we are; we are radicals in such matters as eliminating special privilege and securing genuine popular rule, the genuine rule of the democracy. But we are not overmuch concerned with matters of mere terminology. We are not in the least afraid of the word " conservative," and, wherever there is any reason for caution, we are not only content but desirous to make progress slowly and in a cautious, conservative manner. Moreover, ultraradicalism may be as hostile to real progress noW as it was in Lincoln's day. Lincoln was a radical compared to Buchanan and Fillmore; he was a conservative compared to John Brown and Wendell Phillips; and he was right in both positions. The men and forces whom and which he had to overcome were those behind Buchanan and Fillmore; to overcome them was vital to the Nation; and they would never have been overcome under the leadership of men like Brown and Phillips. Lincoln was to the full as conscientious as the extremists who regarded him as an opportunist and a compromiser; and he was far wiser and saner, and therefore infinitely better able to accomplish practical results on a National scale. The great movement of our day, the Progressive National movement against special privilege and in favor of an honest and efficient political and industrial democracy, is as emphatically a wise and moral movement as the movement of half a century ago in which Lincoln was the great and commanding figure. But, thank Heaven, the present movement is free from taint of sectionalism, and all good citizens, North and South, East and West, can stand shoulder to shoulder in advocating the basic principles on which the movement rests. Of course the Progressive movement has some opponents whom we can have no expectation of converting. The dishonest man of swollen riches whose wealth has been made in ways which he desires to conceal from the law, and the politician who does not really believe in the right of the people to rule and who prefers to trust to corruption and class favoritism rather than to honesty and fair dealing in politics, are both naturally against us. Moreover, many men who, according to their lights, are sincere and honest, are yet so dominated by real or fancied self-interest as likewise to be against us. The rich man who has made his riches, not by lawbreaking, but by the profits of special privileges which the law should abolish, and who denies the right of Government to regulate in the public interest the business use of corporate wealth; the man who puts property rights above human rights and denies the right of Government to interfere with his business by guaranteeing to his laborers that they shall work under safe and healthy conditions and be compensated for loss of life or limb due to the dangers of their trade-these also, and the many like them, we must expect to exert their power against the Progressive movement. There is thus one group composed of those who understand Progressive Nationalism and heartily approve it because they believe it tends toward the abolition. of special privilege and of political corruption and toward the development of a genuine democracy; and another group composed of those who cordially fear and fight it because they wish to preserve special privilege and evade control. There is yet another group who are not in the movement because they misunderstand it. One of the most frequently advanced allegations about the movement, made for the purpose of discrediting it in the minds of good men who do not know the facts, is that it stands for "over-centralization " and for the destruction of States' rights. Nothing could be further from the truth. The advocates of Progressive Nationalism will, I believe, agree with what I said on this question at Denver and Osawatomie last summer: "The State must be made efficient for the work which concerns only the people of the State, and the Nation for that which concerns all the people. There must remain no neutral ground to serve as a refuge for lawbreakers, and especially for lawbreakers of great wealth who can hire the vulpine legal cunning which will teach them how to avoid both jurisdictions. It is a misfortune when the National Legislature fails to do its duty in providing a National remedy, so that the only National activity is the purely negative activity of the judiciary in forbidding the State to exercise power in the prem I do not ask for over-centralization; but I do ask that we work in a spirit of broad and far-reaching Nationalism when we work for what concerns the people as a whole. We are all Americans. Our common interests are as broad as the continent. The National Government belongs to the whole American people, and, where the whole American people are interested, that interest can be guarded effectively only by the National Government." The advocates of a Progressive Nationalism emphatically plead for efficient State action as well as for efficient National action. All they demand is that both State and National action be in the interest of, and not against the interest of, the people. The most efficient possible devel taining that the other has none. I wish to contrast with this position of the special interests the spirit and purpose of Progressive Nationalism. Its advocates desire to secure to both State and Nation, each within its own sphere, power to give the people complete control over the various forms of corporate activity, and power to permit the people to