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By ERNEST W. MANDEVILLE

The size of its drink bill and the behavior of American tourists give Europe pause

EFORE returning home from my study of the liquor problem in England, I took a month's irip through Holland, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, and France. I made no attempt during this short time to delve very far into the Continental drink question, but, with the background of a thorough study of the problem both in America and Great Britain, certain comparisons were impressed upon my mind. I shall report my observations to you.

Temperance movements, I was told, have slightly gained in strength in all the Continental countries with the exception of Spain, Italy, and France. In Spain and Italy the issue scarcely exists. In France prohibition societies are well organized and work hard, but they are up against a general indifference which is more dangerous to their cause than open hostility. The French people as a whole simply cannot conceive of a dry country. They are so used to wine with their meals that restrictions on its use would strike them in the same way as the prohibition of bread and butter or sugar for our coffee would strike us.

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R. BONN, Professor of Economics of the University of Berlin, said to me: "There is no use of discussing prohibition for Continental countries, for we are not drunkards. We drink, but we are not drunkards. We have no saloons or ginshops such as you find in England and such as you used to have in America."

I believe that Professor Bonn is right in his comparison of the Continental drinking with that of England. I did not find the counterpart of the filthy British "pub" or the American saloon in any of the Continental countries. There were many places to drink-in fact, most of the drinking is done at the open-air tables lining the sidewalks--but comparatively little hard liquor is sold. Almost every one drinks either beer or wine, and very little drunkenness is noticeable.

Notwithstanding this fact, however, there is an important liquor problem in Europe. The six countries of Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, Rumania, Germany, and Austria spend approximately each year $2,410,900,000 on alcoholic liquors. Considering the poverty of these countries and their enormous in

debtedness, it does not require economic experience to deduce the conclusion that they cannot afford this expenditure.

One wonders how the individuals one sees in the restaurants can afford to spend their money there when they are in such poverty and working for such small wages. The answer is that they live too well because they are too poor. They spend every penny they earn, and are afraid to save. This is understandable when we realize that in Austria, for instance, the crown is now 70,000 to the dollar, when before the war it was five to the dollar. You can readily calculate how a fortune in the savings bank or in life insurance has dwindled to an amount insufficient to buy a square meal. The inhabitants do not trust the future. They are afraid to save. They spend all the money they have while it still has purchase power.

Some of their leaders, however, realize that their habits must change. Dr. Julius Willhelm, economist of Vienna, Julius Willhelm, economist of Vienna, said to me: "Vienna in her dire poverty is spending eighty to ninety millions for drink. It is utter nonsense. We are a very poor country, but people do not easily change their habits. The time will come when it will be absolutely necessary for them to change their habits. If we could reduce the drink bill even by one-third, in ten or fifteen years every one in Austria could have a small house and garden. To-day thousands of families are living in one room in dirty, unhealthy tenement-houses. In Hungary they are turning their attention toward partial prohibition. Public-houses and inns are to be closed from Saturday noon to Monday morning; inns selling brandy alone are to be abolished, and youths under eighteen are not to be served."

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HEARD a great deal about the success of the Swedish system. Situated between two prohibition countries-Norway and Finland Sweden claims to be soberer than either. Each household is allowed four liters of liquor per month. Since 1911, when liquor restrictions were adopted, it is claimed that consumption has fallen from 24 liters per capita per annum to 12 liters; public offenses, from 47 per 1,000 population to 19 per 1,000 population; drunkards treated in hospitals, from 1.2 per 1,000 to .36 per 1,000.

In Holland I found plenty of drinking,

to be sure, but little of the abuses that I have described as existing in England. A rather feeble prohibition movement exists, but it is split into three divisionsProtestant, Neutral, and Catholic-ench one working apart, and therefore making little impression.

