material is brought to us by boat from the South. We have a large supply ordered and on its way from a Southern port. In fact, the shipment has been on its way for some time, for the steamer which is carrying it has made four trips to New York without being able to unload this vital supply for our business. It cannot unload here because of the tie-up of strike conditions on the wharves. It does not unload at the other end of the journey, for there is always an optimistic feeling that'next trip conditions will be better.""

The cost of taking that raw material on a yachting trip will be paid for by, some one. We doubt whether the steamship company will pay for it. We are

R

ECENTLY in New York City, Governor Lowden, of Illinois, called attention to the necessity of prac ticing thrift. As he himself has practiced thrift for Illinois during his Governorship of that State, his remarks had special weight. He urged clergymen to preach sermons against "the present orgy of extravagant buying and the importance of cultivating thrift;" called the women of that State to make clear the manner in which they may co-operate to prevent further increase in the cost of living by abstention from the purchase of luxuries so that more labor may be released for the production of essentials; recommended first the adoption of a budget system for family finances as an intelligent check upon extravagant buying, and then personal marketing, a . knowledge of fair market prices and the adherence to them in purchasing.

The latest number of "The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science deals largely with this subject, and comprises many articles of value on individual, social, and governmental thrift. From this number we extract a few significant facts and pertinent suggestions:

The present period has not been characterized by habits of personal thrift on the part of the American public. Savings deposits have increased, but not in proportion to the general increase in prices. A considerable part of the Government's war issues is still in the hands of the banks. Here they have aggravated living costs by their use as collateral for bank loans, the proceeds of which have been used for speculation. During the war we accustomed ourselves to doing without, to buying carefully, to using economically. But with the close of the war came reaction. "A veritable orgy of extravagant buying is going on. Reckless spending takes the place of saving, waste replaces conservation; demands for shorter hours and greater profits increase; and all this in the face of an appalling shortage of goods throughout the world.'

But mere saving is not thrift. Thrift is to the individual what conservation is to the nation. "It does not consist in hoarding resources, but in their wise use. The weekly wage properly spent is thrift, even though not a penny may have been put into a savings account or the purchase of a home.. If a worker has borrowed from his fund of physical energy to put money in a savings account, it is a disastrous form of thrift; he has merely taken a part of his vital resource and turned it into property. The underpaid workman will not find the way out of his difficulty in a thrift policy which compels him to tighten his own belt." Hence the demand for shorter hours, higher standards of living, and a co-operative commonwealth to be reached, not through saving, but through wise spending, is not inconsistent with true thrift. This is the advantage of the co-operative movement; it does not inculcate the kind of thrift which results in low standards of living, and does not unduly depress consumption during the saving period. One of the contributors to this thrift programme, Professor Hansen, suggests an extension through Government in order to increase home ownership:

The Federal Farm Loan Act makes provision for the utilization of the cooperative credit of the Nation for the laudable purpose of helping farmers to become landowners. Why should not the Nation's credit be mobilized in some similar fashion for the purpose of assisting our citizens to become home-owners?

Governmental thrift no less than individual thrift is necessary to National. prosperity. Professor Zook, of the Pennsylvania State College, points out that the sale of the 1918 series of War Savings Stamps exceeded $1,015,000,000. This splendid success made men feel that the stamp system should be continued to show to Americans that thrift was as necessary after the war as during the war. Had individual thrift thus been properly developed our Governmental situation would be different from what it is. But the number of stamps sold during 1919 fell

far below the mark set for that year in 1918. Together with this came a realization of three things: (1) The prodigious scale of our public expenditures; (2) the unprecedented weight of our direct tax levies; (3) the excessive volume of our Governmental borrowing.

Before the war about one-sixth of the wealth annually produced by us was saved, and practically all accrued to the Nation's industrial and financial capital: account. But during the war much, if. not most, of our customary industrial. expansion was suspended. Any increase in individual savings was absorbed by the Government and used directly or indirectly in furtherance of war production. Thus "most of the savings appropriated: for public use in the time of our war emergency represent something which, from the point of view of the Nation's peace-time economy, must be regarded as unproductive expenditure and economic waste."

