to compel arbitration. limit of his power.

57

Persuasion was the

He found that if the men were granted an eight-hour day the danger of an immediate strike would be removed.

There was a precedent. for this action. It seems to be somewhat generally overlooked that the Government of the United States has already set its seal of approval upon the eight-hour day. All wage-earners in Government arsenals or other Government works now have the eight-hour day by statute, and Congress, under a previous Administration, had gone so far as to forbid the Government to let contracts for public works to any contractor who does not grant the eight-hour day to the laborers he employs.

It is said in criticism of the present action of Congress that it was a misnomer to call the question one of hours or labor conditions; it is asserted that it was simply a question of wages. It is true that for the men on the trains it will, to a large extent, result in an increase of wages rather than a restriction of hours of work. But the new law, of which we give a synopsis on another page, is so wide in its application that it will, if found to be Constitutional, affect thousands of men, such as signalmen, switchmen, telegraphers, and other employees who have fixed places of work, in their actual hours of labor. correspondent, quoted above, says that if he had been a Member of Congress he would have voted against the measure, and that a general strike would have been preferable to the yielding of Congress under duress. reply it may be said that if the present action of Congress has not established a permanent basis of peace neither would a general strike have settled the fight on a permanent basis of peace.

Strikes never do.

Our

In

With the horrors of the European war staring us in the face, a general railway strike-which would amount to little less than a bloody civil war-seems to us a method of settling an industrial dispute to be avoided at any cost, save that of violating a great and unquestioned moral principle. Would our correspondent desire to have repeated all over the country the turbulence and bloodshed of the Pennsylvania strike of 1877, the Pullman strike of 1894, or the Colorado strike of 1914? Assuredly not.

The real question to be considered may be resolved into two component parts:

First, Are we nearer a reasonable and permanent basis of settling industrial disputes

We unhesitatingly answer, Yes.

Second, Are the evils which the country will suffer from the yielding of Congress to the urgency of the President and the duress imposed by the labor unions greater than the evils which would spring from a universal railway strike and the complete disorganization of our social fabric which such a strike would entail? We answer, unhesitatingly, No. But we add the proviso that Congress must now proceed to enact a law which will assuredly prevent the repetition of such an emergency as we have just passed through. If Congress fails to enact such a law, we shall then, but not until then, agree with our correspondent that the President's course has been opportunist, superficial, and futile.

The Outlook has long advocated eight hours as the standard day for organized labor in factories, mines, and railways. As consumers we should be willing to pay our proportion of any additional cost which the adoption of such a standard might involve. But it is neither just nor democratic that this question should be determined for the Nation by a bureaucracy of either laborers or capitalists. The railways are not like other private property. They are the highways of the Nation. Both the managers and the employees of the railways are the servants of the Nation. It is intolerable that any combination of either managers or employees should be able to dictate to the Nation on what terms the people may use their highways.

We think it was wise for Congress to vote for the eight-hour day rather than subject the people to the terrible consequences of closing the highways for even a short season. Congress has done well to free us from the present distress. But this is not enough. It ought now at an early date to devise some plan by which the people can decide with authority the terms and conditions on which the highways must be operated and can enforce their decision on both managers and employees.

This can be done by the enactment of a compulsory arbitration law. Our correspondent, quoted at the beginning of this article, says that it would have been better to submit the issue to a strike. In the rioting that would have inevitably followed a general railway strike we should have shrunk from fighting with men over a mere question of dollars and cents. Such a fight would have been a war of conquest, and conquest for

ought to, should adopt a compulsory arbitration law for the settlement of railway disputes, and the workmen by force should attempt to fight the findings of a compulsory arbitration board or court-such a fight as that we should enter upon with zeal and a clear conscience, for it would be a fight to sustain a fundamental institution of the Republic.

Is it not possible for those who disagree as to the wisdom of the course of the President and Congress in the recent crisis at least to agree in demanding that compulsory arbitration, sustained by all civic and military power of the country, shall make such crises improbable, if not impossible, in the future?

THE PIPES OF PAN

The pipes of Pan are never silent; they can be heard above the tumult of cities and the deep-throated curses of the guns that turn ancient woods into blackened wastes. When poor Susan passed the corner of Wood Street in the silence of the morning and heard the song of the thrush that hung there, the city vanished from her sight and there rose before her

"A mountain ascending, a vision of trees;

Bright volumes of vapor through Lothbury glide, And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside.

She looks, and her heart is in heaven; but they fade,

The mist and the river, the hill and the shade; The stream will not flow, and the hill will not rise, And the colors have all passed away from her eyes."

