We have the testimony of an English traveler that even in 1897, when the ox still trod out the grain and the chaff was winnowed from the wheat as in the days

of Ruth and Boaz, so great is the fertility

of the soil that the Serbian farmer, after

supplying his own needs and making his yearly contribution to the communal granaries—his sure defense against want in bad years could still, if he chose, lay up half the value of his yearly crops. The same traveler, Mr. Herbert Vivian, placed the average yield of hay from unsown meadows as high as six tons to the

acre.

Placing the value of one year's harvest in Serbia at about four hundred million dollars, Mr. Savic declares that the enemy seized three harvests. The invaders destroyed 130,000 horses, 6,000,000 sheep and goats, 2,000,000 pigs, 1,300,000 cattle, and more than 8,000,000 poultry -this in a purely farming country, where all agricultural machines, every implement down to the most trivial, had also been carried away or destroyed! But for the food of America, this meant quick starvation for ninety per cent of the Serbian people. It still means a prolonged and stern struggle for the merest necessities against fearful odds. And it means that Serbia is confronted by another vast problem, altogether new to her, upon the solution of which depends the future of the entire race-the care and protec tion of a multitude of helpless and destitute children. The Serbian Minister of Child Welfare places the number in Jugoslavia at "above half a millioneighty-five per cent of the cases in dire need of medical treatment." It is physically impossible for ruined, disorganized Serbia herself to give that care and pro

tection.

The picture drawn by the late Hamilton W. Mabie is essentially as true to-day as it was in 1915. He wrote in The Outlook, November 3, 1915: "These children are not orphans in the ordinary sense. They have not only lost their fathers and mothers, but they have lost all personal relations with the world. Many of them are in parts of the country which is strange to them; they do not know who their relations are, some of them do not know their own names. . . .

...

Perhaps never in the world has there been

such a pitiful condition as that of these thousands of friendless, homeless, shirtless children." He added, "The problem is not only physical, it is also moral. Those of the children who survive are in danger of becoming beggars and criminals."

Since those words were written, to the natural horrors borne by these children have been added the fear and merciless cruelty of man during three years of Teutonic and Bulgarian frightfulness.

SHOULD THE PEACE

TREATY BE RATIFIED?

N another page we print some letters on this question from readers of The Outlook. They are perhaps typical of the various shades of opinion in the country regarding the League of Nations. We do not undertake to answer each query or comment in these letters, but use their publication as an occasion to restate briefly our own position.

Riders: Legislation by "riders" is unequivocally bad and should never be tolerated even when the object which the "rider" is designed to obtain is good. A

66

rider" is a clause which is tacked on to an important bill, although its subject is foreign to the general purpose of the bill, and is not an integral part of it. Legislators who employ "riders" hope that they will be carried through by the reluc tance of their colleagues to delay the passage, often vital to the country, of the bill itself.

world of the necessity of some inter national tribunal. The five great nation most instrumental in winning the wat have, after laborious conference, devised such a plan. They amended the plan and attempted to safeguard the special inter ests of the United States on receiving suggestions from American statesmen no actively participating in the Peace Con ference. The plan provides a method fo future amendments if they should b found desirable, as they doubtless will be after the plan is put into operation. I also provides a simple method of with drawal for any nation that does not lik the plan after it has tried it. In ordinary

personal or business contracts and agree ments such provisions would be consid ered liberal and extremely safe for the contracting parties. Nations are simply individuals acting on a grand scale. A principle which is safe in individual relationships is safe in national relationships. If the present opportunity of trying international judicial procedure, supported" by thirty-two nations of the world, is rejected, who knows when mankind will have another such chance? If the United States Senate amends the Treaty, it wil in fact reject it. The Treaty will have to go back to a reconvened Peace Confer ence at Paris for concurrence. Can the Conference be reconvened? Will it con cur if reconvened? Do we want to ru the risk? The Outlook thinks not.

Reservations: Will "reservations" destroy the Treaty? No, if they are put in supplementary form and in gener terms. If, for example, the Senate shoul say of Articles VIII and X that it ac cepts them with the clear understanding that the final authority regarding reduc tion of armaments or participation in war by the United States rests in Congl gress, no harm could be done. But thom necessity for such reservations is not aj parent to us. For in these matters th explicit language of the Covenant is tha the action of the Executive Council the League shall be simply recomme datory and advisory. The danger reservations is that they may be a framed as to make practical interpret tion of the Covenant difficult.

