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.

F

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 be 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 out its own salvation. They are not pleasing to me. I do not expect them to be 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.

F

ARMERS 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 still 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

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.

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

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. 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

THE farmer, however, does pay a large

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.

valuation, and all of it is taxed on that W

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 erty. They may be right or they may

HAT is expected of a Federal export corporation-and all that 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 sufficiently high to keep imports out until the price rises high enough to afford a profit 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 not believed that it does.

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

American Farm Bureau Federation on the day before his Message was read. Secretary of Agriculture Jardine issued a statement that, having got the co-operatives' aid bill behind him, he was ready to turn his attention to the surplus problem. He is calling conferences of all sorts of interested groups.

I do not suppose that the convictions of the Administration have changed a hair's breadth. I do suppose that the political situation grew so alarming, the revolt of the Middle West and the West so imminent, that concession had to be made, and that speedily. I suppose that Mr. Jardine is diligently trying, with the support of the President, to arrive at some basis for a surplus disposition bill

that will accomplish something beneficial to farmers without throwing our economic machinery out of gear. I do not suppose any bill that the conscience of the Administration-a conscience that

the Middle West. I suppose that whatever hope there was for another term for Coolidge went glimmering in the last week of the old year.

ILL there be any surplus disposal legislation at this session of Congress? I do not know, and the showdown is too near at hand for guessing at. It depends on how far the Administration will go to meet the farmer and how far the farmer will come to meet the Administration. I think I do know that the farmer protest-which, as I said before, is really a protest against the tariff -will feed bolts and bars and calked horseshoes into political machines until something is done.

Ο

NCE a year, in some large center, several thousands of American scientists gather in order to read papers describing their researches, to listen to lectures by one another, and, equally important, to rub shoulders, hobnob about science, and thus maintain a mutual acquaintance. This constitutes the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a body of some sixteen thousand men and women representing all branches of science.

Thus the annual meeting of all these people who have widely varied interests in science is a kind of clearing-house for the current advances in research. It is also a great mouthpiece through which the several sciences may make known to the public what they have been doing during the year past-what researches have been attempted, what results accomplished. For to-day the scientist clearly realizes that the future of science is in the hands of the public, which furnishes the funds whereby his research may be performed.

Always, or nearly always, the public obtains its strongest impressions of the important meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science from the newspapers, and in the last analysis the only kind of news reports which may be consistently marketed to the greatest number of newspapers are

By ALBERT G. INGALLS

the kind which the masses of their readers will read and understand. Thus, while we have had excellent popular and semi-popular newspaper accounts of these great scientific gatherings, notably from such papers as the New York "Times" and the Kansas City "Star," to many editors it has evidently seemed impossible or impracticable to present a serious and accurate depiction of what our scientists are doing and saying, and, in short, to give a clear idea of what they are really like.

In many cases of reporting, the necessary compromise between the abstruseness of the scientific account and the popular report, there has been an illconceived effort to revert to the use of humor. Humor, however, does not of itself leaven the abstruseness of science.

The result has undoubtedly been to leave in at least the less appreciative and less understanding majority of lay minds the general impression that scientists are a peculiar kind of people who spend their time searching for the bizarre, the paradoxical, the "stunty," and even the sensational aspects of their work.

Thus we might pick up our morning paper and read something like this: "Florida real estate will soon become even more valuable than that of Manhattan if the predicted return of the Glacial Period drives mankind out of the North, crowding millions into the uninvaded

portions of the country. This is the purport of an address delivered to-day at Omaha before the American Association for the Advancement of Science by Professor Sirius Orion, noted geologist and cosmologist. The professor's hearers were noticeably perturbed until near the close of his address, when he explained that he was using the word 'soon' in its geological sense, and that if the ice mantle should return it would not push our descendants southward for another 20,000 years."

Noticeably, however, as mentioned above, the newspapers are gaining a clearer insight into the nature and significance of science to civilization, and some of them are treating it seriously as well as with great popular interest.

