spoke of religion, he made it clear what he meant by religion, so that if his hearers understood something else by the word they would at least not misunderstand him. He was precise in his use of language. The beauty of his style lay in its precision. No one in his day equaled him, no one in any day has surpassed him, in the framing of sententious inscriptions. He valued manners and taste as he valued all elements of a rounded and complete life. He was disturbed by some of the bad manners of modern young persons, and particularly young women, not because they violated conventions, but because they were impediments to the kind of life that can truly be enjoyed. He was not of a pugnacious disposition, but he never fled from controversy, and when engaged in it was as unsparing as he was always courteous and courtly. He believed so thoroughly in what is called sometimes democracy and sometimes republican institutions that he coveted for all mankind the best. He was an aristocrat because he was a democrat. He believed in the people, and therefore he believed in the need for leadership. Freedom he believed included freedom in the choice of leaders. He could believe in the government of society through co-operation because he had faith in the powers of the individual. No European aristocracy could have produced him. For those whose faith in America may waver there is no better tonic than acquaintance with the mind and character of this great and distinctive American, Charles William Eliot. Making Workmen in ownership appears to have had the first substantial beginning about 1900, when the Illinois Central Railroad developed a plan for selling stock to its men. The National Biscuit Company followed suit. Then the movement took on considerable impetus, which has grown steadily in strength. The United States Steel Corporation, the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, the International Harvester Company, and the Du Fonts were conspicuous examples. Profitsharing had been instituted earlier by Procter and Gamble, who also afforded a basis for acquiring stock by workers. Profit-sharing seems to have preceded ownership in numbers of instances and is still widely practiced. It lacks, however, the certainty and full responsibility that comes with stock ownership. More recent sellers of securities to their employees have been the Dennison Manufacturing Company, the Standard Oil Company, Chicago and Brooklyn Edison Companies, and the Consolidated Light and Power Company of Baltimore. These were later supplemented by the American Telegraph and Telephone Company, the American Tobacco Company, the Eastman Kodak Company, the Loose-Wiles Biscuit Company, the Studebaker Corporation, the Texas Company, and the Niagara Falls Power Company. All these began the practice before 1921. Since that year the movement has grown amazingly. The further list includes Armour & Co., the Radio Corporation of America, the Fleischmann Company, Great Western Sugar Company, Pacific Mills, Jones & Laughlin Steel Company, United Shoe Machinery Corporation, Yale and Towne Manufacturing Company of Stamford, ConHE process of communizing by necticut, Bethlehem Steel Corporation, General Motors, Brooklyn Manhattan Transit Company, United Cigar Stores, Corn Products Refining Corporation, National City Bank of New York, California Petroleum Corporation, Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, International Cement Corporation, the Pullman Company, and the Western Union Telegraph Company. TH the distribution of stock in corporations among consumers described more than once in The Outlook -but notably by Mr. Seitz in the issue of April 28-has had a further development in recent days through the extension of security distribution to workers. So considerable has this movement become that it is now the subject of a study made by Robert F. Foerster, Director of the Industrial Relations Section and Professor of Economics at Princeton, and Elsa H. Dietel, Assistant Director, and published by the University under the title "Employee Stock Ownership in the United States." This by no means covers all corporations that are opening their doors to their workers, but suffices to show the extent of the movement and its "communizing" character. That much of the initiative was taken on behalf of the "white collar" men is true; but, with the The movement to interest employces great rise of wages that has taken place in the last decade, workmen have been placed in a position where many are better able to invest than members of the clerical and managerial forces. The marked thing about it is the fact that companies have come to the conclusion that they are democratic institutions— and this is the most remarkable social discovery of the age. Men whose minds run back beyond the