Thus the immediate passage of the Agricultural Bill was necessary for the maintenance of the vital work of the Government. The repeal or continuance of daylight saving had nothing to do with agricultural appropriations. The repeal should have been considered, even if desirable, by itself. The League of Nations, even if undesirable, is not only germane to the Treaty, but is a part of the Treaty. A legislator having the ultimate interests of the country at heart should always vote against "riders;" he may or may not vote against a bill because he objects to one of its sections or clauses. Those who oppose the League of Nations, if For these reasons, while we do n logical, should oppose it, not on the ground object to simple reservations, we shou that it is a "rider for it is not-but advise, if asked, against them. Th on the ground that it is an objectionable seem to us in danger of increasing rath section of a bill which should be defeated than diminishing the difficulties of t if the obnoxious section or clauses are not situation. The common-sense course removed by amendment. to start the machine, see how it work Should there be amendments? Our and modify it after observing its ope judgment is that there should not.

For at least a quarter of a century enlightened statesmen have been trying to establish machinery for settling, as far as possible, international disputes by judicial procedure. The world war, suddenly and dramatically, convinced the

tion.

The Duty of the Republican Party We repeat what we have already sa about the tactical blunder of the Repu lican leaders. If we were those leader we should, from a purely party point view, ratify the Treaty as soon as po

ible. Our political aim would be to get he Treaty out of the way and leave othing for the President to debate, no pportunity for him in his projected ampaign this summer to put the Repubican party in the position of obstruc

ionists.

Whoever wishes to be a leader of the American people must look toward the ature. He cannot lead by merely critiising the actions of the past. If Lincoln ad simply attacked the preposterous octrine of Buchanan that a State had o right to secede, but that if it attempted secede the Nation had no right to oerce it, he never would have been lected President. He led a campaign, ot of obstructive criticism, but of contructive statesmanship. In 1916 the Republican party managers devoted hemselves almost wholly to criticism of heir opponents and made almost no contructive pronouncements as to the Euroean war. Mr. Hughes was beaten. Are he party managers going to repeat that nistake?

Constructive Problems: The problem efore our country and before the whole orld is: How can we make our indusrial institutions correspond in their pirit to our political and educational astitutions?

How can we so reorganize our transortation system that it shall provide ustly for the interests of the railway wners, the railway workers, and the ailway users, including both shippers nd travelers?

How

can we secure a management of ur telegraph and telephone systems so 3 to make intercommunication in this ountry prompt, efficient, and economical, that the whole system shall be open something like equal terms to all the ople, as is our postal system? What can we do to secure for all the ople of the United States the benefit just and equal terms of those raw aterials which are essential to human elfare and, indeed, to human life-fuel, ght, and food?

What can we do to set in motion those cial forces which shall make for a more quitable division of property and better portunity for the physical, mental, and oral development of all the people, and it an end to the slums which are pestiatial plague-holes in many of our facty and mining towns, and in our great ties?

Farming appears to be almost necesrily individualistic; manufacturing, alost necessarily highly organized. What we do to protect the welfare of the arming community from the too great Ower of the organized industries on thich the farmers necessarily depend? The

present condition of organized inustry is too often that of chronic and sup

pressed hostility between the laborers and the capitalists; they should be partners, united by a common interest and working for a common welfare. What can we do, not merely to prevent the ruinous strikes which imperil the peace of the whole community, but to cure this false attitude of suppressed hostility?

In one sentence, What is the next step for us to take in perfecting that American brotherhood which will unite men of various races, classes, traditions, prejudices, and religious faiths in one truly free and truly co-operative commonwealth?

The man who can point out the direction in which the Nation should move for the solution of these problems will be our leader; the journal which can throw real light upon these problems will not lack for interested and appreciative read ers; and the party which can propose a solution or partial solution which seems to the American people just and practicable will secure their votes.

