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Bath House John and Boss Tweed are the products of democracy trying to do its work with the Long Ballot; Abraham Lincoln and Grover Cleveland are what democracy produces with the Short Ballot.

When the Thirteen Original Colonies separated from England and began to constitute themselves into self-governing bodies, it was natural that they should turn towards forms of pure democracy that is to say, forms in which every man had something to say about every question of government. The authority of the government officials which had been imposed upon them by the mother country was so despotic that they looked upon all authority with fear and suspicion. The kind of government that most appealed to the rebelling colonists was of the type of a New England town meeting. But a nation even as small as the newly federated colonies was too large to be efficiently conducted on the town-meeting plan.

A revolutionary statesman of whose political genius we hear too little in these days, but who deserves to be ranked with Washington, Jefferson, and Hamilton as one of the great founders of this Repub

make the executive practically a board of men instead of one man, and by crippling it so as to make it ineffective for good, while at the same time dividing the responsibility, so that no one need be afraid to do evil. Above all, they were anxious to take away from the governor the appointment of the military and civil servants of the State."

The result of Morris's failure to persuade his colleagues is that we have a complicated State Government in which we elect Heaven only knows how many office-holders in a system so incoherent and heterogeneous that nobody can be held responsible. But Morris did not despair. He was a delegate to the Fed

eral Constitutional Convention which met in 1787 in Philadelphia. As it was Jefferson who wrote the Declaration of Independence, so it was Morris who drew up the original form of the United States Constitution, and as that original now stands it is a product of his pen. It was he who was chiefly instrumental in making the President of the United States the Chief Executive of the Nation, in making him Commander-inChief of the Army and Navy, in giving him a veto power, and, finally and per

ing the Short Ballot principle to all forms of of administrative government work. I have never been able quite to understand why, when he sees it working every day before his eyes in the National Government with efficiency and success, he does not apply it to his State, county, and city governments.

The American has really a genius for organization. The industrial or commercial corporation in business is practically an American invention, and has proved to be a remarkable instrument for social

efficiency. One hundred men join together to build a cotton mill. They form a corporation and are the stockholders. As stockholders they get together and elect a small board of directors. The board of directors gather and elect a president and perhaps one or two other executive officers. These two or three executive officers select a book

keeper, engineer, the head machinist, the sales manager, and all other employees. Power and responsibility are placed upon the president of an industrial or financial or commercial corporation. He directs the business, employs his subordinates, and reports results to his stockholders.

lic, early saw the need of establishing haps most important of all, in endowing If the stockholders do not like the re

authority in a democracy if it was to be efficient. I refer to Gouverneur Morris, one of the splendid figures in the history of New York State. Gouverneur Morris was the founder of Short Ballot government in the United States. When the State of New York was framing its Constitution, Morris endeavored to make New York a Short Ballot State. He wanted a governor with very broad powers of appointment. But the word "governor" had a kind of terror for the people. It called to their minds the British governors imposed upon them in colonial days. The story is told in Theodore Roosevelt's brief but readable "Life of Gouverneur Morris."

"Men," says Mr. Roosevelt, "often let the dread of the shadow of a dead wrong frighten them into courting a living evil.

"Morris himself was wonderfully clear-sighted and cool-headed. He did not let the memory of the wrongdoing of the royal governors blind him; he saw that the trouble with them lay, not in the power that they held, but in the source from which that power came. Once the source was changed, the power was an advantage, not a harm to the State. Yet few or none of his companions could see this; and they nervously strove to save their new State from the danger of executive usurpation by trying to

him with the power of appointing all

Government officers. Thus we have a Long Ballot Government in the State of New York and a Short Ballot Government in the Nation. The result is that, while in State, county, and city elections. the poor confused voter has to vote for literally scores of officers about whom he can know nothing and cares to know nothing, in the National Government he votes for only three men-a President (the Vice-President is a mere appendage of the Presidency), a Congressman, and

a Senator. Those three men he knows. He knows their names, their characters, their personalities; he watches them and holds them responsible. He has the time and the knowledge to exercise an intelligent judgment about what they do. None of us thinks that his rights as a free American are curtailed because we do not vote for the Justices of the United States Supreme Court or for the Secretary of the Treasury or for the Ambassador to England. And yet in the State we have to vote for judges of the State Supreme Court, for State engineers, and State treasurers as well as for a host of other officials. It is a curious kind of legend or tradition fostered and encouraged by machine politicians that keeps the American citizen from apply

sults, they choose through the board of directors another president. This system can be made to work in government exactly as it works in business, because this is what is done in our National affairs. If we ran our business corporations as we run our State and city governments, the stockholders would meet once a year and vote for the office boy, the janitor, the bookkeeper, the stenographers, and the salesmen. How long would a business last conducted on this principle? The amazing thing to me is, not that our State governments and city governments are inefficient and corrupt, but that they have been able to exist at all under a system which the plainest man on the street knows would be ruinous if applied in ordinary business affairs.