coming of the twentieth century recall quite clearly the time when corporations had no souls, and when their employees had little more identity than numbers, to say nothing of possessing rights or interests in common with the owners. They were as wide apart as the poles. The "white collars" were no better off in this respect than the workmen. They were afraid of their lives. Officers and directors lived in & higher realm, to which but few of the underlings dared aspire. As for workmen, no one ever thought about them. It was left for the labor unions to lift them up into the daylight. The unions, it would now appear, acted wisely when they shied off from profit-sharing and benevolent schemes for their betterment. They rightly regarded these as poor substitutes for decent wages and working conditions, preferring independence to peonage, and money in hand to pensions. The result of their standing out is visible in the new corporation policy, which takes every man in who is willing to come and assists him in some notable instances to finance his holdings. The reason for this may be found in the disappearance of industrial aristocracy in the United States. So it is that here in America, as a further development of true democracy, we are having a "communizing" of capital that takes in all classes. While anti-red propaganda as a remedy for imaginary "redness" has been peddled about, real redness has been drowned in the flood of good wages and chances to share as owners in great enterprises. Most conspicuous among the "communes" is that of the Philadelphia Rapid Transit Company, where the employees own one-third of the capital stock of $30,000,000, under a pooling system devised by Thomas E. Mitten, head of the corporation, whereby a percentage of wages is divided monthly and turned over to the Mutual Benefit Association to be invested en bloc. It now represents a holding of about $1,500 for each man. The company has made it a recent practice to sell its stock also to car riders September 1, 1926 when new issues required for expansion ions and from among less than one-twoare marketed. What we are to welcome in the growing extent of this great change is the breaking down of another great barrier to opportunity, to a true democratization of industry that does not disturb organization, but makes it the servant and not the master of the employee. No Marxian theory ever developed so practical and sensible a method of adjusting the relations between the earners and makers of money. Continued, as it must be, in the very nature of things it will make the economic road in America very smooth. "Voteless Washington ne TA 99 SYNDICATE writer recently suggested that all of the acts of Congress since 1911 are invalid because, in the Reapportionment Act of that year, the population of the District of Columbia was not deducted from the total population of the country before the apportionment was made. Therefore, he argues, Congress has not been organized since 1911 "according to the Constitution." He speaks of 500,000 "political orphans," the non-voting population of the District of Columbia. There is, of course, no such thing as a non-voting population of 500,000 in the Perhaps fourDistrict of Columbia. Perhaps fourfifths of the residents of the District are citizens of the States. Such of them as are of voting age are qualified voters in the States. If some of them do not exercise the right to vote, they simply neglect a privilege, as do many of their fellow-citizens nearer the polling booths. As a fact, however, a large proportion of the residents of Washington do vote. Some of them go home at election time. Many others vote by mail. In so far as the population of the District of Columbia is made up of Government employees, there is no loss of the right to vote. In so far as it is made up of tradesmen and professional persons who prefer Washington to other cities, the right is renounced deliberately and in most cases cheerfully. If the right of suffrage were extended to the District of Columbia and if all residents became citizens in order to exercise the right, we should have the remarkable spectacle of a Federal Government drawing practically its entire official personnel from one-and the smallest of its forty-nine political divis hundredth of its population. At present Complaint is made, too, that the Dis- To exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever over such district (not exceeding ten miles square) as may, by cession of particular States and the acceptance of Congress, be RR come the seat of the Government of the United States, and to exercise like authority over all places purchased for the erection of forts, magazines, arsenals, dockyards, and other needful buildings. That Federal employees in the District of Columbia should vote