I was in attendance at a dinner given by the League of German Industrialists to visiting Americans, and at the Americans' request it was the first social function ever given in the history of the League at which no liquor was served. In Germany almost every one drinks beer. During the past year, however, an increase in the consumption of spirituous liquors has been noticed. Professor Gaupp, of Tübingen University, says that in 1924 the country distilleries in- | creased from 700 to 1,700 in round numbers, and that all distilleries of potable spirit increased from 1,000 to 2,100.

There is a growing prohibition movement in Germany. A national post-card campaign recently produced 460,000 signatures in support of local option. About one million women are enrolled in the Evangelical Women's League, which is campaigning for a dry country.

That the movement is as yet very unpopular, however, can be learned from the following incident. Recently the Frederichshein Brewery, of Berlin, which rents its public hall for meetings of argumentative burghers, unwittingly leased its auditorium to the German prohibitionists. When the public discovered what was going on, the report went through the city that "hallowed ground was being desecrated," and a crowd of over one thousand assembled, mobbed the prohibitionists, and drove them from the hall.

The drink situation in Czechoslovakia is much the same as in Germany and Austria. The prohibition movement is as yet very weak. Its main asset is the interest of Dr. Eduard Benes, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, who is a total abstainer.

I have already mentioned the indifference of the French people to the drink problem. The prohibition movement makes little headway, though many fine men and women are interesting themselves in its program.

Mr. H. W. Chafee, secretary of the American Young Men's Christian Association in Paris, stated that the prohibi

tion movement there was simply for the prohibition of distilled liquors. He explained how every one drank, and said: "Ten out of the twelve men on my Association board are wine merchants. The president of the board is a big wine merchant, and he has told me that if he thought that his business was not Christian he would give it up in a minute.”

I also talked with Dr. Mono, of the

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Paris headquarters office of the French Protestant Churches. He said: "When the average Frenchman comes across the American tourist, he says, 'Oh, he is dry!' but the tourist is not long dry in France, and the man in the street concludes that the American has come to France to get away from that awful prohibition. What are we to think when prohibitionist pastors from America demand wine in

France and beer in Germany? We must get prohibitory laws here to save the country. I am a lifelong abstainer myself and speak continuously for prohibition in France, but we get little help from visiting Americans. If prohibition is a success in America, it will sweep the world. It is a failure, it will react against the efforts of the dry movement all over the world."

American University

HE great word of impression that the English visitor takes away from a study of American universities is "organization." It comes into his constant vocabulary very early. The idle, easy ways of Oxford and Cambridge, boasting that the greater part of the benefits that they bestow come from interminable and spontaneous conversations round the fire-these are the things most clearly lacking in the American university. The football player is almost a pawn in the hands of his coach. The debater often has the words of his speech written for him by a professor. Classes are compulsory. Every breath that the student takes is the university's business, and he must breathe it at an appropriate and scheduled time.

In the excess of organization something is lost, although something is also gained. But it is perhaps the way of the Englishman to discover the loss much sooner than he discovers the reason for it. The reason for it is, of course, partly in the American. In America the conversationalist is very rare. The American does not take to the Frenchman's quick throwing to and fro of a conversational ball. He prefers taking turns at monologue. And he loves organization. The organization of his social life, the number of his club luncheons, is the wonder of the world.

Still, for this organization in the universities there is a more special reason. Here, as in so many other things, America has undertaken a task quite different. from any that the world has ever before

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education to everybody. The experiment has demanded the price.

I have heard Americans argue that she has by so doing stultified the very purpose of higher education and sacrificed ability to mass mediocrity. Be that as it may—and there is much to be said on both sides it is evident that it makes education's problem very different. For not only has it brought a volume of students to the university, for parallel to which we have to go back to Europe before the Reformation, but-and here the comparison with the mediævals breaks down-the great majority of them cannot love learning for its own sake. For the taste is rare. The critic who remembers this finds many of his criticisms answered. Organization? Yes. But what sort of people are you organizing?

But here is a question that will not down: Granted that organized athletics, the fraternity system, the amassing of credits, are wise policies with which to meet the problem of the indifferent numbers, are you not sacrificing to them the genuine lover of learning? And is not a system of education which does such a thing a very parody?