Aside from the evident lesson of saving as applied to individuals or to societies, the American Government needs not only to save but to look facts in the face. It can do so by establishing what it has never yet had, a National budget. At the present time the head of the bureaus inthe departments at Washington prepare estimates of alleged necessary expenses and send them to the heads of the depart ment. In some cases, as Mr. Charles Wallace Collins, the author of "A National Budget System," points out, this head may order certain reductions in the esti mates of a bureau, but this is excep tional." The estimates are sent to the Secretary of the Treasury, who is re quired to classify them and have them printed in the "Book of Estimates," but he has no power to review the estimates or to suggest reductions. He transmits the "Book of Estimates to the House of Representatives, but does not include in it an estimate of the revenues and suggestions for new taxation, if neces sary. When the estimates reach the House, they are given to a number o independent appropriating committees

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I want to ask you if some time you won't tell us what your theory is as to "why we are here at all." This is a sincere question, in my mind.

me,

we

I have a dear little son (born after his father's death). I sometimes think, "What was the use of bringing him into the world ?" I would not have considered for a moment of doing otherwise. But the question recurs to "What's the use? Why are here; why did God create earth?" Not to have an answer to this question is disconcerting to any other philosophy which I build up. No doubt I could find an answer in the Bible if I only knew how to find it. I can't seem to interpret the Bible to my satisfaction.

It were well if more men and women asked themselves this wise question. The differing answers which are given to it create not only different schools of philosophy, but, what is much more important, different standards of life and conduct.

I have recently been reading Alexander Black's story "The Great Desire.' It interprets dramatically the different desires which control us and the different answers which our would-be public teachers give to this question, "Why are we here?" The Socialist replies:

Socialism has had a thousand, maybe ten thousand, definitions. Yet what Socialists want is simple enough. That does not make it easy to describe that want. Gravitation or electrolysis is simple, too. But they are not easy to describe. However,. I think we may say that the Socialists want applied brotherhood. Not merely brotherhood talk bat brotherhood practice-not merely a sentiment or even a system, but a life expressing brotherhood. I think

we

may say that the Socialists want co-ordinated liberty, opportunity safeguarded by true equality; a fruit of labor assured by a common glory of labor, peace assured by common need and common cause, happiness not as a private gift, but as a public blessing.

This desire for "happiness, not as a private gift, but as a public blessing," the Anarchist repudiates with scorn :

KNOLL PAPERS

BY LYMAN ABBOTT

WHY ARE WE HERE?

at

Happiness! What is it? It is a dream, a name, an illusion most, of course, an effect. . . . The need written in every living form and every part of every living form, the need sigliing, singing, gnawing, struggling, aspiring throughout the whole cycle of created things, is the need for selfexpression. You don't ask the flowers to be happy-you ask them to be themselves each, utterly in its own way. I want self-expression for all the creatures of the earth on the terms they can naturally make-without diagrams invented by self-appointed viceroys of an impossible god. .. . This is why I am an Anarchist. This is what Anarchism means. Every individual opposition to the existing order of things is illuminated by the spiritual light of Anarchism. It is the philosophy of the sovereignty, of the individual.

If happiness is what we are here for, this is a very ill-ordered world. For sorrow is written on every page of the book of life which humanity is writing. The babe comes into life through a door of pain. His first voice is a cry. And when his drama ends, though his last expression may be a smile, the wife and children and friends that surround him struggle in vain to suppress all expressions of their poignant grief.

The youth sits at life's loom and plans to weave a fabric of beauty, with golden and silver threads running through it. But somehow a black thread gets into the wool and no pattern comes off the loom as the weaver planned it. Life is never satisfying; is not meant to be satisfying. "Man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward." It is many hundred years since that sentence was written. And the intervening centuries have confirmed its truth.

If we have the Christian faith, we believe that the Father shares the sorrows of his children. Sorrow is not a human accident, but a divine design.

Nor are we here merely for self-expression. I doubt whether any one who reads this article desires merely to express himself. Most of us often wish to repress ourselves and always wish that we might be more worth expressing. We ask the flowers, but not the weeds, to be themselves; and he is either marvelous

in his saintliness or marvelous in his self-conceit who has no consciousness that there are undesirable weeds in himself to be rooted out. He is sure to be conscious of undesirable weeds in his neighbors. He has no admiration for the petulance or the passion in his boy; none for the greed in the tradesman who cheats him. Self-expression may mean wrecking a railway train, dynamiting a printing office, or flooding a mine. It may mean, and often has meant, robbery or assassination. In the German nation it meant wholesale brigandage and a World War. Unbalanced by a desire for self-restraint, it means crime or lunacy.