as citizens of the District of Columbia and elect legislative representatives was no more in contemplation than that Federal employees in the Mare Island Navy Yard should vote as citizens of the Navy Yard reservation. That the "non-voting" population of Washington should be deducted from the total population before apportionment for representation in Congress was no more contemplated than that the officer instructors at West Point should be so deducted. We shall have to search further for a means of invalidating all of the acts of Congress since 1911. Personality in Art By LAWRENCE F. ABBOTT OYAL CORTISSOZ, in one of painter was an intimate friend of Cherubini, Mendelssohn, and Franz Liszt, my interest in his genius was whetted. Here was a man who could ride two horses at once and ride them well. Ingres's great distinction as a painter led to his appointment as director of the French Academy in Rome, but his musicales in the Imperial city were apparently more talked about than his painting. A NOTHER current magazine—the admirable "American Magazine of Art"-reveals the double genius of another great painter. Perhaps his intimates knew about it, but the general public will be surprised to learn-at any rate, I was that the late John Singer Sargent was an accomplished musician. This interesting news is told in an article by Grace Wickham Curran, who pleasantly describes a visit to Grenada, where she discovered a wine-shop and a vintner of a character truly and exclusively Spanish: The master of the wine-shop led us, however, through another door and across a small vine-hung inner patio, from which opened a scrap of a kitchen. Everything was spotlessly clean, every utensil an antique treasure and we longed to linger and prowl into corners. A steep, almost ladderlike stairway led up past a wall hung with old Spanish rugs, brocades, carv ings. On stair landing and over-door shelves were placed softly gleaming copper and brass jugs, old bowls and jars. We quite caught our breath as we stepped forth into the little upper room, a real museum and art gallery, with several pieces of fine old furniture and walls hung close from floor almost to ceiling with oil and watercolor sketches, drawings and etchings. Examining the signatures, we found the names of well-known French, English, and German painters and two or three American comrades of our own old Paris student days. All these had come and left souvenirs of their passing. But with rare dramatic skill our host had saved the cream, the climax of our visit, for the last. A piano stood in a smaller room, opposite the door leading thither, and above it, with a special light arranged to show its beauties, hung a characteristic and beautiful Sargent water-color, equal to any we had ever seen in world museums. At one side there hung also a large black-and-white drawing, a portrait of our host himself, inscribed in Sargent's own handwriting, "A mi amigo." We questioned, "Do you realize that this water-color is a valuable painting?" "Ah, yes! Señores," he responded. "Es el mio." (It is mine.) Then we heard the story of how Sargent was once detained at Alhambra by the illness of his mother, who lay in the pension Villa across the way. Every evening he used to mount the narrow stairway to these little rooms, where he lingered often till the small hours of the night, talking over many subjects with this sympathetic and adoring friend, and playing wonderful music on the piano. We may V be sure he did not omit from his choice many of those alluring Spanish compositions which carry such an undertone of ancient Moorish melody. If the old proverb be true that a man is known by the company he keeps, does not this glimpse into a Spanish wine-shop and its tiny upper chamber reveal to us a whole chapter in the biography of the man Sargent? He shunned the whole world and was shy and inexpressive in the presence of dignitaries, but he opened his heart to this simple man of the people who shared his delight in all things beautiful. A NOTHER current periodical"Books," published in conjunction with the New York "Tribune"-calls attention to the revival of interest in the great French caricaturist, Honoré Daumier. There is a popular notion-somewhat justified, it is sad to say, by experience that poverty and painting are natural mates. John Singer Sargent was an exception to the rule, but Daumier's life confirms it. Daumier was a struggling lithographer, and the great volume of the work which he left consists of wonderful lithographs. He was not only an artist, but a satirist, and his ridicule of the bourgeois Government under Louis Philippe put him in jail for six months. He died totally blind at seventy years of age. During his lifetime he achieved a wide reputation-perhaps notoriety would be a better word as a newspaper