the doctrine that a newspaper is to be judged by its success as a commercial enterprise. The modern newspaper, when it wants to win the plaudits of its readers, publishes statistics, not of its achievements in the gathering and literary presentation of the news, but of the volume of its circulation and advertising. A journalistic "scoop" used to mean that you had beaten your competitors in giving your readers complete and accurate information about some important event; it now means that you have printed in a given period of time more National, financial, or department-store advertising than any other newspaper in your vicinity. Some years ago a clever but cynical New York editor, John Keller by name, defined this commercial view of journalism in an address before the New York Press Club as well as I have ever seen or ⚫ heard it done. His definition was something like this: "Publishing a newspaper is simply a manufacturing proposition. You buy a raw material called paper at two cents a pound, treat it with a chemical called printers' ink, run it through a machine called a printing-press, and sell it at ten cents a pound." These figures would hardly fit the costs or size of present-day newspapers, but the principle which John Keller enunciated is still sometimes applicable.

This article, however, was not begun. with the intention of furnishing a critique on the modern newspaper. My purpose was to ask whether the new professors of journalism are considering with their

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pupils what is likely to be the effect of the American newspaper upon literature in America. Are we not turning out annually more printed matter and less permanent literature than any other civilized country since Gutenberg invented the printed press? I do not assert this; I merely ask the question. But how can it be otherwise? Even to write a weekly article is sometimes to work under distressing pressure. What must it be to have to write a daily editorial, or a daily book review, or a daily financial article, or a daily column of persiflage? What must be the effect upon a man's views of politics, or literature, or economics, or wit and humor, when the printer's devil is standing at his elbow calling for more copy?

Dr. Johnson in one of his essays in "The Rambler" claims that one reason why the Greek writers are immortal is because they had no newspapers. "There were in those days no weekly or diurnal writers," he says, and adds that "one of the most pernicious effects of haste is obscurity." He refers to "the blotted manuscripts of Milton" as a proof that great literature is only born at the end of hard labor. He quotes Dryden to show that facile poetry is usually frail and fleeting:

No blood from bitten nails those poems drew;

But churn'd, like spittle, from the lips. they flew.

There are some examples of periodical literature which have a permanent value,

but they are few, I think. The only instance in this country that comes to my mind is Oliver Wendell Holmes's "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table," which appeared as a monthly serial in the "Atlantic" when James Russell Lowell was its editor. Still, even if Dr. Holmes wrote these delightful and lasting papers as rapidly as they were published it must be said that a month's time will give a man of genius sufficient opportunity for brooding and polishing. There are some striking examples of fine literature produced under the pressure of weekly journalism, but none in this country, as far as I know. In France the essays of Sainte-Beuve, "Causeries du lundi," were contributed every Monday to a daily newspaper of Paris, the "Constitutionnel," and they fill fifteen volumes. More permanent still are those charming and ever modern stories and sketches of Alphonse Daudet, "Lettres de mon Moulin" and "Contes du lundi," which were written and published periodically in the newspapers. Perhaps the most outstanding instance of classic literature which has been created under periodic pressure are the essays of Joseph Addison. Sir Roger de Coverley is an im mortal-at least as immortal as the English language-although he was born in a daily paper. Whether there would be room for a similar accouchement in a column of reading matter alongside of advertising in the New York "Times" or "World" or "Tribune" or "Sun" is open to question.

The Outlook's Editor in Europe

E have just witnessed two crises the Greco-Bulgar and the Anglo-Turk. The League of Nations Council acted regarding both. With the first it averted war; will it with the second?

The primal thing to bring about was not peace, but justice. That was aimed at in both awards.

grant the Kurds local self-government and the official use of their language in schools, courts, and administrative bureaus, the Turkish Government would have to face greater discontent among the minorities in Turkey proper.

4. The region's wealth has been and is an integral economic part of Turkey.

5. In Turkish opinion, Great Britain is mandating Irak, not for Irak's good, but for Britain's.

6. England, Turkey claims, did not occupy the town of Mosul and its environs before the Armistice.

7. Finally, the Turks regard Mosul as a symbol. Great Britain fears the awakening of the Orient. She wants to diminish and humiliate Turkey, the head of the Oriental movement.

Now as to Great Britain. She claims the vilayet for Irak because

1. It has always been a part of that country.

2. Without it, having no strategic frontier, Irak would be defenseless and unstable.

3. The Kurds, having known Turkish oppression, turn towards Irak as promising them local self-government.

4. The Christian inhabitants, having known still greater Turkish oppression, turn towards Irak for salvation.

5. The region's economic trend is down the valleys to Bagdad, and not over the mountains towards Turkey.

6. Great Britain wants, first of all, to fulfill a mandatory's obligations to Irak; it has never enjoyed such government as under the mandate.