We are not here for happiness. Happiness is an incident, not an end. We are not here for self-expression. Self-expression and self-repression must work together or the end is death. We are here for self-development. Creation, it has been well said, is not a product, but a process. Man is in the making. And here we see only the beginnings. What the end will be we do not know. Perhaps there is no end. Perhaps growth is an eternal process.

This process of self-development begins with man's birth and ends only with his death. He learns love from his mother, law from his father, reverence from both. He learns lessons from his brothers and sisters which others cannot teach him. It is easier to bring up four children than one, for they learn from each other. He goes to school and learns from the playground as well as from the school-room; he goes to college, and college life gives him more preparation for manhood than any one recitation room, perhaps more than all of them combined. The preacher, the newspaper, the books, are not his only nor even his chief teachers. A savings bank will do more to teach him thrift than a schoolteacher; if the school-teacher wishes to teach thrift, he establishes a school savings bank. A railway will do more to teach him punctuality than a church, for if he is late to church he can always get a seat, but if he is late at the station the train is gone. Unless he is exceptionally stupid, if he is a merchant he learns the meaning of honesty, if a lawyer the meaning of justice, if a doctor the nature of the

body and the medicinal value of a courageous spirit, if a soldier the splendor of devotion to a great cause and the supreme value of self-sacrifice. And all the time the successes and the disappointments,

the joys and the sorrows-and generally the sorrows more than the joys-are teaching him the meaning of life as in "The Great Desire" it was taught to Anson.

"The Great Desire is the desire to find God." "The way to God is through love."

Life is a school; character is the end; sorrow, disappointment, disaster, are teachers; death is graduation.

T

HE first of these bills, taken in connection with the statute against seditious activities passed during the war, establishes a bureau of secret police under the supervision of the Attor ney-General. During the war the action. of this secret police and the appropriated funds were under the final control of the Governor. Under this bill, and taken in connection with its companion proposals, the Attorney-General's office may easily harbor a practically uncontrolled and permanent institution of inquisition and repression of every sort of genuine freedom of opinion in time of peace. Its agents may scurry into every corner of the State over the heads of district attorneys of the counties in the quest of symptoms of sedition or disloyalty.

The second of these bills extends the most rigid censorship of the educational Board of Regents over the ideas of all private schools, institutions, groups, associations of every sort which meet for discussion and instruction. Anything whatever within the domain of private education which the Board of Regents in its infinite wisdom might regard as inimical to the public interest could not be taught or discussed. This is a vast extension of power, and if intended only to meet a single instance or group of instances of disloyalty is like forging a triphammer to kill a fly. The rigorous supervision of what is discussed and taught in the public school system is of course entirely proper. Those subjects and ideas upon which the public mind is not generally agreed should be excluded from the public school curriculum. Jews and Catholics and Protestants all contribute to the support of the public schools, and matters in controversy between them are naturally and properly excluded. The State cannot permit Democratic or Republican or Socialist doctrines to be taught in the schools in any partisan way. But into the domain of voluntary groups and associations outside the public school system, and into adult thinking generally in the colleges and universities, no free state has ever entered with its censorship of ideas save in those extremely rare instances in which disloyalty and sedition were clearly the underlying purpose. Here the existing

provisions of the educational law passed during the war give already every opportunity to the Department of Education to weed out sedition both in text-books and teachers.

The State of New York has always regarded private schools, institutions, groups, associations, colleges, universities, as schools of experiment in new methods, new ideas, in which the utmost rational freedom of thought and utterance should be permitted. This is the only way that the world of thought and of progress has ever advanced. This proposed Lusk bill marches human thinking in the goosestep. Nothing like it has ever been proposed in America, and nothing more hopelessly contrary to American ideals of freedom and progress has ever been conceived. It is contrary to every known principle of the development of human thinking. Taken in connection with the bureau of secret police, this bill furnishes a complete machinery for the lock-stepping of the human mind in line with the economic, social, ethical, or political preconceptions of any group which happens to be the real power in or behind the government of the State. The Board of Regents is, and usually has been, made up of admirable men under the present system of freedom, but the Board of Regents is elected by the legislative machine, and is dependent for its sustenance upon the ruling government, and might easily be degraded under the terms of this bill into a perfect engine for the repression of free opinion.

The first bill, creating a bureau of secret police, would make America Russian after the manner of the Czar. The second bill would make America Prussian after the manner of William the Hohenzollern. The only answer that has been made or that can be made is that these measures will not be carried out according to their tenor; that they will be used only to strike at certain things which the ruling group in the government at the time does not like. In that case, these measures are more dangerous still in their demonstration of the inequality of law. The passing of laws of an extreme kind upon the theory that they will be executed in the discretion of officials against the influences which the ruling group in the

government at the time does not like, reduces law to such an inequality and absurdity that no intelligent and fair minded man could respect it.