But whoever desires to lead or to act for the American people and in their interest must not waste his time or theirs over the problems that are past, must not halt or hesitate to take up new problems, and must not fear to arouse the bitterest opposition by the Anarchists on the one hand and by the autocrats on the other.

undoubtedly hereafter be included some made by Henry Ford. According to him, as a witness in court, aggression means to burglarize, "apostle treason" means means "helper, 66 anything against the Government,' preparedness" is the same as paredness" is the same as " militarism," "mobile army is a "large army mobilized," and "an idealist, I think, is a person that can help make people prosperous."

a

In explaining some of these definitions Mr. Ford succeeded in making them somewhat more obscure. For example, in admitting that he was an "ignorant idealist "-using the word in the sense of one who makes people prosperous-he added, "I believe I can do it a little." In explaining further his idea of treason as anything against the Government, he was asked, "By whom,?" and answered, "By an Anarchist, I guess." When he was asked, "What did you mean when you said that treason was something that was against the Government by Anarchists ?” Mr. Ford answered, "It was against militarism, or it was militarism."

The words which he thus defined are all words which Mr. Ford-or rather his

publicity agent whom he hired to write for him and for whose writing he repeatedly acknowledged himself responsibleused in a campaign of newspaper advertising to educate the people. He used words without knowing their meaning. It was as if he were to spend money without knowing its value. When Mr. Ford uses the word "idealist," it is as if he were giving a check for a million dollars under the impression that it might be worth perhaps a hundred dollars or two.

Mr. Ford's testimony was given in a suit which he is bringing against the Chicago "Tribune" for libel, because the "Tribune" spoke of him as an Anarchist. It was natural, therefore, that the "Tribune's" counsel should cross-examine him about his ideas of anarchy. This is a part of the cross-examination :

"Now, going back to the question that we were referring to: You don't seem to be very clear what a condition of anarchy would be, do you, Mr. Ford?” "War, is guess, a condition of anarchy, as much as anything."

66

I

Anybody who was in favor of war would be an Anarchist?"

"Not in favor of war."

"Isn't any one who is in favor of anarchy an Anarchist ?"

“I was in favor of war when we got

into it."

[sic] of it." "What phrase?"

"He might be in favor of some of it." "You would not recognize that a man who was in favor of a continuation of anarchy would be an Anarchist, do you?" "I don't know, I am sure."

Naturally, as Mr. Ford regards an Anarchist as necessarily a man who throws bombs, he resents being called an Anarchist.

Mr. Ford does not seem to think that ignorance is a limitation. On the contrary, he takes the position that if he wants any facts he can hire some one to get them for him. As a consequence, he is quite ready to acknowledge his ignorance of history and dismiss it as a matter of no consequence. “Do you know," he was asked, "when the United States was created?" "I could find it in a few minutes," replied Mr. Ford. And when he was asked again, "Do you know?" he answered, "I don't know as I do, right offhand." He admitted that he had heard of the name of Benedict Arnold, but when he was asked who he was Mr. Ford replied, "I have forgot.

ten just who he is. He is a writer, I think."

But Mr. Ford has been educated. He acknowledges it. Once he called those who advocated preparedness "murderers;" and he still thinks, in a way, that professional soldiers are murderers; but he admits now that under certain circumstances it is well for a country to be prepared, and he seems unwilling to put General Pershing or General Grant into the category of murderers. Once he thought it possible and reasonable to stop the war by a peace expedition; so he fitted one out at great expense and went himself to Europe to get the boys out of the trenches; but now he has learned that the war in which America joined was not to be stopped that way.

THE CLASSICS AND
RECONSTRUCTION

AST week reference was made edi

torially in The Outlook to recent utterances on the abiding value of the classics by Dr. John H. Finley and by a writer in the "Atlantic Monthly." Now comes a novel contribution to the discussion in a pamphlet on "The Classics in British Education." It is written by

the Director of the British Museum, Sir Frederic Kenyon, and is notably moderate in its views and generous in its recognition of the claims of other than classical subjects.

Yes; Henry Ford has been educated. But at what expense? It has been said that the best way for a person to learn a foreign language is to set himself up as a teacher of it. It may be best for the alleged teacher, but how about the pupils ? Mr. Ford has been learning about government, citizenship, military defense, and the principles of liberty and justice for which men from time immemorial have been willing to fight. He has learned of these things by undertaking to be a teacher of them. As a result of his education he has given his country patriotic service, but his education has been costly. The cost of his education is not to be reckoned merely in the dollars that he has expended upon the process, though they run into the millions; its greatest cost has been to the people whom he has undertaken to educate.

survival of tradition, but as a part of a new movement for reconstituting civilization and setting high standards that we find just now coming from three dif ferent quarters pleas for fair play for the classics.

