Volume 144

The Way of the Dictator

P

ANGALOS, the dictator of Greece, is out. The revolution which has transformed him from dictator to prisoner was foreseen in Greece. As a consequence it has come about without bloodshed. But whether it is a revolution in the interest of liberty is a question which the facts as now known do not answer. One avowed purpose of Pangalos was to get rid of parliamentary government by making the Presidency of Greece, like the American Presidency, independent of parliamentary control. There is no Constitutional limitation upon the power of the American Executive. That power is not derived from Congress and is exercised independently of it. This is not so under the European systems of democratic government. Under those systems the executive is the creature of parliament. The European prime minister is simply that member of the parliamentary body whom the parliament chooses for the time being to administer the laws. In Italy this system broke down, and we have Mussolini. In Greece it broke down, and we got Pangalos. In France it has broken down, and at the moment we are not sure whether we have Poincaré or nobody. Whether Kondylis, who has succeeded to power in Greece, can restore parliamentary government, as he promises to do, in eight months may be doubtful, but it is hardly to be expected that he can make it efficient. At any rate, it is too soon to learn whether in this latest upset Greece has made any progress toward liberty or order. Pangalos at least had an idea for Greece; but he has gone the way of all dictators.

September 1, 1926

General Kondylis

shall determine the conduct of the mining industry. The latest news from London has indicated that, after four months of struggle, neither owners nor workers are ready to give in. A conference between representatives of the mine

Keystone

General Theodore Pangalos

Number I

operators and the Miners' Federation broke up without definite results or prospect of renewal.

Meanwhile coal is to be got in Eng-land-some being imported from other countries and some being produced under difficulties from British mines. An incident recounted lately by an Englishman just landed here from his country illustrates the situation. A friend who manages a factory needed new supplies of fuel. He made inquiries of the mining company from which he usually buys his coal. He was told that he would have to pay about double the previous price, but that limited amount of coal could be furnished-enough to keep his factory running. Rather than shut down, he bought what he had to have.

7

Some miners are drifting back to work at seven and a half or eight hours a day, instead of the seven hours which was the union schedule. Just how many men are returning in this way it is difficult to estimate, but probably they are not enough to begin to solve the industrial problem or end the conflict. The strikers are being supported by funds from unionists in Europe and the United States, and also from the Communists in Soviet Russia. Despite their sufferings, the main body of them apparently are ready to go on behind their leaders. The issue remains, what it has been from the start, a test to determine whether the miners or the owners are strong enough to dictate the terms on which England may get her own coal.

moves. But there can be no substantial doubt that the agreement with Canada, which seems assured because of the consummated agreement with the British Government, will greatly increase the efficiency of enforcement.

Secretary of State Kellogg is to arrange for a conference between representatives of our Departments of State, Justice, and the Treasury and the Canadian Minister of Customs. The agreement, which is regarded as a foregone conclusion, is expected to follow closely the terms of the agreement recently negotiated by General Lincoln C. Andrews and his associates in London. After the agreements are in operation, it is said that ships cannot obtain clearance papers out of a British port or have their papers changed by the Canadian authorities until the United States authorities have been notified. Enforcement officials, therefore, will have advance notice of movements of liquor toward our coasts and, under the treaty with Great Britain, will be in position to pick up the ships at the twelve-mile limit.

The co-operation of the Canadian authorities is, perhaps, more important even than that of the British, since so large a proportion of the illicit liquor which finds its way into this country comes by water from the Maritime Provinces of Canada or, by land, directly across the border at points farther west.

Synthetic Sunshine

THE

HE world need never go hungry as long as the sun shines. So the chemists have declared at the Institute of Politics, at Williamstown, Massachusetts; and since scientists say so, it must be so.

Food in the future, it appears, is to be obtained from the light of the sun and the nitrogen of the air. Proteins and carbohydrates-those elements of nutrition which you hardly can escape getting in a good dinner whether you like them or not-will probably be made in the factory rather than raised on the farm. "Thirty men in a factory the size of a city block can produce in the form of yeast as much food value as 1,000 men

their food in the form of yeast when they got it, were questions left to other prophets.

All the rest of us have to do, it seems, is to trust to the chemists. We all like, at times, to imagine to ourselves the happy life of South Sea Islanders, lying under trees in the sun and allowing ripe breadfruit and bananas to drop into their laps. But in these less kindly northern latitudes, where the sun sometimes fails to shine and occasionally it rains, no such easy solution of the problem of living is in sight.

To be fair to them, the chemists did admit that-so far as we can see-we never can be free from the care and cultivation of the soil. But H. Foster Bain, Secretary of the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers, Mining and Metallurgical Engineers, sounded more realistic in his treatment of the world's task of developing and using its resources. He called some of the chemists' predictions "fairy promises" which fail to deal with the hard facts of life. He discarded chemical synthesis as a solution of the problem of dealing with limited mineral resources. Engineers, he said, are interested in dealing with present values, and not with the hope in some far-off future of "marvelous synthetic substances held up to dazzle our cyes." He warned the public against being "lulled to sleep by a false sense of security" as a result of the theoretical possibilities of chemistry, and remarked: "Substitution and synthesis usually require some form of preparation or manufacture. Both of these absorb power. It would be only by happy and rare accident that production of new raw materials produced rather than used power." Time for many wars and years of troubled peace, he suspected, remained before the needs of modern civilization can be met by synthetic panaceas. There are the words and thought of the practical technician.