If the American democracy is to become efficient, it must extend the system which has proved successful in the National Government to all its political administration-the Short Ballot system, in which the people shall elect the fewest possible officials, give them the greatest possible amount of authority, and hold them to the strictest accountability. It is for this reason that I am heartily in favor of the Smith-Hughes plan for the reorganization of the State of New York.

I

Staff Correspondence from Washington by DIXON MERRITT

LEFT it in the wash-room of Pullman car X53 of the Pennsylvania

Railroad train which left Washington at 12:10, midnight, February 22, and arrived in New York just before dawn of the 23d.

Somebody has it. To him it means only a good razor.

I have lost it. And to me it means a thousand memories, some of them funny, many of them sad, some of them sacred.

Please do not think me sacrilegious when I say that that old razor, more than the chiming of the church bells and more even than prayer-books and psalters, had the power to bring me at times into a worshipful frame of mind and of spirit. It, more closely than any other thing that I possessed, linked me with the reverential moments of my boyhood.

FOR

OR the old gentleman who brought me up in the nurture of good precept and of well-nigh faultless example used every Sunday morning to take that old razor from its worn and battered leathern case-that would be when he was preparing to walk with me to the little white church down the road where now his ashes rest. He would take out the old razor and, talking to me the while of those things that youth must receive from the lips of age or else go unarmored into the battle of life, he would strop it, giving it the finishing touches always on the palm of his great broad, sinewy hand-the hand that was to me as long as he lived the symbol alike of strength and of tenderness. And always in the later years, when I went back home to be with him for a little while, it was the same on Sunday mornings-the old razor stropped to perfection on the palm of the broad old hand even when its strength was gone and only its tenderness remained.

I had not, in those early days, the love for the old razor that came to me later came in its full, I think, only when I found it among his intimate personal things after I had followed him for the last time down to the churchyard. Once, when I was perhaps thirteen years old, I became enamored of old men's tales of

the razor to the task. The result was no pen worth mentioning, but a deep, ragged, ugly gap in the edge of the ra

zor.

I do not know how many evenings the old gentleman honed away, resting the rock on the arm of his old chair in the chimney-corner, slowly grinding the broad blade down to get rid of the gap. I think the razor was never quite as good after that. The edge was dubbed and never quite so keen as before-that is, until it came to me and, with better working tools than the old gentleman had or could have found, I honed away through long evenings until I had made it better than new. Though it could mean nothing any more to him, there was in the accomplishment of the task something of the sweetness of making restitution for an old sin.

A

ND I left that razor, in my haste, in the wash-room on Pullman X53 on the morning of February 23. It was inexcusable, I know, but I hope that the excusable, I know, but I hope that the man who has it will let me have it back. I do not quite know how I am to go back to the old home, when I do go, without it.

It is a big old-fashioned razor, the blade very broad and thick in the back, the handle white and deeply carved.

Such a razor, I know, would appeal to a porter. And I do not know that I should blame a porter very greatly for failure to turn in a razor of that kind at the office. Old razors are treasures that

might tempt men more prominent than porters. But I do not think this porter would keep it if he knew it was mine and that I need it so greatly. He is a good

had heard my name announced when the toastmaster called on me for a speech. So, when he came up beside me and slapped me in the old bluff way, I could not call his name not for the instant. But when he threw his head back as he used so often to do in Economics II and exclaimed, "What!" I said, "Louis Wheelis!"

So home we came to my house and talked all night.

Wheelis does not smoke. I did not either twenty-four years ago, and, though it took me some time to adjust myself to intimate conversation without a pipe, I think we got more of the flavor of the old years by that chance.

It is wonderful how many things one knows that one has forgotten.

Boys' names that I had not thought of for nearly a quarter of a century came back to me— first names, middle names, and all. And I found, greatly to my surprise and more to my delight, that I still can come mighty close to calling by heart the roll of the Erosophian Society for the years from 1899 to 1902.