7. But she also wishes to protect the land route to India.

8. Finally, she desires to assure to her navy and people a proper proportion of the potential Mosul petroleum.

The Lausanne Conference did not setle the dispute. Both sides then agreed hat if, within a certain period, they ould not reach a solution by direct neotiation, they would leave the decision the League Council.

The disputants did not agree, and the Council took up the matter. It finally ucceeded in making the two parties admit its right to determine a frontier line howing the limit of territory to be administered by each until the final frontier etween Turkey and Irak should be esablished. The Council then drew the rovisory Brussels line, so called because he Council met in that city. The two arties pledged themselves not to underke any military or other movement of nature to change the condition of the erritories under discussion. In addition, ethi Bey, the Turkish representative, eclared an acceptance of the Council's Itimate decision as to the vilayet.

The Council then despatched a Com

tember, 1924, on a plea that a Turkish governor had been ambushed, the Turks had chased away several thousand Nestorian Christians from the mountains

north of Amadia, and just a year later, from a territory to the west, other thousands of Chaldean Catholics. As to the manner of deportation, I quote from a page of the report:

Bajo is a village of two thousand homes. The Turks surrounded the village, demanded the forty prettiest women, and murdered their husbands. A week later deportation followed, with the massacre of the old men, the sick, and the helpless children, incapable of following.

When one of the League Councilors read the report, he exclaimed: "This is no longer a Turko-Greek dispute. It is an issue between barbarity and civilization."

Given the Turkish attitude towards subject races and the probability of more atrocities, perhaps on a larger scale, the Council was determined to prevent, if possible, another Armenian tragedy. To hand the vilayet back to the Turk would make the Council responsible for the fate of at least eighty thousand Christians, not to mention thousands of Kurds and other Irak inhabitants.

Turkish denials of deportations persisted until the close of the Council's December meeting, when the second officer in the Government at Angora was reported as saying that, if there had been any deportations, they were acts of legitimate defense in the face of populations armed by British agents.

'URKEY'S case presented two points—

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one of law, one of fact. The first was her statement that at Lausanne Lord Curzon had promised her a vote on the question in the League Council (of course, no pleader is allowed to judge his own case). The second was the fact that the Mosul people's sympathies are divided: most favor Turkey, the Turks claim; most favor Irak, the British claim, and so does the Commission-so long as the British mandate, assuring order, is continued.

"We are prepared for a solution by agreement," the Turks announced on coming to Geneva. They added: "But we shall refuse to yield to superior force. Our army is fully prepared. We have 150,000 soldiers on war footing, and we can mobilize every Turk, young or old, for the country's defense."

This intimidation did not scare the Council.

AT

Tits September meeting I heard Ruchdy Bey, Turkish Foreign Minister, present the Turkish case. At the December meeting Ruchdy, though he had come to Geneva, was silent, and instead I heard the case presented by a supposedly superior Turkish jurist, Munir Bey, Turkish Minister in Bern.

For a couple of hours I listened to Munir's low, even, droning voice and plaintive tone (in contrast to the sprightly terseness of Mr. Amery, the British representative) define, with wearisome repetitions, the Turks' point of view. First, they had never expected an arbitral decision I was at Lausanne, and the talk I heard was of nothing else. Second, they anticipated only a decision of conciliation, and their delegation's powers did not extend beyond a simple mediation. Finally, they rejected the Council's competence to render a proper arbitral decision, even when supported by the World Court's ruling-and the

ruling had been that Turkey was bound to accept the Council's unanimous decision. "We will not submit to the World Court's ruling if it goes contrary to our opinions," the Turks had already announced.

They had refused to send representatives to the Court. Yet I, amazed, was now listening to Munir's argument, contesting the Court's ruling, not only because it went contrary to Turkish opinion, but because the Turks had not been on hand at The Hague!

As a matter of fact, the Turks were not "prepared for a solution by agreement." Even when summoned to meet with others in attempts to secure results by their own methods of conciliation, the Turks refused to appear. Yet the tones of League Councilor Unden seemed to me peculiarly pleading as he told the Turks the very first day that the Council would scrupulously conform to its duty of conciliation.

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N default of solution in this way, the Council's decision had perforce to take an obligatory arbitral character.

The Turkish delegation was not present at the opening of the meeting. A moment of impressive silence followed President Scialoja's invitation to the Turks to take their places at the Council table. The only Turkish official in the room was the Consul. He did not stir. Then a letter was read from Ruchdy, declining to appear and declaring: "As a state's sovereign rights over a territory cannot come to an end save by that state's consent, Turkey's sover

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eign rights over all the Mosul vilayet remain entire."