Day dreams are delightful. But afterwards it is salutary to direct the mind. back to the immediate actualities of a hard-worked world.

War Bread in Peace Time

ELGIUM and France might have been encouraged by the good news from the nutrition chemists at Williamstown about the prospect of food from the air and sun, and also by the black case they made out against white bread. For the Belgian and French people have gone back on the war basis of "black bread"

as part of the national effort to economize, pay off their debts, and redeem their depreciated currency.

The plight of Belgium and France is a striking example of the stubborn facts of the actual world. The bills for war may be put off, but they cannot be dodged. And the money that has been spent in war is gone. It has not been transformed into any productive enterprise. It has been literally "blown in." A nation recovering from a war may inflate its currency and so secure a passing period of apparently easy money, artificial expansion of business, and illusory prosperity. But when the exchange value of its currency slides too far down and inflation has to stop, there will follow a period of hard times or of panic

depending on how far the process has gone. During the process of readjustment to sound principles the actual costs of labor and manufacture will be higher, products will be dearer, and foreign trade will be lost because it is harder to sell in competition in markets abroad. Germany has learned this by ruinous experience, in which a powerful and ruthless class of financiers and industrialists practically bankrupted the state and great numbers of the middle and professional classes. Belgium and France, now that they have taken the hard road of return to sane finance, will have to learn the same lesson, in terms undoubtedly less harsh but equally inevitable.

Europe suggests, of course, that part of this difficulty might be met by canceling the war debts. But this would not mean wiping out some of the costs of war, although it might seem to many Europeans to accomplish that happy result. It would merely mean transferring them to the account of the people of the United States. Whether Europe or America should bear them has been allowed to become, unhappily, a matter of bitter and unreasonable dispute. But if Americans will stop to think what it means to Europeans to be eating war bread in peace time, nearly nine years after the Armistice, it may aid an understanding of their point of view and further at least a more kindly consideration of the whole complicated question of restoring the normal life of the world.

An Anglo-American Incident
A

HAPPY incident of the celebration on August 18 of the 339th anniversary of the baptism of the first white child of English parentage born in what.

Wide World

is now the United States was the friendly declaration by the British Ambassador, Sir Esme Howard: "America is giving a new message to the world, that the lives of men are more than mere goods and that peace and contentment are more than mere wealth." In view of the remarks on American avarice lately coming to us from abroad, Sir Esme's interpretation of what he further calls "the gospel of this new learning of political economy" is something more than the conventional friendliness that is expected in an international historical ceremony.

A monument marking the birthplace of Virginia Dare was unveiled. Virginia Dare and her parents were members of

The British Ambassador, Sir Esme Howard

the "lost colony" which was brought by Sir Walter Raleigh to Roanoke Island in what was then Virginia in 1587. Virginia Dare's grandfather, John White, was the colony's Governor; and her father, who had the extraordinary name of Ananias Dare, was his chief assistant.

The island colony seems to have thrived for a time; but Francis Drake later found it in wretched condition. Governor White went with Drake to Governor White went with Drake to England to ask for help from Raleigh. When White came back in 1590, the colony was gone. It had been agreed that if the colonists left the island they should leave a sign; and White found the word "Croatan" carved on a tree. The

name was that of a near-by island; but no trace of the colonists was found there or elsewhere. Whether they were slain by Indians or were absorbed by an Indian tribe (some writers believe that names of the colonists have been found in a distorted form among records of certain Indians) remains an insoluble historical mystery. Mary Johnston's story "Croatan" deals with this incident.

Self-Government in Business

A

MERICAN business, apparently, is

making progress toward capacity for self-government. Eight hundred and thirteen organizations and associations have adopted the code of business ethics formulated by the Chamber of Commerce of the United States, thus recognizing the principle that business concerns ought to deport themselves in conformity to common-sense rules of restraint, fair play, and consideration for the rights of others.

Whether or not these eight-hundredodd organizations can live up to thecode they have adopted is another question. The adoption of a democratic constitution by a nation does not make it a democracy; declarations of national principles do not make self-government. No more does adoption of a code of ethics make self-government in business. The success of the movement will depend upon the clear-beaded, right-hearted action of business men day in and day out. But the realization that a code of ethics for business is necessary and the adoption of it by so large a number of organizations is proof, at least, that American business would like to be selfgoverning in some better sense than that of every man for himself.

Whether this desire came from within or from without is not of tremendous importance. Beyond the possibility of a doubt, many business men have always desired to place their lines of business on a high ethical level. Beyond the possibility of a doubt also some of those not so concerned at the outset have become so because of Governmental regulation of business. There has long been complaint of "too much Government in business," and there is no doubt that the regulations of Federal and State boards, necessarily general and frequently inelastic, have hampered business in many particulars. It may be that we have had, recently, too much "government in