safeguard the vital interests of all citizens, of whatever class. Again I ask the critics of Progressive Nationalism just what it is to which they object in the position of its adherents. If they do not approve of it, do they wish to leave things as they are? If not, what alternative do they propose? THEODORE ROOSEVELT. STATES opment of State power is not only not CHINA AND THE UNITED incompatible with but is likely to accompany the most efficient possible development of National power. Wisconsin offers the best case in point. Under the leadership of Senator La Follette, Wisconsin, during the last decade, has advanced at least as far as, and probably farther than, any other State in securing both genuine popular rule and the wise use of the collective power of the people to do what cannot be done by merely individual effort the University of Wisconsin, by the way, playing a very important part in the movement. Yet this has in no way interfered with Wisconsin's hearty support of the movement to make the National power in its sphere also more efficient. The representatives and beneficiaries of the special interests desire, not unnaturally, to escape all Governmental control. What they prefer is that popular unrest should find its vent in mere debate, in unlimited discussion of an academic kind as to the sanctity of contract, full liberty of contract, and other kindred subjects. They feel the need of construing the Constitution with rigid narrowness when property rights are involved, and of carrying the "division of power" theory to such an extreme as to deprive every Governmental agency of all real power and responsibility. They prefer the status quo, for they know that the mass of conflicting judicial decision has created just what they wish, a neutral ground where State and Nation each merely exercises the power of main "American Defeat in the Pacific" is perhaps rather a strong phrase to apply to the present commercial relations existing between China and the United States. Nevertheless, in employing that phrase as the title of his interesting article which appears on another page, Mr. Frederick McCormick is justified by the following reasoning: The United States now has, through its control of the Philippines, some vitally important interests at stake in the Orient; the welfare of those interests depends in a large degree on the right development of China and the relations of Japan to that development; and, finally, the social and political development of China is, and will be, influenced profoundly by its commercial and industrial development. If the United States wishes to have in this development a share which shall be helpful both to China and to itself, it must cultivate with the Chinese people commercial relations of the best kind. Mr. McCormick is right, therefore, in contending that a diminution of our commerce with China means a diminution of influence in settling political and social problems of profound importance to the whole civilized world. Before the United States can have a large and profitable trade with China four conditions must be firmly established at home: First, there must be a real desire on the part of American manufacturers and merchants for that trade and a determination to get it by all honorable means. Ship subsidies, investments in Chinese railways, the Americanization of Chinese finance, the intervention of the American Government in behalf of the Open Door policy-all these will count for nothing until American merchants supply the goods the Chinese want, in the packages they desire, and on terms convenient to their commercial methods. In other words, a sympathetic understanding of the Chinese and their needs is the first essential. Second, the promotion of the Open Door policy formulated by Secretary Hay. The "Open Door" means simply that all nations shall be permitted to trade in China on equal terms, with no discriminations or favoritism shown to any nation on the part of the Chinese Government. It does not mean that China shall not impose taxes and tariffs, but that the taxes and tariffs shall apply to all nations alike. Agricultural implements may be taxed, but not merely American agricultural implements; the importation of unsanitary meat products may be prohibited, but not merely American unsanitary meat prod ucts. The American people should support the American Government in every honorable attempt to aid China in maintaining the Open Door. For China wants to maintain it; it is to the interest of every European nation, except perhaps Russia, to maintain it. Russia and Japan are so strongly intrenched in Manchuria that they may jointly strive to nullify the Open Door policy for their own selfish advantage. If so, they should be persuaded that they are not merely doing an injustice to China, but are seriously offend. ing the three strongest commercial and martial nations of the Occident-England, Germany, and the United States. It is true that the Open Door policy is not regarded by the people of the United States as being in the same category with the Monroe Doctrine; the latter, on the ground that its integrity is essential to our National existence, we should cheerfully defend by force against the whole of Europe if necessary; the former appeals to our sense of justice, and to obtain justice we ought to exhaust every peaceful means known to frank diplomacy before taking a single step in the direction of force. Nevertheless, the