural machinery, and modern housing for factory workers. Has he ever climbed three

flights of stairs to his lodgings in a respectable house in Craven Street? Well, I did on my first visit to London forty years ago, and I much prefer a modern elevator. Has he ever tried to shave by candlelight in an English inn of the early 'eighties? Well, I have, and I much prefer electric light. Has he ever swung a scythe on an Adirondack farm in the days when that beautiful mountain region was reached by dusty stagecoaches? Well, I have, and if I were an agricultural laborer I should regard Cyrus McCormick and Walter A. Wood as public benefactors. He thinks that the modern ocean liner "with elevators and fireplaces and swimming-pools and Ritz restaurants" is out of place on the ocean, and deplores the disappearance of the deep-water sailor, "the old shellback taking his trick at the wheel." Has he ever taken his trick at the wheel? Well, I have, off the Cape of Good Hope when our thirteen-hundred-ton bark was yawing its way through rain and sleet in a hurricane, when the "shellbacks" on watch could keep their fingers from freezing only by pulling woolen stockings over their hands and arms, and I understand the charms of steam or electric steering gear.

Let this "Atlantic" philosopher read the letters of Erasmus to find out what the inns of Germany were three hundred years ago, or Arthur Young's Travels to appreciate what the roads of France were in the days of George Washington, and he will be glad that he now rides in a limousine instead of in the saddle when he visits the Black Forest or the Alps.

As to plumbing-but perhaps it would be better to draw the veil of modesty and reticence over that. I may be pardoned, however, if I recall the fact that when I went to an excellent preparatory school in the 'seventies, not many miles from New York, we boys had a bath once a week, on Saturday nights, in tin tubs temporarily placed in the German recitationroom, the water being laboriously carried from a pump which was mercifully placed in a lobby or coat-room, so that we did not have to go out into the ice and snow for it. No running water came into or left the building, so that all other appurtenances which are happily connected with modern plumbing, and are considered essential not only to comfort but to civilized hygiene, were about as primitive as they were in the days of the Neanderthal man. The same conditions

prevailed in Europe, and even so late as fifteen years ago a distinguished American with whom I was a guest in one of the great and splendid palaces of a regal European city found the plumbing so inadequate in the royal suite which had been assigned to him that he said, with a twinkle of humor: "Do you know, I

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don't like living in these palaces, for I can't ring my bell and complain of my room!"

No; when I hear anybody deploring the loss of the beauty and simplicity of "those good old times," I have only to think of the discomforts of travel and domestic life in my younger days and to

Locarno

be grateful to the utilitarians. I am perfectly willing to get my picturesqueness from the green fields of England and the snow-capped peaks of France and cheerfully accept the services of the railway engineer, the automobile chauffeur, the telephone linesman, and the plumberespecially the plumber.

By ELBERT FRANCIS BALDWIN The Outlook's Editor in Europe

N this most beautiful country in the world, in the midst of a balmy atmosphere and under an azure sky, I have just done the three worst articles I have ever sent to the 'Revue des Deux Mondes.'" So once wrote here Alexandre Dumas père.

In the same spirit, Gustav Stresemann, German Foreign Minister, remarked to us the other day: "It is going to be a hard job to attend to politics in such a paradise."

In truth, the country is so beautiful that the usual incitement to the usual kinds of work found in the usual uglier places is absent. On the other hand, Locarno does incite to the particular work the Foreign Ministers of seven Powers have been doing here. They want to frame a pact to assure justice and peace to themselves, and so to the world. "Certainly, if their foundations," said Austen Chamberlain, British Foreign Minister, on arriving here, "could

not be secured in so heavenly a spot, peace must have flown from this earth and taken refuge elsewhere."

Lovely nature and lovely weather do inspire optimism. And we have had both.

Locarno has the lowest altitude of any place in Switzerland. Hence its air may seem hardly as dry and invigorating as elsewhere. But it is invigorating, all the same, for it is Alpine air, albeit mild and restful. Protected by the mountains, the winds from the north pass high over it and do not touch it.

This morning I talked with a Locarnese. He said: "You should be here in January, signore. Primroses begin to bloom then. It is our best month. Every year more and more strangers profit by our climate. Last winter we had practically no snow, and we never have fog. Indeed, the colder months are the preferred season here now. The Grand Hotel, you notice, has been open only

from September till June, but, like the others, is now to be open the year round." "It is, then, I suppose, hot and close here in summer," I suggested.

"Oh, no, signore," was the reply. "Make no mistake. Almost always we have a lake breeze."

More than four centuries ago this upper end of Lake Maggiore became Swiss. In appearance and life, however, the characteristics of the country remain thoroughly Italian-from the little lake boats with their bent-wood covers, to the deep clefts on the hills, with their dark dramatic shadows in startling contrast to the luminous southern sun. Or from the vast vineyards (no stubby growths, as in the north; the vines are supported on long, thin stone uprights and are strung across, the rich purple clusters hanging temptingly over one's head) to the villa gardens, with their peculiarly Italian colors and odors of chestnuts, cypresses, magnolias, mimosas, eucalyptus, oranges,

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lemons, pomegranates, persimmons, and palms. Or from the noon and evening calls across the lake from the tall clocktowers alongside, but detached from the churches in the many little lake ports or in the high-pitched mountainside settlements, pictures of aloofness and serenity, to the perfectly proportioned, ample church porches that cause you to wonder not at all that this southern Italian slope produced a Palladio. And what friendly churches, always open and seeming to say to the wayfarer: "You must pray eventually; why not now?"