The decision followed, categorical and unanimous. It awarded to Irak nearly all of the vilayet, namely, the territory south of the Brussels line, a boundary considerably to the south of the strategic mountain frontier claimed by Great Britain.

The decision is not to become definitive until the Council has been notified of the London Parliament's approval of a continuation of the British mandate over Irak for twenty-five years, or until such time as Irak shall have sufficiently developed independence to be admitted into the League. Great Britain has six months to prepare a new treaty with Irak, to come into force on the expiry of her present mandate in 1928. The award

said to a friend of mine at parting, “We intend to be friendly with England."

This flatly belies the Turkish militarist attitude reflected in Constantinople press comment-of a sincerer accent, just the same, than in certain artificial English attacks on the London Government "Henceforth we are the declared enemies of everything English," says the "Djum huriet;""the whole mandatory system is nothing but a farce, destined to legiti mize tyranny, slavery, and usurpation ...We will save Mosul as we have saved Smyrna, Adana, and Brusa." "The re deeming feature of the decision," adds the "Aksham," "lies in its exposure of Europe's imperialist mentality. Other wise the decision has no value. Turkey will herself solve the problem."

also comprises guaranties, first, of local M

administration, including the full use of the Kurdish tongue, and then of free commercial intercourse between Turkey and Irak. "At any rate," a Turk ruefully argued, "the Council accepted one of our proposals, that of equal commercial opportunity."

The two parties to the dispute have now the means of coming to friendly arrangements, above all, in commerce and finance. Strong in her legal position, Great Britain can afford to be generous in all possible compensatory concessions. For instance, Turkey is poor and needs a loan. Direct arrangements with London would assure many immediate advantages impossible to be obtained by Turkey through war, even victorious. Perhaps Ruchdy remembered this when he

ILITARISTS declare that this means if not an invasion of all Irak, a least the immediate occupation of northern territory, including the town of Mo sul.

The Turks will find there the English who have been in possession of the vilayet up to the Brussels line. A Turkish movement nearer Constantinople could precipitate an English occupation of that city.

If British mandatory authority be too far resisted, the League can enforce eco nomic and financial and then military sanctions. Thus the Turks may face not England alone, but the collectivity of League nations. Even Russian Bolsh evism, inciting Turkey, as it does, might then think twice.

Paris, December 22, 1925.

HOSE who are addicted to excessive concern lest the younger generation be demoralized by extreme frivolity, on the one hand, or extreme radicalism, on the other hand, may find some ground for reassurance in recent developments among college students. The World Court Conference at Princeton, initiated and carried through, as it was, by students and backed by a student-directed campaign of education, should serve to disarm that rather large group of youth critics who have insisted that college opinion on world peace was dictated by impractical extremists. And now, at Evanston, another group of college students nearly one thousand of them from two hundred colleges and representative of twenty-five denomina

By STANLEY HIGH

THIS correspondence from

the Evanston Conference holds high promise that the younger generation will see clearly the essentials of religious unity.

tions have undertaken an appraisal of the Christian Church as a channel through which young people can work.

Evanston, it must be pointed out, was not a superficially generated conference with students out for a frolic at the expense of their tolerant elders. The two young men who came from western South Dakota on a freight train and the

rather considerable number of others who rode by night in the day coaches because Pullman fare was lacking typify the spirit that characterized the entire group The most general contact with college campuses of the present day will serve to indicate the widespread interest that prevails in regard to the problems with which the Church is organized to concern itself. Evanston was a reflection of this interest and more than any other devel opment brought it to a definite focus.

It should be said also that Evanston was a starting-point-not an ending. At the first day's session student discussion revealed a widespread hostility toward resolutions and expressions of abstract opinion. When it came to appointing committees to consider the issues raised.

the instructions to those committees called, not for general declarations, but for lines of action. Again and again from the floor of the Conference students protested against mere expression of opinion, and asked for information, for statements from those who had had actual experiences in regard to the problems under consideration. And the three hundred non-participating non-students -church board secretaries, Christian Association leaders, bishops, preachers, and laymen who thronged the balcony expressed amazement at the aggregate information which the student discussion brought forth. Thus Evanston endeavored to launch certain definite projects, certain undertakings which youth might carry through, actual experiments which youth might initiate through the Church. Evanston, moreover, represented the first tangible bridge that has been built between Fundamentalists and Modernists. By that I do not mean that Fundamentalists and Modernists—and both extremes had worthy representation on the floor of the Conference-affected an understanding at this Conference. Much more important than any formal agreement that they might have drawn up, however, was the fact that during the

discussions of more than three days both extremes considered together their common Christian obligation to the problems under consideration and did not once go off into theological dispute. There is no doubt but that on certain questions the vote taken registered a wide difference of opinion on questions of belief. But both conservatives and liberals voluntarily refused to discuss these issues in the interest of finding agreement on those social and international matters which are of common Christian concern.