Open Door is necessary to the development of civilization in China, and the United States should never, and in our judgment will never, relax a proper insistence upon its observance by Japan and Russia. Third, a clear understanding that through our occupation of the Philippines and our building of the Panama Canal we have obligations to perform with regard to the development of China and the whole Orient in its relations to China. One of these obligations is to aid China in her struggle for Western education. Selected Chinese students should not only be welcomed but should be induced to come to American schools and universities. The admirable remission of the Boxer indemnity during President Roosevelt's Administration and the application of some of the money of this indemnity to the education of Chinese in the United States was a long step in the right direction. Fourth, President Taft should be loyally supported in his efforts to aid China in the reforms she has undertaken to make in her financial system. The best-informed economists agree that the greatest obstacle in the way of China's commercial development is the chaos prevailing in Chinese finance. The United States Government is taking the greatest interest in co-operating with the leading Powers to help China frame a sound scheme of National finance. It is believed that an important feature of China's financial plan is the appointment of a financial adviser, preferably an American. If America and China can persuade the European Powers that such an American adviser will be a man of distinguished ability and of disinterested determination to employ his office for the promotion of financial order, for the creation of a Chinese Department of the Treasury administered on modern lines by the Chinese themselves and for the placing of all foreign interests on an equality, more will have been done toward the preservation to China of peace, integrity, safety, and sound commercial development than has perhaps been done by any other one act of foreign political and commercial intercourse with China. A WORD FOR THE USUAL 66 The title of Mr. Colby's new volume of essays, "" 1 Constrained Attitudes," suggests some kind of compulsion; as if the themes or the positions had been imposed on the writer. If either surmise is correct, Mr. Colby moves with enviable ease within the limitations, and speaks with refreshing frankness of habits of his contemporaries and of not a few of their halfgods and less interesting idolatries. The critic who refreshes himself with these keen thrusts at imposing platitudes, inherited credulities, and cast-iron self-deceptions will hesitate to speak of these essays as generously as he would like, lest Mr. Colby find in his commendation some of that easy assumption of authority, that subconscious conceit of opinion, which the essayist finds such easy game. Let it suffice, therefore, to say that he who enjoys a book of keen perception, sharp criticism, and alert intelligence cannot afford to leave "Constrained Attitudes unread. It is a lively oasis in a desert of monotonous collected essays by serious and heavyhanded persons. The practice of deliberate and profitable humbug has been a fine art since the beginning of history, and has furnished the comic journals with inexhaustible variety of themes and occasions. Mr. Colby is interested in the psychology of the unconscious practitioner of the gentle art of deceiving himself as well as his neighbors. This, for instance, is what he has to say about those groups of people who organize admiration for a writer into a trust which, from its very inception, aims directly at monopoly: "No one should be blamed for being suspicious of the literary cult. And it is as short-lived as it is deceitful; for it has been observed of its members, as of the blue-bottle fly, that they buzz the loudest just before they drop. Excesses of this sort have of late years been invariably followed by periods of severe repression, of silence almost propor ionate to the degree of garrulity when the talking fit was on. The hush that settled on 'Trilby' and Robert Elsmere' endures to this day. The reader of 'The Man with the Hoe,' if there be one, is as the owl in 1 Constrained Attitudes. By Frank M. Colby. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York. the desert; and upon the lips of the Omarian the spider builds its web. Men still find pleasure in the writings of Stevenson, but where are the Stevensonians? Where are the Smithites, Brownists, and Robinsonians of yesterday? Let a subject once fall to the cult, let the lavish tongues of small expounders have their way, and the waters soon close over it." Mr. Colby finds easy game in those persons of literal mind who are always trying to "do sums" in literature and reduce everything to pounds, shillings, and pence; who are persuaded that the poetry of the day can be standardized, so to speak, and the relative value of the poets accurately determined by weights or measures; who ask bewildered editors who are "the five greatest female novelists, which are their five greatest novels, and what are the names of their five greatest characters." It is reported of a distinguished college president that he received a letter from an anxious inquirer who wrote: "I hear that you are the greatest thinker in America; will you please send me your greatest thought?"