Nothing is more foolish than an affected eccentricity of superiority. An intellectual who cannot take an ordinary place in the life of the ordinary world the ordinary world can well afford to spare. This self-differentiation is the quality one finds in the third-rate; always in a Marie Corelli, and never in a Shakespeare. And yet is there not a danger? Is the conversa

tion of a fraternity house meal table good enough intellectual chewing-ground for the Oliver Wendell Holmes of the future?

Is not the whole philosophy of loyalty to a fraternity a great fraud? I shall never forget the sight of a man of sixty dining with his old fraternity and singing with them

Delta Tau Delta,

My home and shelter.

To what was this loyalty? The members, the very building, had changed. There is no way of life of Delta Tau Delta different from that of all the rest of the world. How can a man serve three Greek letters? What result does the attempt bring but terrible and crushing. sameness, man to man, fraternity to fraternity? It is just the wrong size; that is the fraternity's great vice. It is too small to be a permanent and enduring society, too large to be a body of boon companions. And this is a vice that it shares with many instruments of American sociability.

How necessary is this fear that the individual is being destroyed? It is, of course, obvious that no generalization about America can be at best more than half a truth. But if the Middle West, as it sometimes tells the traveler, is America, then the fear is necessary. For the Middle West certainly hates individuality. But America, I think, like a wise shopkeeper, displays its best goods in its windows, on its east and west coasts. Why is it that people are best educated when they live by the sea? The advantages of the East are manifest. It has age and tradition, which is so essential to culture. But why, if you leave Yale and Harvard on the east coast, is it necessary to travel six days to the west coast to find their equal? Why, if Iowa or Utah have not forgotten their pioneer days, has California left them so far behind in education as in other things?. We are

often told that it is because the sea brings it into contact with other cultures and saves it from the isolation of the Middle West. But the explanation is surely too facile. I do not believe that the excellence of Stanford is entirely due to the fact that the students go down from Palo Alto to watch the steamers coming into

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San Francisco. I think, rather, that the explanation, if it is not in natural virtue, is in the climate the climate of California, which has forced the people, perhaps unwillingly, perhaps unadmittingly, into leisure. For a leisurely life is the greatest need of the American university of to-day. By far the greatest vice of

American education is that there is much too much of it. No one has ever been educated in a hurry. Long evenings, the Socratic threshing out of subjects until boredom, talk, talk, freedom; all is education, and not text-books and credits. It remains to be seen whether the Eighteenth Amendment has prohibited it.

The Book Table

Edited by EDMUND PEARSON

From Pieria to Mediocria

Reviews by William Rose BENÉT

HIS season boasts several new monographs upon poetry in its fundamental and eternal relationship to life, all interesting if not conclusive. The most recent of these is Mr. John G. Neihardt's "Poetic Values: Their Reality and Our Need of Them;" while R. C. Trevelyan's "Thamyris; or, Is There a Future for Poetry?" is another brief suggestive discussion of the theme. It is not within the scope of this review to treat these particular books, but in this connection we may call attention to Mr. Struthers Burt's introduction to his volume of poems, "When I Grew Up to Middle Age."" He calls that introduction "Ancient Gossip," and it is well entitled. The points he makes in it, for well or ill, have mostly been made before. Yet some of it is cogent. He burnishes certain old truths that are likely to become lost, strayed, or stolen in the strident confusion of the competitive present.

The older one grows [says Mr. Burt], the more one becomes an anarchist, realizing how little didactic any one should dare to be concerning such a hidden and delicate subject as

verse.

We feel as if we were that kind of an anarchist. The New has now become almost as didactic as the Old, and we long for a little respite. It is, of course, only a manifestation of human nature that a little later on Mr. Burt himself becomes quite didactic. But one of his didacticisms, even though some may call it moss-grown, needs, we think, to be blazoned on high in this day and generation:

"No form of poetry can make poetry, but poetry can make any form."