The true American theory of govern ment is not a government of repression from above, nor is it government by the mass mind. It is organized self-control Far better to allow the American people their traditional freedom of discussion and instruction. Men win self-contro only out of freedom and wide information about things as they are. The sporadic in stances of sedition and disloyalty and threatened violence should be dealt witl in our time with an iron hand, but not by such a process as this of the subverting of human freedom.

The third Lusk bill expressly charge the Board of Regents to investigate and license the loyalty of all the public schoo teachers of the State. This is a vast un dertaking and a vast extension of th powers of inquisition from the top. Unde the law as it now is, the State Depart ment of Education licenses the genera qualifications of a teacher. Nobody but: citizen can be a teacher as the law nov is; and the person who is a citizen i assumed to be loyal until the contrary iproved, and there is abundant machiner already to determine this. Under this nev bill no teacher is assumed to be loya until he or she is investigated and license by the power at the top. This again is no America. It is Prussia and Russia. Th secret police, the censorship of the ideas o all voluntary groups meeting for discus sion and instruction, the searching out o alleged disloyalty of labor in the mill and factories and teachers in the school in every corner of the State in time o peace, the espionage, the secret persecu tion, the open door for spies and enemie to allege secret information-such a sy tem, so contrary to American though and tradition, would soon arouse a tre mendous resentment and vast rebellion i the mass of the loyal people of the Stat and the country.

I heartily share the fierce resentmen which burns in the hearts of true Amer cans against anybody or anything whic is against this Government of ours. Wit all its faults, it is the best government i the world and the only real hope of the

PERSONALITY

N Frank Orren Lowden you see a man of medium height, of somewhat stocky but not bulky figure, erect, rugged, muscular, and of alert stride. His face is strong; he looks at you with clear eyes. "A determined man," you say to yourself; and you add, " "A A plain business man, alive to the issues of his job and of the day."

As he begins to speak you get no rhetoric and eloquence; instead, deliberate, terse good sense. He seems a safe man; you have the impression that he might make a safe President. But he

seems an inelastic man.

His personality is dignified, but he impresses you, just the same, as being a good fellow. His is the handshake of a corn-husker. He came honestly by that handshake; he is farmer bred.

His life-story can be sketched in three words-poverty, struggle, success. He is fifty-nine years old. He was born at Sunrise, Minnesota. His father was the countryside blacksmith. The father and his neighbors built a schoolhouse, and there it was that young Frank learned his A B C's.

Then his parents moved to Iowa, the seven-year-old boy trudging beside their "prairie schooner." In the Iowan summers the lad helped his father with the farming and in the winters did chores to earn his schooling. At fifteen years of age he was able to teach a school. He did

so for five years, and gained the funds for further education. Saving and studying, he entered the University of Iowa and was graduated valedictorian of his class.

But the struggle for education was not over. To raise money enough to study law he had still to teach; then he became a law clerk in Chicago at $8 a week. He made enough to enter the Union College of Law at Chicago. He completed the two-year course in year. He took first prizes in scholarship and oratory, and, what is more, two years

one

after, graduating from that college, he was again valedictorian of his class.

In later life valedictorians rather belie the brilliant promise of their early years. Not so Frank Lowden. Admitted to the Chicago bar, and outranking all who were examined at that time, he soon became a promising young lawyer; indeed, before long he actually occupied the chair of Federal Jurisprudence in Northwestern Law School, the successor of the Union College of Law. Lowden Hall was named for him. Within a dozen years after graduation he had built up a lucrative practice. He organized two now famous business corporations, the National Biscuit Company and the American Radiator Company. He had thus laid the foundation of his financial fortune.

In 1896 he married Miss Florence Pullman. Though his greatest political handicap has been the tradition of the Pullman car wealth, he has continued to support his own family.