-a very embarrassing question to put to a modest man! It is the National proclivity to regulate commerce in ideas and art which keeps alive interest in the "best sellers." The commonplace comes in for gentle castigation at the hands of this bantering essayist, whose clear-cut standards and pungent phrases do not disguise the force and veracity of his criticism. It is a theme which has yielded an easy and early harvest to shrewd, and sometimes to dull, cultivators since the beginning of satire and irony. The commonplace amounts to a portentous sum in life, and it seems at times as if large sections of society were stricken with a monotonous dullness. The young commuter who lives on a small income in a small house in a suburban town and wheels a perambulator before and after church on a pleasant Sunday is an easy prey for the satirist who is not afraid to repeat an old tale glibly. If one groans in spirit with those whose lives are hedged about with the usual and feels like breaking all the windows, he will find. pleasure in Mr. Colby's shrewd comments on "Hedda Gabler;" but if he needs a good strong tonic, let him read Miss Sinclair's 66 are latest story, "The Creators," a report of the unusual made with great ability and in minute detail. There are commonplace people in this novel, but they are introduced solely for the purpose of putting solid ground under the uncommonplace. The central group, "the Creators,' all people of genius. They live, move, and have their being in a sphere of their own, with mutual understanding, a common language, and a kind of joint consciousness of a special function. The heroine, if the story has a heroine, is a woman with what might be called a 'genius attachment —a rare and inexplicable creative impulse which seizes her at times like the evil spirit in the Gospels and rends her. Miss Sinclair has at last freed herself of obsession as to the sex question, and has made an analysis of temperament of extraordinary insight and analytical skill; but her woman of genius is not convincing; the creative power does not seem to be a part of her; it is not the flowing together of all the secret forces of personality; it is something which comes to her from without. The story is too long, the analysis too heavily underscored, the talk too voluminous; the book is charged with ability, but it is not thoroughly dramatized. All Nevertheless, "The Creators" is a capital antidote for impatience with the commonplace; it would be difficult to put more unhappiness between covers! the Creators share a tormenting self-consciousness; they are driven by the wind of destiny; they are generous and loyal, but they never lay hold on content or repose. Happiness is not the end of life, but there ought to be some normal ease, some natural adaptation to environment, in every group of people; in this group everything is at sixes and sevens. No sooner do a little wholesome peace and a few months of normal habit wait on these Creators than a blast of genius makes their wives hateful to them, their husbands repulsive, and their babies objects of loathing. One turns with relief to the young commuter propelling the perambulator along the suburban street. His life is not exciting, but he has no desire to strangle his child or elope with his neighbor's wife; The Creators. By May Sinclair. The Century Company, New York. he is not tossed on a sea of surging passion which will carry him to a divorce court or to the penitentiary; his wife does not follow Madame Bovary in order to vary the dull round of daily duties. The interests of the young married commuter may not be broad or stimulating, but he keeps his honor and betrays his friend neither in his home nor in his purse. He is an easy mark for the satirist, and it requires no great genius to make sport of the perambulator; but in any sane view of life it is at least an open question whether he does not get more out of life and put more into it than the Superman whose chief characteristic is a selfishness so brutal and colossal that it is a kind of elephantiasis of individuality, a monstrous deformity. In the reaction against the normal and usual people forget that the abnormal and unusual develop a monotony of their own, and that the escape from the perambulator to the lunatic asylum is not an escape from dull routine to freedom, but an exchange of one form of commonplaceness for another. To the layman lunacy seems rich in variety of delusion; but the alienists tell us that the illusions of the insane are very few and are easily classified. Out of every thousand a definite percentage of the insane will be Mary, Queen of Scots; another definite percentage will own everything within sight-a widespread form of delusion; another percentage will enjoy the distinction of being George Washington. There is evidently no escape from monotony through the asylum or the penitentiary. Nor is it possible to conceal the fact that even the great apostles of the revolt against the monotony of the daily round move in regular circles and soon become as monotonous as those who wheel the perambulator. One speedily becomes familiar with Ibsen's interesting ladies and can calculate their fates with mathematical accuracy. Their orbits are eccentric; but they are orbits, nevertheless. The vivacious and much-advertising Mr. Shaw cannot conceal the rhythm of his irony or satire, and we predict the exact point at which his characters will discard their masks and show old, familiar faces. Mr. Chesterton goes his cheerful and paradoxical round, |