continued Mr. Lloyd George, "the Germans would have been turned out of France and driven half-way across the devastated plain of Flanders. They would have been well out of the country they had tortured and tormented with dastardly cruelty; more than that, we should have actually penetrated into Germany."

Mr. Lloyd George went on to say that men were enlisting much faster than equipment was being turned out for their use, and he warned the workers and shop-owners that because they believed that for the time being there was no prospect of conscription as a means of levying armies " they ought not thereby to assume that compulsion is unnecessary in enabling us to mobilize the industrial strength of the country."

Mr. Lloyd George is one of the few Englishmen who since August 4, 1914, has clearly understood the seriousness of the crisis confronting Great Britain. Even today a considerable portion of the British pub. lic act as if they believed that England were suppressing some rebellion in India or South Africa instead of grappling with a nation which threatens England's very existence as it has not been threatened since Napoleon's time. But there are signs that at last the British people are waking up. If any one can arouse them, Lloyd George can.

APROPOS OF THE LUSITANIA CASE

As an excuse for sinking the Lusitania, the German Government has asserted that that great merchant vessel was armed. In support of its assertion the German Embassy has presented an affidavit by a man named Stahl, in which he says that on the stern main deck he saw two guns mounted on wooden blocks, and on the foredeck two other guns. This story has been rightly treated as preposterous. As against the explicit statement of the Collector of the Port of New York it was not worthy of attention. Stahl himself has apparently disappeared, and there has been some interest in the task of ferreting him out.

Even if Stahl's story were true, it would have no significance. A merchant vessel has the right to carry such an armament as he affected to describe. The presence of guns on a merchant vessel does not offer the

shadow of an excuse for seizing neutral goods on board, much less for sinking her without notice and drowning the women and

children on board. This has been accepted without question for years by the United States Government, even to its own detriment.

In 1813, during the war with Great Britain, an American privateer captured a British merchant vessel mounting ten guns and manned by sixteen men. This vessel had been chartered by a Spaniard, who was, of course, a neutral. Before the capture this vessel, the Nereide, attempted resistance; but she surrendered after an action lasting fifteen minutes. The matter coming before the Supreme Court of the United States, Chief Justice Marshall, who delivered the opinion of the majority of the Court, declared that a neutral might lawfully place his goods on a belligerent ship, whether the ship was unarmed or armed. Even a vessel so heavily armed as the Nereide did not lose her peaceful character as a merchant vessel, nor did the fact of her bearing arms entitle the United States to seize the goods of a neutral owner which happened to be on board.

This case is described at some length in Moore's "Digest," Volume VII, pages 48991. It is an important case because it is seldom that the case of a belligerent merchant vessel comes before a court.

Of course, if the American privateer could not seize the goods on board such vessel, that privateer could not think of sinking the merchant vessel without taking goods off and providing for the passengers. The United States, having held for over a century that no American vessel could capture neutral goods on a belligerent merchant vessel, though armed, cannot afford to allow any other Power to assume that American citizens when traveling on the high seas, even in an armed merchant vessel of a belligerent, are subject to the risk of death like that to which Americans on board the Lusitania were subjected.

COLLEGE HONORS FOR
WOMEN

There are many politicians much talked about by the newspapers who are of extremely minor importance in the life of the Nation; while there is an army of men and women whose names have very little journalistic currency who are doing the real work of civilization in the country. Among these is Miss Louisa Lee Schuyler, upon whom Columbia University recently conferred the degree of Doctor of Laws. It is rarely

even in America that a woman receives this distinction. Miss Schuyler refutes the popular fallacy that there are no New Yorkers in New York. She is a member of the old New York community which the great modern city has overshadowed so far as publicity is concerned, but which counts largely in all the movements for the betterment of city life.