ON CULTIVATING OUR PARENTS

THE admonishment of the Fifth Com

mandment is singularly tactful. It cannily refrains from enjoining obedi ence. The stark fact of abstract obedience to any one is repellent to every independent mind, whether that mind is five years old or fifty, while honoring has a securer foundation in human impulse. Honor is an attitude conspicuously exempt from responsibility to reform its object, whether that object is one's father or one's son. In our earliest acquaintance with them we had no difficulty in honoring our father and mother, for the simple reason that their personality then ap peared to us so mysterious and so potent that we could do nothing else than respect it. The exhortation of the Fifth Commandment was therefore addressing it self, not to our infancy, but to our later age, when, having come to years of indiscretion, we should feel called upon to reeducate our parents, to bring the dear old fogies abreast of the times and make them over to suit our taste as once they felt it incumbent to make us over to suit theirs. Every one who has ever been sixteen and recovered from it knows that th the Fifth Commandment perceived what was needed.

But what makes the pamphlet of special interest is the fact that it is one of a series put out by the British Ministry of Reconstruction. It is just as much a part of the governmental plans toward the after-the-war building up of the nation as are other pamphlets in the same series on Housing, Commercial Forestry, and Raw Materials. In other words, in this great English effort for reconstruction the need of the kind of culture and training that is acquired through a classical education properly combined with scientific and practical courses is assumed and arguments adduced to that effect. From comparative statistics of students' success the conclusion is drawn that "for the all-round training of the citizen the claim of the classics to hold the premier place has not yet been shaken," and there is abundant testimony "to the value of a broad, humanistic training as a basis for work in quite other fields than the classics or literature." A broad, general scheme is presented; science and literature, the usual English branches and foreign languages, the technical and the cultural, should be combined, it is urged, in the earlier stages and a choice of thorough and sensible specialization provided for at the right stage of advance. Thus may best be obtained, it is held, the prime object, "the training of human beings in mind and character as citizens of a free country."

Mr. Ford is an advocate of efficiency. Is his method of education an efficient method? Is it necessary to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and to impart to others the confusion of mind which the pupil suffers from in order that the pupil may acquire a little knowledge of history and government and the principles of law and liberty?

Tre

e p

ton

Co

the

Even when one has safely emerged Na from the terrible teens one may still ponder with profit the only genial exhortation of the Decalogue. Perhaps even stern Moses desired folk to feel friendly toward their forebears. The word honor implies respect for the essential freedom that is the foundation of all friendship, and conspicuously of that intimacy be tween parents and children which, how it ever we may gloze the fact, is actually so rarely existent. Against this spontaneity of comradeship two tendencies are potent A dutiful child is prone to feel responsi bility for his father and mother, and to have an impulse at anxious moments to put a skittish parent under some form of moral restraint. Indeed, even physical restraint is all too common, of course kindly not crudely administered, but nonene the less effective for being expressed in constant "don't, dears," rather than in bolts and bars. If we really honor our re parents, we shall leave them free, even at a cost.

Another point of interest is that this official British document urges that "intellectual aristocracy" should not be confined to the well-to-do; that the working classes need an infusion of cultural and literary teaching; and it is claimed that there are signs that leaders in education for workmen recognize this and would welcome, as one of them says, "a redistribution of the opportunities for classical studies." And when the founder of the Workmen's Educational Association remarks that he hopes to see the day when an intellectual workman may enjoy his Homer in the original the author of the pamphlet refuses to consider that a fantastic ideal.

There is a simpler method. It is one which has been adopted by the American people and costs much less than that employed by Mr. Ford. It is the method used in our schools and colleges. It is followed by our public school system. It is a method used by men who have had less schooling than Henry Ford; it was the method which Abraham Lincoln adopted. It is the method of studying what men have done in the past, the results of their experience, the records of the best that they have thought, and the means that they have used to express themselves. That method is by no means perfect, but it provides the pupils who really give it a full trial some better education than Mr. Ford has received, and the tuition fee is something less than a million dollars per pupil.

It is then, apparently, not because of a

the

was

Another and more selfish impulse sometimes prevents our enjoying our fathers and mothers as much as we might;

d

meast

intiase

most of us cherish an inner resentment that our parents do not understand us better, forgetting the strain they are under-due to having known us all our lives of having to merge into one astounding composite all the myriad selves we have been since first they met us. It may easily be that at five or at fifteen our personality was so offensive that no parent could be expected to perceive that we ever afterward outgrew our evil condition. Even when our parents' recollections of us have been agreeable, it is but natural that they should revert to the lifetime habit of regarding us as infantile. Perhaps also they are loth to relinquish their attitude of protection and of DOO precept. We grow tragically self-sufficient with maturity. Sometimes the only way for a parent to pierce our engrossment is rá by pin stabs of fussiness. Sometimes the me only way to reach us is to irritate us, but qu this is only when we ourselves have locked i the doors of intimacy so tight that love has no language of admittance except nagging.