He lays fitting stress on the pro

1 When I Grew Up to Middle Age. By Struthers Burt. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. $2.

nouncement that "the only poet who should dare to use free verse is the poet trained in the ancient laws." That is not new, perhaps, but it holds good. Free verse, as he knows, is no new thing, "but an ancient and honorable form of poetry." He becomes more original when he declares that "the statement that a restless time demands restless verse asserts that a thing can best be described in terms of itself; and that, as every one knows, is photography, not portraiture;" and also when he neatly pierces certain of his audience with, "The man who pleads simplicity and says he cannot understand poetry is naming himself not a simple man but-as so many people are nowadays-a partially developed man; a man too complex but not complex enough; a 'half-baked' man."

We wish we had space to discuss at length such running comments as these. We have not, and must turn to Mr. Burt's book itself. Undeniably there is poetry here. It has well-wrought passages of clear, calm felicity (such as page three of "No One Knows the Countryside"). It rises to the fantastic brittle beauty of "Helen Pendicott." It is traditional in manner, for the most part, as the English poetry of Freeman and Drinkwater is traditional. And it doesn't give a darn that it is.

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Let us juxtapose Miss Edith Sitwell, the varnished flowered-chintz cover of whose book expresses aptly the verse within. Miss Sitwell takes nonsense and nursery legend and playful sophistication and tangles them in maze of varicolored yarn. The maze is full of color schemes, but sometimes it is a labor to untangle the yarn. There is a fascination about Miss Sitwell's helter-skelter of brilliant phrase that seems often to con

Troy Park. By Edith Sitwell. Alfred A. Knopf, New York. $1.75.

sist mainly in the fact that her meaning hides and grimaces and runs away to hide again. In this characteristic she is completely of her century. What she cares most for are the design and the opportunity for fandango. And in fandangos she indubitably excels.

Robinson Jeffers comes before us as a poet of considerable power, emerging from "the golden, remote wild West where the sea without shore is" with a new manner of long narrative poem. He seems fond of the incest motif. He desires to choose themes that will shock. It is hard to shock us to-day. Leaving this quite aside, "Roan Stallion" and "Tamar" and "Tamar" and "The Tower Beyond Tragedy" and a few of his other poems are full of intensity and have memorable passages. His Cassandra is a Cassandra. "The Tower Beyond Tragedy" is to us, in fact, one of the most terribly vivid revivals of Greek legend that we have read since Swinburne's "Atalanta." It is not Greek as Swinburne was Greek. It is not Greek as any one has been Greek before or since. But some of its moments continue to vibrate in the mind. "Tamar" itself is one of the most congested pieces of writing we have toiled through in moons, but we find that, in spite of all its overplus of horrors and organ roar of madness (in spite, we say, instead of because of these things), its story (which requires a strong stomach) has left a powerful impression. It is the same with "Roan Stallion." Mr. Jeffers's book contains evidences of creative power of the first order. Mr. Jeffers will go his own way. We certainly cannot predict how far he will go.

Margaret Widdemer is a poet of emotion, and sometimes a poet of mere prettiness. This recent book of hers is stronger in many respects than some of her former ones. She can be intensely,

Roan Stallion, Tamar, and Other Poems. By Robinson Jeffers. Boni & Liveright, New York. $3.

'Ballads and Lyrics. By Margaret Widdemer. Harcourt, Brace & Co., New York. $1.75.

humorously charming, as in "Orange Birds;" she can be stirring, as in "Revisitants;" she can be moving, as in "Words;" stirring, as in "Janua Vitæ;" trenchant, as in "Gods."

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Vachel Lindsay's new collected poems are embellished with his own decorations. In his most recent poetry, in my own opinion, he has gravely declined from the inspiration that was his a few years ago. He seems to be groping between the lights. His drawings are from "The Village Magazine" of his own invention. Some of his designs are delightful, notably "The Map of the Universe." And the poetry in this thick volume contains (even though we must definitely discard some of the more recent sound and fury) enough remarkable work to assure him a place in American literature. What he may do in the next few years is on the knees of the gods. Personally, we expect a new annus mirabilis.