cartoonist. But it was not until after his death that his merits as a painter and his transcendent gifts as a Five Things Seen draughtsman were recognized. He has been called the Michelangelo of caricature, a title which he might well share with Gavarni. What interests me most about Daumier, aside from the Hogarthian humor and vitality of his work, was his friendship with François Millet. They were both poor, they were both engaged in portraying the lines and movements of the human figure in modern occupations and dress, and they both had high ideals about the worth and dignity of man. When Millet lived in Barbizon, Daumier used to be one of his most intimate visitors. Perhaps it was their common love of line drawing that drew them together. In one of his letters Millet describes his emotions on his first visit to the Louvre, fresh from a Normandy farm: But when I saw that drawing of Michelangelo's representing a man in a swoon, I felt that was a different thing. The expression of the relaxed muscles, the planes, and the modeling of that form exhausted by physical suffering, gave me a whole series of impressions. I felt as if tormented by the same pains. I had compassion upon him. I suffered in his body and his limbs. I saw that the man who had done this was able, in a single figure, to represent all the good and evil in humanity. It was Michelangelo! That explains all. I had already seen some bad engravings of his work at Cherbourg; but here I touched the heart and heard the voice of him who has haunted me with such power during my whole life. This is personality in art indeed! A Rambling London Letter by C. LEWIS HIND ICTOR HUGO originated the title "Things Seen." Since his time many writers have favored it, I among them. My first book, printed for private circulation in 1899, was called "Things Seen," and, being youngish then, I put the following from "Hamlet" on the title-page: O, where, my lord? In my mind's eye, Horatio. "Things Seen" came to mind because I have five topics to touch upon in this "Rambling London Letter." Each is significant, and each might have run to a column; but, as empty columns are few, I group them (that is my humor) as "Things Seen"-I to V. I LECTURE! It was delivered in the A House of Lords. I took some pains to procure a ticket because this is the first time a public lecture has been given in the House of Lords, and because the lecturer was my friend Dr. Robert McElroy, of Princeton, now Professor of American History at Oxford. He was invited to deliver the 1926 lectures of the "Watson Chair of American History, Literature, and Institutions." In honor of the event, the Lord Great Chamberlain allowed the first address to be given in the House of Lords. The subject was "Permanent Conditions Which Have Influenced America in British-American Crises." It had been arranged that the meeting should be in the Royal Gallery, but, as the acoustics of that magnificent chamber are not good, the gathering was held in the Cartoon Hall. Viscount Lee of Fareham presided. I do not propose to give an account of this remarkable lecture, which was delivered with vigor and point. It will be published. The idea of it was what interested me an American explaining America, in the House of Lords, to a distinguished British audience, which of course included the unemotional Ambassador, Mr. Houghton. Big Ben boomed periodically. It was a moving hour. English Poetry, sponsored by the British Academy. The subject was "Chaucer and the Rhetoricians," and the lecturer was Professor J. M. Manly, of the University of Chicago, perhaps the first Chaucer scholar of the day. The Earl of Balfour benignly presided, and the place was the rooms of the Royal Society, Burlington House. The courtyard of Burlington House was crowded with people about to visit the Royal Academy Exhibition; the streets were thronged with pleasureseekers and shoppers; London was at the height of the season. Within the rooms of the Royal Society, hung with portraits of past worthies, were gathered the small group of Chaucer students, few but fit, listening to an American professor from Chicago delivering an address, amazingly learned, on the Father of nenglish Poetry-he who sang: And specially, from every shires ende Of Engeland, to Caunterbury they wende, The holy blisful martir for to seke, That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seke. swathed in the Union Jack. The band L IV ANSDOWNE HOUSE, in Berkeley Square, the ancestral mansion of the fifth Marquess of Lansdowne. It is now occupied by Mr. H. Gordon Selfridge, proprietor of the biggest and handsomest "store" in Oxford Street, the architecture of which is revolutionizing commercial London. Mr. Gordon Selfridge and Princess Wiasemsky are "at home" to the members of the Architecture Club, who