The fact is, parents are often worth a child's cultivating even when that child is grown up. Parents, however, are ex

tremely elusive in friendship. A child must be patient, not precipitate. Parents often have rare confidences to make, but in order to receive these sons and daughters have to be themselves of rare imaginativeness. Margaret Ogilvie had a son to whom she appeared eternally a girl, but not many sons have Barrie's imagination, and so not many sons have such maternal companionship to remember as he commemorates in his life of his mother. It is more incumbent on the young to understand the old than on the old to understand the young, for the old are heavy with experience, and experience tends to stultify the imagination by its pain and poignancy. If you really want to get at a parent, you should endeavor to make him comfortable in your presence, so that wisdom, hesitant and shy if you are young and arrogant, will come forth from him confidently. Sometimes a parent's thoughts are very different from what we had supposed, but the best way of eliciting them is by submitting to the old habit that controls their utterance, the old habit of thinking us little children.

thesis that the best thing one can do for a parent is never to let him know he has grown old, even though his over-confidence lead to peril of life and limb. The author puts into a daughter's mouth words that few of us would have the courage to embody in our treatment of our parents. Anxious coddling is an insult, she maintains: "If all we can do for them is just to keep their poor old rusting machinery oiled and working— at whatever cost to pride and manhood and usefulness-if that's the price they have to pay for just keeping alive, is it worth the cost? What do a few years more or less matter so long as one is living to the very end?"

The essence of comradeship is letting others have their adventure at whatever cost to us or to them; for parents this means letting people have their adventure from the beginning; for children, letting people have it to the end. All of us have had to be children, many of us have had to be parents. The best way of getting even with the grim necessity is, if a parent, to stop being one as early as possible, and if a child, to remain one as

I

lack of consistency regarding legislation by rider. If there is any one thing that you have persistently condemned it is this, and I had always supposed that your criticisms were a matter of principle; but I have been brought to a questioning attitude on this point by your recent course. If the repeal of the Daylight Saving Law by making it a rider on another bill is a thing to be condemned on principle, on the theory that a matter of this importance ought to stand or fall on its merits, how can you reconcile yourselves to the support of the League of Nations as a rider on the Peace Treaty? Why shouldn't it, too, stand or fall on its merits? The very obvious answer is that if it were to be submitted to the Senate for ratification, in accordance with the plain intent of the Constitution, it would fail, and so the President in the carrying out of his threat has so intertwined it with the Peace Treaty as virtually to force the Senate to approve something that it disapproves or to disapprove something that

it approves.

Your editorial "The League of Nations in the Senate," in The Outlook of June 25, is a virtual acknowledgment of this fact, and yet I have not seen a word of censure from you on this very evident attempt to deprive the Senate of its Constitutional right-a duty as well as a right to pass on this momentous thing on its merits. What a chance you are

An editorial called out by these letters will be found on another page.-THE EDITORS.

CON

missing for a ringing editorial asserting your adherence to the anti-rider principle, even though it might result in the defeat of something that you favor, for I can hardly bring myself to believe that you want the League of Nations established by this most transparent chicanery-or do you?

I wouldn't want my own position misunderstood. I believe that there is more than a mere bit of humor in dubbing the thing "the League of Hallucinations." I believe it to be a very accurate naming of it. I want to see it defeated in the Senate, but I am perfectly ready to "take my medicine" if the Senate can be brought to ratify on a fair and square test, but this test can't be had as the case now stands.

Just now I am especially interested to know if your opposition to legislation by rider applies only to the things that you are opposed to. There may be a touch of raillery in this letter, but I seriously think that you are in a very indefensible position. May I add that I think the repeal of the Daylight Saving Law was a serious mistake, however it may have been accomplished, and that I am as much opposed to rider legislation all the time as you are part of the time?

C. F. HILDRETH. Freeport, Illinois, July 8, 1919.

III

I have been a reader and a friend of The Outlook for a long time, because it has stood for genuine, practical Ameri