CONGRESSMAN

From 1906 to 1911 Lowden scrved as member of Congress. His point of view was revealed by his affirmative vote on such measures as those prohibiting child labor in the District of Columbia, establishing postal savings banks, and creating a Bureau of Mines. During that time I used to hear about him as an efficient member of the Foreign Affairs Committee; he proposed and actually put through Congress a law providing for the purchase of legation and embassy sites abroad. People who assert that he is not up" in foreign affairs may at least remember this. He also showed himself a true conservationist. He planted some five hundred thousand trees on his estate because, as he said, "hundreds of thousands of acres in Illinois are better suited to forestry than to anything else." He added a word concerning a reform long urged by all forestry friends:

66

Private owners of land will not content themselves with a crop which does

not mature for half a century. They will therefore naturally not plant their acres to trees unless they have encouragement from the State. It is possible that if all the now waste lands of Illinois were planted to trees in half a century they would produce enough timber to supply our own needs. . . . If the State would exempt these lands from taxation on condition that they were planted to trees, with the provision that when the trees were harvested a proper tax would be collected on the product, much of such land, I believe, would become permanent forests, a source of revenue to their owners and to the State.

GOVERNOR

In 1916 Lowden was elected Governor of Illinois by almost 150,000 majority. Theodore Roosevelt wrote to him as follows:

Let me heartily congratulate you. I earnestly hope you will now assume a position of leadership. We want leadership! What I most desire is that you shall help bring the Republicans far enough forward to enable us to hold the Progressives far enough back to keep a substantial alignment.

you

This was Governor Lowden's reply: I thank from the bottom of my heart for your note. You have stated exactly, it seems to me, the problem, and I want to work with you to the fullest extent in trying to help solve it.

To show what Lowden thought of Roosevelt one may take this summary from an address by the Governor in February, 1919:

Great events are ever connected with his name, but the greatest of all was Theodore Roosevelt himself. It was not so much what he did as what he was. For, during all his life, he was the lightning in the political sky which purified the air.

When Lowden was running for Governor, he sent out a lot of workers over the State. He furnished them with automobiles and paid them well. After the

(C) Underwood & Underwood

GOVERNOR LOWDEN, OF ILLINOIS (LEFT), IN ANIMATED CONVERSATION WITH SENATORS KEYES, JONES, AND MCCORMICK, IN WASHINGTON

campaign one of these men came to Lowden's office in Springfield.

"I worked hard for you, didn't I, Governor?" he asked.

Lowden admitted it. Thereupon the visitor asked for the appointment of a friend of his to a certain office. Now it was Lowden's turn.

"I paid you, and paid you well for your work, didn't I?" he demanded.

The man replied, "Yes." The Governor went on:

"The reason I did that was so that I would have no strings tied to me; so that no one could ask me to repay a personal debt with a public office. This friend of yours may be just the man I want, and if he is I will be glad to appoint him. But if I do it it will be because of his fitness, and not because of any service you rendered me in the campaign."

Lowden promised little. He fulfilled much. Recently in The Outlook I pointed out Governor Johnson's achievements as recorded in Californian legislation. It is also a satisfaction to mention some laws

passed under Governor Lowden's administration in Illinois :

A Workmen's Compensation Act. A Child Labor Act. A mine-worker's measure providing for first aid equipment at mines.

A law extending the establishment of free employment offices to include towns of 25,000 inhabitants or over.

The development of vocational and other educational measures.

to

An act permitting farmers and dairymen to enter into collective bargaining. The so-called "Blue Sky Laws protect the public against unsound or dishonest stock promotions.

The abolition of the Board of Equalization of twenty-five members and the establishment of a tax commission of three members.

Highway and waterway laws.

Calling a Constitutional Convention (now in session) to draft a new Constitution.

Outside of Illinois the new budget system has attracted much attention. The head of the Illinois Department of Finance prepares a budget of estimated

expenditures and receipts to be submitted to each regular session of the General Assembly, the Illinois State Legislature, and he begins the preparation of the budget two years in advance. "He is constantly gathering information," says Governor Lowden, "to enable him intelligently to judge what the appropriation should be for the next biennium. His budget is submitted to me, and by me in turn transmitted to the General Assembly." This was certainly a change from. the old way, when any official who wanted to expend public money made an estimate and submitted it 'directly to the Legislature without any one's revision. Because of the budget system and the centralized administration, the tax rate has dropped from ninety cents on a hundred-dollar valuation in 1917 to sixty cents in 1919. In January, 1917, the available cash in the State treasury was something over $500; two years later it was nearly $13,000,000.

The State's centralized administration was seen in the transformation, within sixty days after Lowden took office, of the former 125 agencies and bureaus of Gov ernment, with their special parasites and political hangers-on, into nine Govern ment departments. The results of the new rule have surpassed expectations indeed, the Non-Partisan Legislative Voters' League of Illinois, a body no overmuch given to praise, declares :