If any single conviction dominated the entire Conference, that conviction may be said to have been the almost unanimous demand for the organic union of all Protestant denominations. The Church was considered in relation to race, to war, to industry, and to community welfare.

And when each specific problem arose the conclusion was speedily reached that solution was delayed-and probably would continue to be delayed-until Protestant unity could be achieved. One of the outstanding contributions of the Conference was made by a delegation of Canadian students who brought to the discussion their experiences in relation to church unity in Canada. The project most definitely recommended to the Con

tinuation Committee was a proposal to begin this process of unification by undertaking, first of all, the union of the young people's organizations of Protestantism. A student study of the ways. and means for accomplishing this end has already been agreed upon.

A large proportion of the students who came to Evanston were uncertain in their attitude toward the Christian Church. They came because the program of the Conference called for a fair statement of both sides of the question-the case against as well as the case for the Church. The most extreme critics as well as the most uncritical friends of the Church were promised their day in court and had it. It is altogether probable that Evanston did not bring about many conversions of view-point. The Conference did not and, doubtless, could not achieve a unity of attitude. What it did achieve, however, was a unity of purpose. It revealed how far, in matters of fundamental importance, those who held widely differing theological opinions might travel together, and brought about a genuine determination to express that unity of purpose by action, if possible, through the channels of the Christian Church.

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ROM my watch-tower down here, the growth of agrarian unrest was the most significant and, looked at from a particular angle, the most alarming development of the last few days of the old year. I see in it the brewing of a storm which is likely to blow great guns through the early months of a new year-a storm that almost certainly will destroy the orderly progress of the only well-ordered Congress that I have ever seen in action; a storm that may buffet the old ship entirely off the old track and force its navigators to lay a course for a new port. My opinions on this subject may not De sound. I am personally willing to advance them and to take responsibility for them. They will not be pleasing to advocates of Government price fixing. No more will they be pleasing to those who think that agriculture should work ut its own salvation. They are not leasing to me. I do not expect them to e pleasing to anybody.

By DIXON MERRITT

The question is, Why are farmers dissatisfied?

The answer is, Farmers are dissatisfied because they are not making money.

Having made a categorical answer to a catechetical question, I may be permitted to explain in some detail.

The fact that farmers are dissatisfied is not, I suppose, questioned by anybody. We may as well-indeed, better a long sight-admit at the outset that the dissatisfaction has been considerably fomented by demagogues. But it genuinely exists, and would genuinely have existed if there had been no demagogues. It subsided appreciably with the return of fairly good times, or of what the farmers. were told were fairly good times, and which seemed so to them because of prices somewhat higher. But within the past few weeks it has flamed up again angrily, particularly in that great producing region stretching from the eastern border of Ohio to the foot of the Rocky Mountains. It has flamed, too,

in other producing sections, but not so fiercely.

FARMERS have found out that, for

them, there has not been a return of good times. They have found that prices are not actually higher, though they receive somewhat more money for the things they sell. The price ratio between what they have to sell and what they have to buy is still against them, and more markedly so this year than it was last year. They can buy a little more of what they need with some of their products-with butter, for instance. But they can buy less with others of their products-with, for instance, eggs. So it goes through the whole list. The composite price of what the farmer consumes has gone up, and while the composite price of what he produces has gone up a little too, it has not gone up enough to hold his purchasing power where it was a year ago, when it seemed just to have begun a slow recovery from

a five-year slump. The farmer is still not making money, and the farmer therefore stiil is dissatisfied-more intensely dissatisfied than before, not only because of hope deferred, but because of hope snatched from him when he thought it was realized.

Now, having offended all those readers who insist that the farmer is really pretty well off despite all that has been said to the contrary, let me proceed to offend the farmer himself.