Miss Schuyler comes of the most distinguished American Colonial ancestry. She is the great-granddaughter of John Schuyler, one of the noblest men of the Revolutionary period, and of Alexander Hamilton, its most brilliant and fascinating personality. Miss Schuyler was one of the most active and useful members of the United States Sanitary Commission during the Civil War. At its close she interested herself in the condition of the inmates of the poorhouses and hospitals supported by the State; and as the result of her familiarity with the conditions in these institutions she founded the State Charities Aid Association, a pioneer among organizations of its kind. She also led the movement which culminated in the removal of the dependent insane from county poorhouses; she was very influential in organizing the first training school for nurses in this country; and in 1907 she became one of the original trustees of the Russell Sage Foundation. Such a record puts Miss Schuyler in the front rank of Americans.

In conferring the degree of Doctor of Letters on Mrs. Ruth McEnery Stuart and Miss Grace King, Tulane University in New Orleans has recognized two women who have made contributions of high value to American literature. It was the good fortune of both these writers to deal freshly with original material. Miss Grace King's "Balcony Stories preserve in very artistic form the habit of life and temperament of a vanishing society. She has also written the story of New Orleans with such sensitive skill that the pages of the historical record are suffused by the atmosphere of a city in which the Latin temperament harmonizès with the southern climate. Mrs. Stuart's delightful humor and knowledge of the Negro. as well as of his rural white neighbor have given us a series of stories which belong to the folk-lore of American fiction. 66 'Sonny" is one of the distinctive figures in American fiction.

The conferring of the Doctorate of Letters on these two ladies in the presence of a great audience in the French Opera-House was

made the occasion of an enthusiastic popular approval of the action of Tulane University.

SOME GUIDES FOR FEMININE ENERGY

Dr. Virginia C. Gildersleeve, Dean of Barnard College, which recently celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary, delivered the Phi Beta Kappa oration before the Columbia Chapter on "Some Guides for Feminine Energy." She is one of the first women to give the Phi Beta Kappa address. This address, it will be remembered, has always been regarded as an academic opportunity of a high order. Several of Emerson's most notable contributions to the thought of his time were first presented at meetings of the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

Dean Gildersleeve commented on the rapid economic and social changes of the last fifty years, which have been storing up a great reservoir of unused feminine energy. In some places this energy, she said, "has grown stagnant or fermented into morbid fads and nervous prostration; at other points it has overflowed the shores and dikes and burst into strange channels, most disconcerting for the peaceful valleys of the country round about."

Much of the labor of the home, she reminded her auditors, has been lightened by being taken out of the home, and a great amount of energy has been released. An even more important factor in releasing feminine energy has been the decrease in the birth and death rate, and the tendency to

marry later in life. Under present condi

tions, she said, both husbands and wives are economically and socially far less necessary to one another. These various changes, which have come about quite irrespective of the efforts of women, have shut out from household occupations an immense amount of energy, which must be spent by women through some other activity; and the problem is to find fitting occupation for the honest desire of women to be of service to society. Among those occupations Dean Gildersleeve enumerated teaching, social work, preventive medicine, public health work, nursing, law, fine arts, and scholarship. The fact that part of the time and thoughts of so many women will continue to be occupied by domestic affairs makes it necessary to provide many "part-time " occupations to use these surplus hours of married women, and many kinds of work

There are no college students who are more earnest students nor more promising both as students and as citizens than those who are working their way through college. Probably every institution in the country is doing something to provide for the needs of these students by securing work for them. The students at Columbia University, for instance, earn a very large sum of money, chiefly, of course, because a great city affords varied opportunities of work, and there is no field in which American energy and inventiveness take on so many forms. A young girl in Denver has earned the money to pay all the expenses of her freshman year at the Colorado Agricultural College by the combination of forty hens and a vacant city lot.

This young woman was eager to go to college, but at the critical moment her father's health failed and the financial resources of the family failed with him. On a vacant city lot near her home the family kept chickens, and for two years she had cared for them. In looking about for available occupation and taking account of possible resources the lot and the chickens solved the problem. With forty hens as her capital she embarked in the enterprise which has made it possible for her to make at least a beginning in her college career. Her business sagacity is expressed in the advice which she is reported to have given: "Sell only to private families; have regular customers; give your chickens the best of care; supply them with wholesome food; keep accurate accounts."