have been invited to see this fine example of the domestic work of Robert Adam-Lansdowne House. In the vast rooms are the old furniture and carpets; on the walls are the old pictures; in bookcases the old books. We stroll about reflectively and listen to twentiethcentury music. V E sit in the chilly, venerable crypt of St. Paul's Cathedral. wait in silence, counting the members of the Royal Academy of Arts who have been shepherded into the central places. The recess in the wall of the crypt in front of us is covered with a white veiling. No sound from the outside world reaches us. We are beneath the earth. All around are monuments to great artists. Here is Painters' Corner. I turn my head, and see the monument to Sir Christopher Wren; close by is Turner's grave. We have met to do honor to John Singer Sargent; the bronze crucifix of his own making, a replica of the one in Boston, is to be unveiled. The clergy enter the Dean of St. Paul's, followed by two canons and an archdeacon. There is a short service; Lord Crawford and Balcarres delivers a brief address. Then he pulls aside the veiling. We see the crucifix "designed by that great artist." The President of the Royal Academy places a wreath of laurels before it. Beneath are these words: "In Memoriam. John Singer Sargent, R. A. This work of his hands, presented by his sisters, was erected by the Royal Academy of Arts." The Dean of St. Paul's accepts, with. bowed head, the charge of the memorial. Painters' Corner is inhabited by another world-famous artist presence. The Mystery of the Mary Celeste By OLIVER W. COBB TH 'HREE weeks ago The Outlook reported an explanation of a fifty-year-old mystery. It was given in the form of a story which had been told to a writer in "Chambers's Journal" and then retold in a recent issue of the New York "Herald Tribune." This tale, which came from one who purported to be Cook Pemberton of the Mary Celeste's crew, made out that there was no mystery at all, but a false report by the captain of the Dei Gratia that discovered and salvaged the Mary Celeste. A cousin of Captain Benjamin S. Briggs, of the Mary Celeste, Dr. Oliver W. Cobb, of Easthampton, Massachusetts, seeing this report in The Outlook, and indignant at the aspersions not only upon Captain Boyce, of the Dei Gratia, but Captain Briggs, who disappeared from the Mary Celeste, has sent us the statement printed below in which he gives his theory of what happened. "When Captain Benjamin S. Briggs and his wife, Sarah, with their two-year-old daughter went away on this unfortu nate voyage," writes Dr. Cobb to us, "the family left at home consisted of the grandmother Briggs; the Captain's son, Arthur, seven years old; and myself, fourteen years old. Both Captain B. S. Briggs and his wife, who was Sarah Cobb, were my cousins. To us and many other friends and relatives who waited long for news of these dear ones, and who still mourn their unreturning feet, their story is no fraud or romance, but a great sorrowful tragedy." Though Dr. Cobb refers to yarn said to have been told by a sailor named Triggs, accounting for the disappearance of Captain and crew by an adventure involving the capture of a derelict and desertion, he does not here take up the strange story purporting to come from Cook Pemberton. In this issue, however, on our editorial pages, we summarize the reasons given by Captain Briggs's son for rejecting the Pemberton tale. And now follows Dr. Cobb's interesting narrative and persuasive explanation.-THE EDITORS. pipe and after blowing out two or three We know that Captain B. S. Briggs, his wife and daughter, a mate, second mate, cook, and four sailors on the brig Mary Celeste left New York on Novem-. ber 7, 1872, with a cargo of 1,700 barrels of alcohol, bound for a Mediter ranean port, Genoa, and that Captain Oliver E. Briggs, a brother, left New York at an earlier date for Vigo, Spain, in the brig Julia A. Hallock, and from Vigo was to go to a Mediterranean port. Those brothers had been in correspondence and intended to meet at Barcelona, Spain, where they both expected to load fruit for New York. Two days out from Vigo, in a storm in the Bay of Biscay, the Julia A. Hallock sprang a leak. The pumps choked by the fine coal of which she had a partial cargo, she filled with water, rolled over, and sank, all her crew being lost except Mr. Perry, the second mate, who was rescued from a piece of floating wreckage four days later by a Spanish vessel and landed at Vigo. The Mary Celeste was found by the men of the British brig Dei Gratia on December 13, 1872, about three hundred miles west from Gibraltar, and taken by them to Gibraltar. They found the Mary Celeste with topgallant yard down on the cap and gaff topsail clewed down. otherwise under full sail. Jibs set on starboard tack, vessel headed