No poet has known petter than Wordsworth how inseparable are the inner and outer worlds, and how largely the beauty of the landscape lies in the eye and the music of the spheres rests in the ear. So the creative energy flows on from generation to generation and the world is born anew for every man who looks or listens. There is no age of miracles; the miracle is continuous and we are part of it. The spring

comes in us

as truly as in the bloom of the earth about us, and the springs of life within us rise again when the birds come back and the trees put forth their leaves. "In the beginning God," is written in the poetic report of the making of the world;

and then follow the innumerable generations who have shared in a creation in which the artist in God and the artist in man work together at

"The roaring loom of time

And weave for God the robe thou seest him by."

There are moments when the deeps within us are stirred by the call of the deeps without us and nature and our spirits "whisper together of immortality." So Wordsworth, in a fragment which Emerson used to read with thrilling intelligence, describes the boy who, "when the earliest stars began to move along the edges of the hills," would stand beside the lake and blow mimic hootings to the owls, and they would answer him:

"And, when there came a pause Of silence such as baffled his best skill, Then sometimes, in that silence, while he hung Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise Has carried far into his heart the voice Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene Would enter unawares into his mind With all its solemn imagery, its rocks, Its woods, and that uncertain heaven received Into the bosom of the steady lake."

To the simple country girl at the corner of Wood Street in the most prosaic part of London, to the boy shouting to the owls on the shores of Lake Winander, to the sensitive Senancour in Switzerland, to Coleridge within sound of the "five wild mountain torrents" that rush headlong through the Valley of Chamouni, nature speaks in different tones, but with a kindred magic; and there is in every man, in every condition of life, a poet who understands.

Nor do the pipes of Pan ever fall wholly silent; even the passionate preoccupation of war does not hush them. Pheidippides, the fleet-footed runner of Athens, was racing to Corinth, carrying the news that the Persians had landed and that the light of Greece was at stake, when he came upon the great god Pan piping by the roadside, as he had piped a thousand times in the peace of the Arcadian hills. And the other day the lyre fell from the hand of Rupert Brooke, latest of the English singers, dying for England and liberty on an island in the Mediterranean.

The pipes of Pan are heard, not only by those to whom culture and leisure make place for poetry, but by simple folk far from the centers of art, whose days are spent under the open sky and whose nights are splendid with the unbroken march of the stars; and they sing of plain things and

59

simple occupations with a magic as mysteriously beautiful as that with which they set great armies moving on distant fields or notate the elemental music of the spheres chanting the glory of God, the Creator, with sublime sweep of harp. Theocritus, reporting the sights and sounds of Sicily, home of goatherds, is as true a singer as Homer, companion of gods and heroes.

Pan was earliest at home in Arcadia, where he was the god of the herdsman and the guardian of the flocks, familiar with the simplest occupations and the rudest life, worshiped on the tops of mountains and in caves as well. His was also the inspiration which divined the deep mysteries of the universe and made men mad with glimpses of hidden presences moving on soundless feet in the secret places of nature. Fellow with the most uncouth men in a rough occupation, his worship was charged with mysterious awe, at times with the terror that breeds panics; for he was nearest the ways of men and yet wholly strange to them; incarnation at the same time of the most familiar and the most mysterious life about and within them. one of his most beautiful pieces of prose Emerson wrote: "The great Pan of old-who was clothed in a leopard skin to signify the beautiful variety of things and the firmament, his coat of stars-was but the representative of thee, O rich and various man! thou palace of sight and sound, carrying in thy senses the morning and the night and the unfathomable galaxy; in thy brain, the geometry of the City of God; in thy heart, the bowers of love and the realms of right and wrong."

In

Poetry inheres in the nature of man and begins to show him the wonder of the world as soon as the imagination stirs within him. It antedates knowledge and is a wisdom born with children and too often blurred or banished by the education which opens the textbook and bolts the doors and windows. The later knowledge lies largely prefigured and predicted in the noble myths which the race created in its childhood to explain the mystery of things to itself; and to-day the Irish peasants use a language on which stars and lonely glens have set their seal, with a rhythm of voice and words beyond the reach of the schools. And yet there are those who talk of the lack of education of Shakespeare and Burns!

A thousand interests, wholesome in themselves but tyrannical and limiting in their power of absorbing attention and energy,

assail the poet in man; but sooner or later, in his hours of passionate pursuit of the things that feed his body and starve his spirit, he comes upon the great god Pan seated by the roadside, and on the instant the spell is upon him-half-forgotten landscapes rise before him and around him, and the perishing things in which he lives take on a beauty not their own. The song of an invisible bird, a sudden silence, a glimpse of self-forgetfulness and heroism on a city street, a flower in bloom in a tenement-house window, have power to remind him of his immortality. In the hour when the world he has made for himself seems most solid it is suddenly smitten with unreality and he is engulfed in mystery.