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Sister Mary Angelita's book opens with a devotional poem of genuine distinction, "Signum Cui Contradicetur." It seems to us her most striking poem, though there is charm elsewhere, and the beauty of simple devotion. Marguerite Wilkinson's anthology of Christmas poems, "Yule Fire," contains much one likes to read over and over in this season, and is prefaced by a zealous and wellinformed essay in the Christian spirit, upon true and false mysticism among other things. Our own predilection is for a wild kind of faith, and when, at the end of the book, we swing into Chesterton's "The House of Christmas" we are thrilled the most:

This world is wild as an old wives' tale,
And strange the plain things are,
The earth is enough and the air is
enough

For our wonder and our war;

But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings

And our peace is put in impossible things

Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings

Round an incredible star.

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"The Complete Poetical Works of Edna Dean Proctor" present for the first time in one volume the work of a poet who was a household word in the homes of some of our elders. Here are her Columbian poems, her Civil War poems, her New Hampshire poems, her

Collected Poems. By Vachel Lindsay. The Macmillan Company, New York. $3.50. Starshine and Candlelight. By Sister Mary Angelita, B. V. M. D. Appleton & Co., New York. $1.50.

Yule Fire. By Marguerite Wilkinson. The Macmillan Company, New York. $2.50.

The Complete Poetical Works of Edna Dean Proctor. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston. $3.

poems of Spanish America and Russia, her homeland poems, and her devotional ones. All are distinctly dated, and we cannot claim to have found any work here that seems to us truly enduring.

To conclude, "Winepress,"" by Waiter Hart Blumenthal, is a medley, with page decorations that might better have been omitted. It opens with a "Chippewa Legend" which we found it impossible to read through, lulled by the monotonous brevity of the lines. The shorter poems range from grave to gay with a vengeance, and mediocrity lies heavily on most of them. Mr. Blumenthal is far

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his book aside with the works of Miss Proctor. This too shall pass away.

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HELEN. By Edward Lucas White. The George H. Doran Company, New York. $2.50.

Mr. White is a classicist, and the publishers have given his book a charming classical dress. He gets at Helen's psychology in a way of his own, and shows that her power over men was through her intelligence as well as her beauty. There is a singular enjoyment to be had. from this short and spirited narrative of chosen episodes in the many years that elapsed beginning with Helen's young girlhood (she was abducted by Theseus at the age of twelve), on through the siege of Troy, and up to her return to Greece with her original husband.

The gods and goddesses are here very much in the background, and we are face. to face with men and women. Menelaus, Paris, Deiphobus, Menelaus again—but always Helen is calm and accepts facts (and men) as they come. There is a legend, not mentioned by Mr. White, that Helen became after death and in the Isles of the Blest, the bride of Achilles. We hope that she did, and that Achilles and Hector fought over her.

THE PRIVATE LIFE OF HELEN OF TROY. By John Erskine. The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Indianapolis. $2.50.

The beauty of Helen of Troy has long been accepted as an eternal truth, but Mr. Erskine does not content himself with mere descriptions. This Helen is an absorbing person, with a quick intelligence and a lively humor. The world knows more or less of what happened at Troy, but little has been said about the after-life of the unrepentant Helen, back in her Spartan home. It is a scintillating wit that has pictured Menelaos, the impeccable husband, rushing forth to punish his erring wife, finding her "too beautiful to kill," and finally bringing her home, to twist him around her beau

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tiful fingers. The greater part of the story is told in conversations between Helen, Menelaos, their daughter Hermione and her eventual husband, Orestes. There are also the officious and everpresent gate-keeper Eteonens; Charitas, an old school friend of Helen's, who at the whisper of bad news always "rushes right over;" and several minor characters. In the background moves the great tragedy of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, but it is with the extraordinarily vital character of Helen that the book is mainly concerned. Of love she says: "You think love is a crime. Let's compromise, and say it's a great misfortune-a misfortune one wouldn't have missed." In a day of "Hamlet" in mufti it will not seem strange that the classic characters in this fascinating book converse in an altogether modern and sometimes cynical manner.