True, October brings no such brilliantly gorgeous colorings in Europe as with us in America. Here the shades are less striking, but more delicate the sunset tones on the bare brown-gray rock of the near-by mountains or on the more distant snow peaks harmonize with the soft russets and yellows and greens of the lower slopes. And wild flowers are still bravely blooming on the roadsides in great quantity and variety.

The proximity of this Italian-speaking canton to the German-speaking ones accounts for the Teutonic names on many hotels and pensions hereabouts. One hears the German language more frequently than any other, save, of course, Italian. But I have hardly ever heard German-German; almost invariably one hears the Swiss-German dialect, a seemingly harsher speech but spoken with a gentler and friendlier face, contrasted with the more harmonious Hanoverian tongue, paradoxically used by more pitiless personalities.

Locarno is a settlement of about ten thousand inhabitants. In their delight at becoming a world capital for some weeks, the Locarnese have lavishly decked their buildings with the flags of the nations. taking part in the Conference of Foreign Ministers here, together with a liberal sprinkling of their own national, cantonal, and municipal banners.

The Conference has held its sessions in the cantonal Palace of Justice. This is

really a more appropriate designation for such a meeting-place than Palace of Peace would have been. Over its porch have been hoisted the flags of the seven participating Powers, arranged in French alphabetical order, and atop the edifice has waved the Swiss white cross on its cheery red ground.

According to legend, centuries ago a Locarno monk, praying ardently, saw the Queen of Heaven appear on a projecting rock high over the town. She desired, he concluded, to have a sanctuary there. The present sightly church and cloister of the Madonna del Sasso are the result, Locarno's most distinguishing feature. It has an exquisite setting. Some one said the other day: "Those monks up there must needs be holy men. The place is too beautiful for sin."

The monks of to-day are alive to what has been going on below. Every evening now, over the cloister door shines, in illuminated, giant letters, the word PAX. It can be seen far down the lake.

Villa Muralto, Locarno.

Rome and Science'

W ITHOUT any desire to stir up controversy, but with a

full realization of the controversial elements in the subject, we printed an editorial in the issue for October 7 under the title "A Cardinal Pays Tribute to Science." In contrast with this tribute to students of science in search of the truth, we quoted from the postscript of a letter written by a well-known Roman Catholic layman to the effect that a teacher in a Catholic university or Catholic school "who would teach that man had descended from a lower order of animals" would be "fired." In our comment we said that there was not only in the Catholic Church, as in other churches, the difference between those who feared science and those who welcomed it, but also the difference between those who think of religion as a creed and those who think of it as a life, and quoted Father George Tyrrell as a Catholic who could and

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did believe that Christianity was a life. A Methodist pastor, in a letter printed in The Outlook for October 21, described this editorial as an "effort. . . to place Roman Catholicism in the ranks of Modernism" (not, in our judgment, an accurate description of the editorial in question), said that the Protestant Church has changed its view of creation when faced by the facts of science, and described such remarks as those of Cardinal Hayes as "only a shrewd attempt to make Romanism appear sympathetic with the modern scientific view-point while it remains, by a process of subtle casuistry, true to its own reactionary mediævalism."

In printing the following letters from Roman Catholic points of view we confine our comment to two points in the one case that the issue be made clear, in the other that our position may not be misunderstood.-THE EDITORS.

Mr. Callahan Remonstrates

A Letter of Protest from an Eminent Catholic Layman

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EFERRING to your article "A Cardinal Pays Tribute to Science," appearing in your issue of October 7.

You embarrass me to no small degree in publishing my inelegant, if rather forceful, letter to my friend, Father Ryan, and also when referring to me as "regarded in some quarters as the foremost Catholic layman in America."

It is now a platitude to say, "There is no conflict between the Bible and science," and I would like to paraphrase the same by saying there is no conflict between the statement of Cardinal Hayes

and my postscript; and if my letter regarding the teaching in Catholic schools. of the theory that man had descended from a lower order of animal were shown to the Cardinal, he would likewise tell you that such an instructor would be rather summarily dismissed.

The Cardinal nor any one else has a higher regard than myself, as well as other Fundamentalists, for what scientists have done and are doing, and it is my thought that, in all fairness, you should likewise publish the similar tribute of William Jennings Bryan, viz.:

Neither does Tennessee undervalue the service rendered by science. The Christian men and women of Tennessee know how deeply mankind is indebted to science for benefits conferred by the discovery of the laws of nature and by the designing of machinery for the utilization of these laws. Give science a fact, and it is not only invincible, but it is of incalculable service to man. If one is entitled to draw from society in proportion to the services that he renders to society, who is able to estimate the reward earned by those who have given to us the use of steam, the use of electricity, and enable us to utilize the weight of water that flows down the mountainside? Who will estimate the value of the service rendered by those who invented the phonograph, the telephone, and the radio? Or, to come more closely

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