It is good to think of all the old boys again and to remember with another who knew them their lovable traits. I think it would not be so good to see all of them again. I confess that, for the most part, I had rather not see them. Those that I have seen after long lapses of years, Wheelis alone excepted, are not at all the same. Many of them are more completely strangers than men I meet whom I have never seen before. Is there

any loneliness quite as overpowering as that of being in the presence of a man you have known and know no longer?

porter. We had a long and enjoyable W
talk in the smoking-room that night be-
fore I went to bed. He told me many
things of his boyhood home in Georgia,
and I told him many things of John and
Tom and Dillahunty, the colored men
who look after my old farm in Tennes-

see.

But, porter or passenger, I hope that the man who has it will let me have it

back again. I need it more than I need

money.

the smooth writing qualities of goose- B

quill pens, and I tried to make one. I found the quills along the sunny-side bank of the pond where the geese were wont to dry themselves, and I ruined a dozen of them with my boy's jack-knife, an implement as unsuited for penmaking as a butcher's cleaver for surgery. Finally, in desperation, I took

ITH Wheelis, though, the old companionship was picked up exactly where it was dropped. Perhaps it may be so always where there once has been genuine friendship on both sides. I do not know. It is a difficult thing to know. There are so few full, two-sided friendships in this world that drift apart and come together again.

Wheelis has been fortunate beyond most of us who were at Peabody in those old days-fortunate beyond the measure of most men in the world.

UT, if I have lost the razor, I have He has stayed right on in the neighfound Wheelis. Twenty-four years borhood in which he was born and he was lost, from the June morning when reared. Except for the years he was in we left college until the end of the Pea- college, he has never been away for any body dinner in Washington during the length of time. From the time he left sessions of the Department of Superin- school he has taught, first the boys and tendence of the National Education As- girls, his neighbors, who were only a litsociation. tle younger than he, and finally their Wheelis had the advantage of me. He children. His impress is on the com

munity, will remain there long after he is gone. Some of us who have gone about the world may have exerted a wider influence, but his has been infi

nitely deeper. He is now superintendent of the county that bred him-that of Ashdown, away out on the Texas border of Arkansas.

If I could envy Wheelis anything, I should envy him the opportunity he has had of staying at home and giving himself in service to his own.

At the Passaic Battlefront

Staff Correspondence by ERNEST W. MANDEVILLE

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down the sidewalk. They are coming from their daily afternoon meeting. They are on their way home. They approach the mammoth Botany Worsted Mill, their former workshop. weeks before they had stopped work because of a ten per cent cut in the wage scale. With few exceptions, they had been orderly and peaceful in their daily conferences and in their processions homeward. During these seven weeks you and I heard nothing of them.

But this day (March 2) they are met at the mill corner by the Passaic and Clifton police force. "Stop!" "Turn back!" It is impossible to pass the cordon of mounted policemen stretched across the road. The workers are forced to halt. Thousands in the rear press forward to see what is the matter, The motion of an orderly sidewalk procession is halted, and it becomes a compact mass of men, women, and children milling around in the blocked street. Instead of keeping order, the police have created disorder. Stupidity! Stupidity rampant. The strikers can't turn back. Their retreat is choked off by the unknowing and undirected thousands in the rear.

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ears.

"Hey, you! Get back! You can't strike organizers. Sweet music to their loiter here!" yells Chief of Police Zober. The strikers stand still. That's all they can do.

"Break them up, officers! Scatter, them, men!" The mounted police ride their horses into the mob, pushing and clubbing right and left. Motorcycle policemen step on the gas and plow in. Of course, it does no good.

Chief Zober isn't satisfied. He digs into his overcoat pocket and pulls out a tear-gas bomb four inches in diameter. He throws it into the mob. The crowd fights to get away from the rising smoke fights to get away from the rising smoke and gas.

The police toss two more bombs into the mêlée. Still Chief Zober is dissatisfied. He rings for the Fire Department. In three minutes the fire hose is being played on the now retreating multitude-men, women, and children, strikers and onlookers-any one within reach. What do they care? When stupid men lose their heads let all beware!

Violence begets violence. Shouts of "Revolution! Revolution!" are heard. "A reign of terror!" "Cossack outrages!" "Assaulted without provocation." These and similar phrases are circulated by the imported Communistic

BE

EFORE this we had heard nothing of the strike. There is no news in an orderly strike. There must be conflict and disorder to make news. Chief Zober saw to that. He is a great little press agent for Passaic. His tear-gas, club, and fire-hose battle found space in the New York papers. But the real publicity coup is yet to come.