There could hardly be a more comprehensive and condensed philosophy of chickenraising than that which this energetic and capable young woman has formulated as the result of her experience.

THE OPEN FORUM

One of the most potent influences on individual and community life in this country to-day is the open forum, according to reports heard at the Open Forum Council recently held in Boston.

More than than two hundred open forums have sprung up all over the country in the past few years, and the number is still increasing. These forums differ in organization and management. Some have been established by churches and are supported by them. Some are definite community activities and are supported by voluntary contributions. A great many are the outcome of the recognition of the need on the part of a group of individuals and are supported by private contributions. School centers, Young Men's Christian Associations, and numerous similar institutions have organized open forums.

The chief feature of every forum is an address on a topic of vital contemporary interest-economic, sociological, or ethical—: usually followed by questions from the audience and open discussion. Such eminent speakers as Edward A. Steiner, Charles Zueblin, Meyer London, Walter Rauschenbusch, and Stephen S. Wise are frequently heard on open forum platforms. A great many forums have a half-hour of music before the talk to lighten the evening. At some meetings hymns and prayer sound an appropriate religious note, for they are held on Sundays.

The fact that hundreds of people are regularly turned away from a meeting because of lack of accommodations is ample proof of the vital place the forum is filling in the life of the community. Not only do ambitious young men and women throng these assemblies, but older men and women are also there. It is an interesting fact that

some of the most successful forums are attended almost exclusively by eager aliens.

There is doubtless no greater democratizing influence in America to-day than the open forum. Its educational value cannot be overestimated; it is higher education for the masses of the people. It is the impression of some that the forum is the resort of discontented laboring people, of radicals; but employers and the "smug aristocracy are also known to attend in large numbers. The result is that each has come to see the other's point of view; the open forum has made for open-mindedness and understand

ing, for a certain sense of brotherhood and fellowship. Where the forum has been used for free discussion of community problems it has brought about a unity of spirit and action and the establishment of needed civic reforms. The educational possibilities of the open forum have been enlarged in many places by forming study sections among the members.

There is in Boston a committee, known as the Ford Hall Foundation, always ready to help to institute and guide open forums and also to assist in providing suitable speakers. Under the able directorship of George W. Coleman, the man who made the famous Ford Hall Forum what it is, this group of people is doing, and we trust will continue to do, a most important piece of work, that of furthering this great movement in education, tolerance, and democracy.

BIGNESS NOT BADNESS

It is said by Washington correspondents that the Department of Justice is surprised and dismayed by the unanimous decision of the United States Circuit Court in the Third Circuit, sitting at Trenton, New Jersey, in refusing to dissolve the United States Steel Corporation on the ground that it is a violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. The readers of The Outlook will be neither dismayed nor surprised. For over a quarter of a century we have contended that business is not bad merely because it is big; that great industrial organizations are a benefit, not an injury, to the community if they are honestly conducted; that an organization is a monopoly if it is created and conducted for the purpose and with the effect of stifling competition, and not otherwise; and since the decision of the United States Supreme Court in the Standard Oil Case we have steadfastly maintained that this is the law of the land as well as the rule of justice and of common sense.

This is now affirmed anew to be common sense, justice, and law by the unanimous decision of the Federal Circuit Court. The application of these principles to the case of the United States Steel Corporation will be found concisely stated in a brief history of the case given on another page. The principles themselves are thus stated authoritatively by the Court:

It has been said that when the sun went down on the 31st of July last it set for the last time on the world that was familiar; on the first day of August it rose on a new world. The changes wrought by war are already incalculable, and they have only begun. Whatever forms they may take-political, social, industrial—they are certain to be fundamental, perhaps revolutionary. The readjustments, when they come, will not be mere diplomatic compromises; they will be vital, radical, and far-reaching. Society will not count its losses, gird up its loins, and go on again in the old way. It is passing through one of the deepest, perhaps the deepest, experience in its history, and it will come out of that experience not only greatly impoverished but changed in spirit. The iron is entering into its soul.