THE BLACK JOKER. By Isabel Ostrander. McBride & Co., New York. $2.

The heroine is surely the most abducted girl in fiction. Minions of three gangs are always grabbing her and she is constantly rushed about in airplane, ship, or motor car. Not for love, however; she is supposed to have "the papers" in a great international struggle, which, by the way, is never clearly elucidated. The incidents are exciting, but the plot is plain "tosh."

P. A. L. By Felix Riesenberg. Robert M. McBride & Co., New York. $2.

This might better be called "Bunk." It deals with every species of humbug by exploitation. Its P. A. L. believes that the fool who is born every minute can be caught, and that the way to catch him is to spend a fortune advertising, then form a stock company, and when the bait ceases to catch the suckers dump the load on the stockholders and start something new. The satire would be keener if there were less exaggeration and more discrimination.

Literature

THE STORY OF THE WORLD'S LITERATURE. By John Macy. Boni & Liveright, New York. $5.

Here is one of the fine books of the year. Mr. Macy tries to tell about the world's literature in five or six hundred pages; so he has to slight much and skim over some rather important authors. But he touches all the great figures, and writes of them with the enthusiasm of a lover, the balance of a man of good sense. Henry James, he says, was "an intellectual 'shut in;' Lincoln, of all statesmen in the world, had the finest and strongest literary touch. These are two bits of sound comment. So is his criticism of Whitman; he places him high among our poets, but isn't afraid to

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admit the truth: that he wrote much rubbish. And thanks, Mr. Macy, for this remark about Mark Twain:

A notion recently current among younger critics that his wings were clipped, that the respectability of American life kept his genius from expressing itself fully, is simply nonsense.

Law

THE FOLLIES OF THE COURTS. By Leigh H. Irvine. The Times-Mirror Press, Los Angeles. $2.50.

A sensible, vigorous, and greatly needed criticism of our methods of criminal justice. Describes American delays, quibbles, and sentimentalisms which result in keeping alive our murderers at the expense of thousands of innocent lives. Contrasts these follies with the English law, which puts the convicted murderer to death promptly, and thereby discourages murder, instead of fostering it.

Biography

MY PORTION. An Autobiography. By Rebekah Kohut. Thomas Seltzer, New York. $3.50.

The daughter of one rabbi and the widow of another tells her life story. Brought to the United States from Hungary as a little girl in the late 60's, she lived in various centers-Philadelphia, Richmond, San Francisco, Baltimore, and New York. Married to the eminent scholar, Alexander Kohut, many years her senior, she found all her attention claimed for a time by domestic duties. Later, and especially after her husband's death, she took up social work, and here her activities have covered a wide range.

The book is interesting and important in various ways. For one thing, as the writer of the Introduction, Miss Henrietta Szold, points out, it is unique in that it is the first American-Jewish autobiography by a woman past her thirtieth year, dealing with experience and achievement and mellow influences, "instead of the harsh, callous grind of a mechanized life." Here is the story of one whose arrival in America long antedates the coming of the immigrant swarms of her people who crowd the ghettos, a woman who has lived always in a cultured environment, which, though predominantly Jewish, has had also its close contacts with Gentile life. The rebellious note of the autobiographies of young women from the ghetto-justified and socially valuable as that note may be is wholly absent from these pages. There are memories of anguished days in the record, but they are told with serenity. To Mrs. Kohut "life, above all, is a going on, a never resting." Her portion seems to her a miraculous compound "of all the ingredients of life-poverty, struggle, affluence, health, illness, companionship, friendship, love, betrayal,

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