Twenty-four hours elapse. Now every newspaper in New York, Newark, and parts adjacent has reporters and camera men at "trouble corner." Once again the strikers walk down the street from their meeting and encounter the police. Once more they are charged. Clubs begin to fall. Men slip on the ice while attempting to duck the blows. their knees in prayer. Camera men gather "close-up" pictures.

Women fall to Children shriek. around to get

Now comes the police move which makes the Passaic strike a front-page news sensation. The camera men are clubbed down by the coppers and eight expensive cameras (worth at least $5,000) are beaten to smithereens. Pencils are snatched from bystanding re

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Courtesy of New York "Herald Tribune"

No comment on the violent methods of the police could be more effective than these steel helmets which

porters and their notes torn to bits. A newspaper woman is lustily clubbed when she fails to "beat it" quickly enough. An attempt at news suppression! Well! Well!! Double reason for devoting full pages to the "Cossack" police and to those photographs which were saved by the few camera men who escaped by jumping over fences and by hiding under the couches in near-by dwellings. Strike stories appear in the capitalistic press which formerly would have been typical of the Socialistic New York "Call" or "The Masses." Thousands of dollars pour in daily for the relief and support of the strikers.

Twenty-four more hours elapse, and there are more newspaper reporters and camera men in Passaic than have assembled on any news story in the United States since the Wall Street explosion. Some of the camera men soar over trouble corner in a hired airplane. Others cruise up and down the streets in an armored car--with camera lenses at the peep-holes. The strikers now file down the sidewalk wearing trench helmets and gas masks. Miss Elizabeth Kovacs leads the procession pushing a baby carriage. She has borrowed her sister's baby for the occasion. By this time some one has succeeded in injecting a little wisdom into the heads of the Clifton and Passaic police. The strikers' parade is allowed to proceed. It does so peaceably and quietly (with the exception of the cheers of onlookers) and nothing happens. Warrants are sworn out for the arrest of Police Chief Zober and two patrolmen on assault charges, but up to the date of this writing no near-by constable is willing to arrest these so-called guardians of

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UT what is behind all of this? What is the strike all about? Nearly one million people are employed in the textile industry of this country in the weaving of wool, silk, and cotton. The large mills are centered in Lawrence, New Bedford, Fall River, and Lowell, Massachusetts, and in Paterson and Passaic, New Jersey. Each one of these cities has thousands of low-salaried immigrant workers. Strikes over wage scales are recurrent. The earnings of the million textile workers rise and fall in accordance with the standards set in the large mill centers. These cities, therefore, are the scenes of activity for union organizers and labor agitators.

Botany Mills Consolidated, of Passaic and Garfield, New Jersey, employ about

six thousand men and women. In 1918 the mills were seized by the United States

Government, on the ground that they were German-owned and that their home office was in Leipzig. It was only a year ago that they were returned to Max W. Stoehr, the American representative of the German house of Stoehr. (Mr. Stoehr claims to be a naturalized American.) An eight-million-dollar bond issue was then floated, and soon became listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The country-wide slump in the textile industry cut down the earning power of the Botany Mills from $2,880,147 in 1923 to $1,731,298 in 1924. Figures for 1925 are not yet available, but, according to

P. & A. Photos

Albert Weisbord

Passaic reports, they will be several hundred thousand less than in 1924. This loss of earning power may be the economic basis for the subsequent wage cut.

In October of last year the earnings of the employees (small at the best) were reduced in two ways: four work days a week and a ten per cent cut in the wage scale. Even under the old system the living conditions of workers' families were pretty miserable. About half of the employees were making from $12 to $22 a week. In families with six and eight children this meant that the father worked daytimes and then the mother went to the factory for the night shift. When the reductions came, there was great dissatisfaction; but with all the grumbling they kept on working.

The scene was now set for the entrance of a labor organizer-or, if you prefer, an outside agitator. Albert Weisbord (twenty-five years old, the son of a manufacturer, said to be a Phi Beta

Kappa man at the College of the City of New York, graduate of Harvard Law School, and an avowed Communist)

came to Passaic and began the organization of his "One Big Textile Union." He had a fertile field to work in. Eight weeks ago he ordered his four thousand followers in Botany Mills to quit their jobs. The strike spread to the other mills in Passaic, Clifton, and Garfield. There are now about eleven thousand workers on strike.