east, wind northerly. The vessel had evidently been hove to on the starboard tack, and by a change in the direction of the wind sailed away on the port tack, the main boom swinging over to accommodate either position. Everything about decks was in order except that the fore hatch was off and lay upside down on the deck. The yawl-boat was gone and the davit tackles were hanging loose, showing that the yawl-boat had been lowered. Nothing seems to have been disturbed in the cabin except that the ship's papers, chronometer, and sextant were missing. Compasses, captain's watch, and a sum of money in the captain's desk were all there. Mrs. Briggs's sewing-machine and a small garment on which she had evidently been working were left as if she had gone away for a minute. The mate's log-book lay open on his desk, as is usual, and the last entry I have previously quoted. These entries are always made at noon. A search of the forecastle showed the seamen's chests and clothing in usual order, and money was found in three of the chests. The remnants of a meal were found in the forecastle. masters who lived up to the best traditions of the sea. To represent him as a criminal deserter of his ship is to desecrate his memory. The Triggs story is as much in error as the picture of the vessel on the same page, which shows boat at davits and square rig on mainmast. The Mary Celeste was square-rigged forward, but had no yards on the mainmast, having there a fore and aft mainsail and gafftopsail like a schooner, thus being a cross between a brig and a schooner, or In Next Week's Issue The "Inside" of American Prisons By Don C. Seitz what is called a "hermaphrodite brig." Instead of eighteen men on board, there were the captain, mate, second mate, cook, and four sailors, signed on in New York (eight men), Mrs. Briggs, and a baby girl about two years old, making the number ten all told. Triggs seems to have forgotten that the yawl-boat was gone and that the davit tackles were hanging as if the boat had been lowered in a hurry. He has forgotten a very important bit of evidence. He says that the Mary Celeste made good sailing across the Atlantic until within twentyfour hours' sail of the coast of Portugal. Whereas the last entry in the mate's logbook, which lay open on his desk when the men from the Dei Gratia went on board, reads: "Weather fine, wind light, St. Mary's island six miles distant." The entry also gives the latitude and longitude, and tells of ordinary work being done by sailors, and is dated, as I remember, about ten days prior to the finding of the vessel abandoned. Triggs says that he signed on in Boston. It is known that the crew were shipped in New York. As Mr. Triggs's story is wrong in all these known facts, the remainder of his story can easily be disposed of as pure fabrication, with no supporting evidence whatever. N ow what happened? This seems to me to be the best theory: A cargo of alcohol sometimes explodes, and it usually rumbles before exploding. It may well be that after the breakfast had been cleared away in the cabin on the morning following the day of the last entry in the log-book, when the vessel would have been about or hundred miles from St. Mary's Island, the temperature rising, the cargo began to rumble. If the Captain was frightened by the rumbling of the gases in the hold-and indeed an explosion may have already occurred, blowing off a hatch and throwing it upside down on deck, where it was found-and if he decided to get his people into the boat as a measure of safety, the boat being on the davits across the stern, he would have laid the squaresails aback to deaden the headway of the vessel. As the vessel was sailing east, the position of the jibs (set on the starboard tack) would indicate that the wind was southerly at the time. It would have been good seamanship to have lowered the topgallant yard and the gaff-topsail. The boat being lowered and brought alongside, the embarkation must have been in great haste, as the Captain left his watch and his money and three sailors left money in their chests. We do not know what befell them. The boat may have been swamped in getting away from the vessel. The cargo did not explode, and it may be that the vessel sailed away from them, leaving ten persons in a small boat a hundred miles from land without compass, food, or water. They perished; how we shall never know. The brothers did not meet at Barcelona. Let us hope that they met where there is "no more sea." The vessel was evidently hove to on the starboard tack headed east when abandoned, and when found by the men of the Dei Gratia was sailing on the port tack with her jibs to windward, still headed easterly, with a northerly wind which had prevailed for several days. The known facts are consistent with the above theory. |