There are three principal reasons why farmers are not making money. One of them has already been mentioned. His purchasing power is below that of other groups. He is not responsible for that and cannot himself do anything toward correcting it. The second is that his taxes are too high. So far as I know, every sound economist who has studied the subject agrees that the farmer is overtaxed with relation to other groups. For that the farmer himself is partially responsible, and he may be able to do a great deal toward curing the evil. The third, and much the most important, is that the valuation placed on his land is, out of all reason and out of all conscience, too high. I do not know whether he is responsible for that or not, and I do not know how much he could do toward changing the situation. I do know, in the farmer's favor, that a great many farmers bought the land, and that all of them pay taxes on it at that unconscionably high valuation. I do know, too, in the farmer's disfavor, that he is not willing to squeeze the water out of his land and let the price of it sink to where it actually belongs. He wants to retain the fictitious value in his land. Perhaps he is not to be blamed severely. It is not in the nature of any man to be willing to see a $500 investment shrink to $125. It would mean bankruptcy in many cases.

Then, too, the farmer claims, and with some justice, that there is water in everybody else's values. He points particularly to the railroads. And, more or less naturally, the farmer does not want to squeeze his sponge until the other fellow does some squeezing too. Just the same, if the water were squeezed out of farmland values the biggest single thing would be accomplished toward giving the farmer a profit on his labor and his investment toward, in short, putting the farmer in position to make money.

I am in favor of squeezing harder than most people will admit is necessary. I have always contended, and I think I always shall contend, that there is not an acre of land in the United States worth more than $100 for the purpose of pro

ducing general crops and live stock. I have some acres that, mainly for sentimental reasons, I would not sell for any such price, but they will not produce fair dividends on any more than that. That is about the return-producing value that many other farmers have found to be right.

TEN years or so ago there came to

Washington from Iowa, where the land is said to be better than anywhere else, and where it is certainly higher priced, a hard-headed old farmer of Scotch ancestry. First he was in the Department of Agriculture, and then in the Treasury Department as a member of the Federal Farm Loan Board. He was a good farmer. He said that, on a valuation of $250 an acre, the best he could do was to make his investment return a dividend of two and a half per cent.

And that was when commodity prices were high. When the price of land in his section reached $250 an acre, he sold. If he had held on, he could have sold later for more than $500 an acre, but if he had let the boom pass and held the land until to-day he would be complaining, as so many thousands are, of losing money on his investment, of production costs in excess of the selling price of crops.

Of course, land is not selling at those high prices now. It is hardly selling at all, except under the hammer, and forced sales do not establish a market. But it is still held at the boom-time valuation, much of it is still to be paid for at that valuation, and all of it is taxed on that valuation. In this last regard the man who never bought or sold boom land, but kept steadily on working the acres that he had worked all his life, is just as much the sufferer as the boom buyer.

I believe it is a fact beyond question that farmers should not pay so large a proportion of State, county, and local taxes as they now pay. Bringing farm lands down to their real value would help in arriving at a proper basis, but, alone, it would not accomplish a great deal. Assessing authorities have a way, necessarily, of stepping up the rate when the value is stepped down. Nobody knows just how this tax problem is to be solved. Has anybody, from the beginning of the world until to-day, ever known how any tax problem was to be solved except in makeshift, slipshod fashion? The farmers, however, believe that the solution is to be found in an adjustment of the burden so that it will rest less heavily on physical property-visible property, that is-and more heavily on invisible property. They may be right or they may

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part of that other kind of Federal revenue-tariff taxes. And the hot resentment that has welled up in him and overflowed during the past few weeks is more at the tariff than at anything else. He believes that the Fordney-McCumber tariff is a bunco game with himself as the victim, that agricultural products are given protection in name only, while manufactured articles are genuinely protected, with the farmer forced to pay, in large part, the cost of it.

The demand for the establishment of a Federal export corporation to dispose of crop surpluses-and this is the burden of the song of discontent that has risen to a crescendo over the corn fields and hog lots during the past few weeks-is really a tariff demand. The farmers want a tariff that will protect them when they have a surplus. They may be willing to give the surplus away, but they want what they call the domestic price for a sufficient part of the crop to meet the domestic demand. They say that the manufacturer has exactly this kind of tariff, and they threaten to tear down his tariff wall unless he opens the gate to them.

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HAT is expected of a Federal ex port corporation-and all tha can be expected of it, even by the most optimistic is that it would dump the surpluses abroad at whatever price they would bring, leaving the bulk of the crops at home to be sold in the domestic market with a tariff wall around it suffi ciently high to keep imports out until the price rises high enough to afford a profi to the domestic producer. Much wild talk to the contrary notwithstanding that is what the export corporation means and all that it means. I do not know that it means as much as that The Administration, apparently, has no believed that it does.

But the Administration has, just a apparently, quite recently trimmed it sails to the wind. That protest which rolled across plains and prairies and reverberated from the Alleghanies to the Rockies shook the White House. spokesman for the President issued a statement to the effect that the country misunderstood the President's Message and his address delivered before the