The great god Pan was the most mysterious of the gods, not because he brought the vision of vague things with him-on the contrary, he was one of the plainest and most neighborly of deities; but because he brought the deep things with him, the elusive companionships of nature and men, the interworking of invisible forces, the flowing life which has made this vast material universe, to modern thought, not an organization of matter, but a boundless stream of force. Happy the man in whose spirit the pipes of Pan keep the wonder and mystery of it all fresh and vitalizing.

THE GERMAN SPIRIT1

We wish that all Americans might read this little volume of Professor Kuno Francke's,

especially the first two essays. It is a sympathetic, too eulogistic, but not uncritical portraiture of the German people by a German-American who appreciates and sympathizes with both the Americans and the Germans. No American can read it with an open mind and not get a kindlier and, we believe, juster view of the German people. He will also get from it a somewhat more hopeful view of the outcome of this terrible war; as, for example, in the following sentence quoted from the address of a German captain on the field: "This, I think, is truethat the war has created a mutual respect between the fighting peoples; and upon the basis of this mutual respect there may per

The German Spirit. By Kuno Francke. Henry Holt & Co., New York. $1.

haps arise a more solid co-operation of nations than the friends of eternal peace have thus far been able to bring about."

But Professor Francke also, in a single sentence quoted from Hegel, indicates what we believe is the real underlying cause of the hostility of all free peoples to the German idea. To Hegel, says Professor Francke, the state is "the manifestation of the Divine on earth." This is rather worse than the dominant idea in the Middle Ages that the Church is the manifestation of the Divine on earth. Any notion that any class or caste, political or ecclesiastical, is the manifestation of the Divine on earth, to which all humanity should be subject, and by which the world's civilization should be framed and fashioned, is absolutely inconsistent with that conception of democracy and that ideal of universal human development in a free atmosphere for which all democracies stand. It is because of this Prussian ideal and the resultant attempt of Prussia to impose this ideal upon other peoples that the free nations of the earth are invincibly opposed to the domination of Prussia. We call this ideal Prussian, not German, because there are increasing indications of a revolt among the German people against this immoral conception of the state. Such an indication is furnished by the little but very significant volume by Hermann Fernau, "Because I Am a German,' "1 written in Switzerland, confiscated in Germany, and now even forbidden public sale in Switzerland, though written by one who describes himself as "born and educated in Prussia " and "generally reputed a good Christian and a law-abiding German citizen by the authorities of my country." His greatest offense is his demonstration that Austria and Germany are responsible for bringing on the war; his next greatest offense is his declaration that "in the twentieth century there ought no longer, under any circumstances, to be two morals- -one for the people at large, and the other for the state and its princes."

The future status of Germany among the civilized nations of the earth depends upon the question whether Hegel as quoted by Professor Kuno Francke or Hermann Fernau truly interprets the spirit of Germany.

1 Because I Am a German. By Hermann Fernau. E. P. Dutton & Co., New York. $1.

books revising the tariff and the banking and currency laws, establishing rural credit, rehabilitating the merchant marine, and creating the Federal Trade Commission. Among other things, Mr. Wilson included in the achievements of the Democratic party the emancipation of the workingmen of America by the legal recognition of a man's labor as part of his life, the emancipation of the children of the country from hurtful labor, the equalization of taxation by means of an equitable income tax, the opening up of the resources of Alaska, and the provision for National defense upon a scale never before proposed upon the responsibility of an entire political party. He claimed that the Democratic party "had driven the tariff lobby from cover, and obliged it to substitute solid argument for private influence."

Mr. Wilson claimed not only to have carried out practically all the platform of the Democratic party, but he added: "We have in four years come very near to carrying out the platform of the Progressive party as well."

THE PRESIDENT ON THE EUROPEAN WAR

Naturally the two most vital subjects, outside of our domestic relations, dealt with in the President's address were the European situation and the revolution in Mexico. Here is his statement of his attitude towards the European war:

We have been neutral not only because it was the fixed and traditional policy of the United States to stand aloof from the politics of Europe and because we had no part either of action or of policy in the influences which brought on the present war, but also because it was manifestly our duty to prevent, if it were possible, the indefinite extension of the fires of hate and desolation kindled by that terrible conflict, and seek to serve mankind by reserving our strength and our resources for the anxious and difficult days of restoration and healing which must follow when peace will have to build its house anew.

The rights of our own citizens, of course, became involved-that was inevitable.. Where they did, this was our guiding principle: that property rights can be vindicated by claims for damages, and no modern nation can decline to arbitrate such claims; but the fundamental rights of humanity cannot be. The loss of life is irreparable. Neither can direct violations of a nation's sovereignty await vindication in suits for damages. The nation that violates these