Such experiences never leave nations as they find them; nor do they leave individuals as they find them; some deep-going change always registers such vast catastrophic events in history. So far the field of military operations has been on the far side of one or other of the friendly oceans which separate us from Europe and Asia, but the tragic experience. is part of the life of every thoughtful man and woman in America. We do not hear the thunder of cannon, but the flash of the guns below the horizon reflected in the sky above us makes us aware that a great tempest is sweeping over the earth and that possessions that belong to the whole world are in peril, if not already destroyed. If this stupendous experience does not touch us, it is because we are mentally unsensitive

we con

or spiritually dead. would take refuge in the cabaret if the bells were tolling continuously for the dead in a plague-smitten city; but the vast majority of men and women live with their fellows and share their fortunes. Whether sciously share them or not, those fortunes are our fortunes; we may shut our eyes, but we cannot shut our souls to the pain, sorrow, and tremendous disturbances which are agitating the world as a storm that sweeps from continent to continent breaks up the fountains of the deep and sends the universal ocean foaming and thundering half around the globe.

Those Americans are to be pitied whose chief anxiety is that we may be kept out of the struggle and find in it a golden opportunity to push forward the prosperity of the Nation. That we may be spared the duty of entering the field of war with arms in our hands is the prayer of the whole Nation, but that we should be spared participation in the sorrow and loss of our fellow-nations in order that we may profit by their misfortunes would be the prayer of a base and blind selfishness. The intense preoccupation of our neighbors beyond the sea may give a great impulse to American industry and enterprise, but we can safely accept prosperity from the misfortunes of others only when our hearts are clean of every desire to shape our National policy to an end so selfish and so hateful to the spirit of democracy.

To be able to keep out of the war without sacrificing the higher interests of humanity is the eager desire of many anxious people, but to escape the sorrow, pain, and renovating power of a great human experience would be to miss one of the greatest lessons ever set for men to learn. Whether we will or not, we are sharing the fortunes of this worldshaking conflict, and it will not leave us as it found us; at the end we shall be a nobler or a meaner Nation. We are being tested as truly as if our armies were in the field. Every man is being tested as truly as if his individual fortunes were involved in the issue. Shall we think primarily of our own safety and comfort, or shall we think first and always of the interests of humanity? Shall we cling to prosperity and the ease and luxury that come with it as the ends of life, or shall we learn from the appalling destruction of material values that these things are as dust in the scales when the soul of a nation or of an individual is being weighed?

This

This is a big country and a very generous one. There are many signs of its approaching maturity; but there are also indications that it is still too young to be called a great country. The adjective "great," generally reserved now for use by political orators, means, if it means anything, constraint, reserve, poise, and general intelligence. country is on the way to these things; but can it be said to have acquired them? Is a country really great which spends fifty million. dollars a year for chewing-gum and seventeen millions for foreign missions? Does that fact indicate breadth of view, maturity of judgment, a sane outlook on life? country great which devours the comic supplements of the Sunday newspapers and thinks them humorous? Judged by that standard, what shall one say either of the humor or the art sense of the American people? And what shall be said of their intelligence and their sense of reality when one reads the reports of the sales of certain kinds of fiction? Is a country really great in which a vast population not only reads "The Eyes of the World," but enjoys it and takes it seriously and utterly fails to discover what manner of novel it is?

son.

Is a

Mr. Owen Wister is a very outspoken perSeveral years ago, when Philadelphia was under the rule of the most audacious and in many respects the most unscrupulous political ring in America, he said some things about that city which only an old Philadelphian of irreproachable descent would have. ventured to say; and a few years later he said some other things equally frank about original scholarship in America which only a man of his education and intellectual standing would have ventured to say. These things were said, not in sarcasm, but as an intensely patriotic American criticises his country in order that it may see itself as it is and disregard childish things. Maarten Maartens prefaced his strong story "God's Fool" with a little group of parables. one of them several men are standing about the coffin of a dead man who has said sharp things of his own generation. "He used

In

the world as if it were a football," said one of the men in the group; and the dead man opened his eyes and answered, "Yes, he kicked it towards its goal."

In "Quack Novels and Democracy," which