The original protest was against the ten per cent wage cut and a request for its restoration. Under Weisbord's direction, the strikers now demand, not only an abolition of the wage cut, but an increase of ten per cent over the old scale, a forty-four-hour week, more sanitary working conditions, and recognition of their union.

If the purpose of the intervention of the American Civil Liberties Union can be judged by the speech which I heard. given by their representative, Mr. Robert Dunne, it is to fan into a flame the workers' hatred for the employers and the police. I hope that this is not the purpose of the home office.

The sympathy of the average Passaic citizen is with the strikers, on account of the low salaries paid and the arbitrary treatment of the employees by the millowners. The mill-owners have made no effective effort to explain the business slump and consequent financial condition to the workmen. As a matter of fact, the workmen are not of a type able to reason very much on their own account. They have placed themselves entirely in the hands of Albert Weisbord and his radical following.

The mill-owners refuse to deal with Weisbord, and Weisbord refuses to let the workers deal with their employers except through him. There is no question of Weisbord's natural ability as a strike leader and of his power to hold the workers with him. So there we are.

It looks like a long and profitless strike-made longer by the pig-headed actions of the local police. Millions of dollars in wages are being lost by the workers. The mill-owners have already lost their spring orders, and they stand

to lose their summer business if the strike goes on much longer. I predict that Weisbord will lose out in the end, as he has in his other textile-strike attempts. Nothing will be gained by either of the contending parties. Hundreds of families will suffer untold hardships.

We probably won't hear much more about it, but we can be sure of one thing: The revolutionary spirit has been stirred in thousands of simple souls by Communist agitators ably assisted by the New Jersey policemen.

Passaic, New Jersey, March 6, 1926.

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T

Ida Noyes Memorial Hall, where the women students find a club home with the appearance of a church

Doorways

Through the University of Chicago

HE murk of trade and the growth of ivy have combined to give to the architectural embodiment of the University of Chicago the appearance of great age. In its cloisters and quadrangles you are in Oxford; Magdalen Tower rises venerably before you; buttressed walls inclose lawns of English perfection; mullioned windows give glimpses of King's College Chapel and wainscoted refectory rooms. Chicago, the Chicago of the stockyards, the Loop, the Illinois Central tracks, and the "Tribune," is one thousand miles, five hundred years, away.

Only thirty-two years ago where now the Gothic towers of the University rise in century-old dignity above the trees the Midway Plaisance ran its terrific sideshow to the World's Fair. On this very ground the Ferris Wheel turned round and round and the tom-toms of the Dahomey Village gave to Main Street in its millions the first premonitory thrills of jazz. Round the staff-made palaces of the White City, created before the days of reinforced concrete, grew up enormous papier-maché and lath-and-plaster sub

By GEORGE MARVIN

urbs, born almost overnight by streets and avenues and districts and plaisances, making a transitory Greater Chicago on the South Side. So much change, such complete overturn and re-creation, could only happen in the United States of America, and in America only in the West. It is almost as great a miracle that one Columbian city with its palaces and pleasure domes, its avenues and canals and rialtos and plazas, its tawdry environs, "its glories and its triumphs and the rest," should have utterly passed away more completely than Sardis or Nineveh without a vestige of its reign, as that, upon the ruins of such Titanic architecture and landscape gardening should have risen this well-ordered embodiment of Old World peace.

It takes a Midway bus about fortyfive minutes to spasmodically run-continually checked by automatic traffic lights and the phonograph chant of the conductor, "Low bridge; kindly keep your seats" from the Loop to the University. In its route is comprehended the gamut of Chicago. From the overpeopled canyons of the Loop you emerge

first on the sweep of Michigan Avenue and face the open sea and the open sky with one great breath of relief. But even here utility comes first. All the years of its life the second largest and second richest city of America has used the very center of its possible landscape plan, its great gift of natural beauty, as a freight yard. That is, or perhaps it would be more fair to say that has been, Chicago. Cheek by jowl with its Field Museum and its art gallery box-cars are stolidly parked. The long sea-wall of its best hotels and clubs and retail shopping stores is grimed with the continual softcoal drift from the Illinois very Central, and all day long conversation must be pitched over the hooting, steam-exhausting, and bell-ringing of switch engines and the assertive arrival and departure of interminable trains. It's like having vociferous plumbing in the parlor; but Chicago, buying up grand opera and beautiful pictures, has continued to put up with this intolerable nuisance.

Consequentially Michigan Avenue, with its wide greensward dotted by recumbent sons of rest and their littered

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