THIS year the American Association

the entire name is more than a mouthful-held its meeting in Kansas City, and it was therefore attended mostly by scientists from the Middle West and West rather than from the East. In this space it will prove impossible to summarize even a fraction of the interesting papers delivered, nor is this desirable, since at such a meeting there are always a few addresses that stand far above the rest in interest or in signifi

cance.

Possibly the most outstanding aspect. of the Kansas City meeting, as your cor

respondent saw it, was the realization that the support of future science depends on the proper sort of publicity which present-day science receives, and also that if scientists are to perform their labors efficiently they must be relieved from the petty worries of maintaining or attempting to maintain a growing family on a meager stipend of two or three thousand dollars a year.

There was manifest at Kansas City a feeling among scientists that science has been .too unimaginative, too specialized, too narrow in its way, and that its daily struggles after truth are, or ought to be, consciously directed towards some greater end. Without doubt this feeling reflects the surprise of scientific men following the Dayton, Tennessee, evolution trial surprise that the intentions of science have not been understood by the world at large; it also takes in the feeling that many of the lesser scientific men have remained limited in vision and depth-that they do not see that science is only a means to living.

A

MONG purely scientific matters dealt

with at Kansas City the most outstanding was the continuation of the friendly struggle that is now going on between two great concepts-Einsteinism, as exemplified by the abandonment of the theory of the ether of space, and the older concept of the ether which Einsteinism would displace. This struggle was brought to a head by Professor Dayton C. Miller, of the Case School of Applied Science (Cleveland), who explained in careful detail his more recent experiments, which indicate that the ether does

in fact exist and that we are swimming in a sea of it. Professor Miller's careful research has thrown a monkey-wrench into the Einstein wheel, although it has far from discouraged the enthusiastic exponents of Einsteinism.

Within the past three or four years, and especially within about one year, three strong, empirical vindications of relativity have been reached by research. The first was the bending of rays of light which pass close to the sun. This has been studied by Dr. Charles E. St. John, of the Mount Wilson Observatory, in California, who explained his work at the Kansas City meeting, and who, by the way, was photographed by a humorous press correspondent while having a prearranged argument with Professor Miller (N. E. A.)-an incident, by the way, which points out that in most cases the battles between great opposing scientific concepts are only between the concepts themselves, and not between their respective proponents. Even where their beliefs clash, a remarkably fine fellowship exists between scientific men the country over; in fact, the chief urge in the minds of many of them to attend the annual meetings of the American Association is for the expression of that spirit.

A second vindication of the Einstein theory is the manner in which light coming to us from a peculiar and extremely dense or "heavy" star called the "Companion of Sirius" is affected, as discovered by Dr. Adams, of the Mount Wilson Observatory; while the third substantiation was the celebrated pipe experiment conducted at Chicago by two physicists, Professors Michelson and Gale. This was explained in a previous issue of The Outlook.

Thus, agreeing with Einstein, many scientists have thrown out the ether of space, and the several previous attempts of Professor Miller to counter this tendency by explaining his experiments which seem to demonstrate the existence of the ether had previously been more or less passed over, as if resulting from some mistake in technic or from some systematic error. Professor Miller therefore reperformed his experiments on a greater scale, making during the past year more than one hundred thousand observations, than one hundred thousand observations, all of which have demonstrated the existence of the ether as an actual thing, and all of which were consistent with one another in showing that the earth, and indeed the entire solar system, is moving through it in the direction of the constellation of the Dragon at the rate of about 125 miles a second. 125 miles a second. This motion, or drift, through the ether appears to be accelerated when we are on the advanc

J. McKeen Cattell, retiring President of the Association

ing side of the earth, and retarded when we are on the retreating side. It varies throughout the day in a consistent manner, also at various seasons when the earth moves in different parts of its orbit with respect to the general motion towards Draco. The final proof of the existence of an objective ether would have the effect of knocking an important prop from under the Einstein theory. Most scientists are strongly actuated by the true scientific spirit-that is, the spirit of search for the truth. Dr. R. A. Millikan, foremost American American atomic physicist, explained at the Kansas City meeting that the only people who know they are right are the atheists and the Fundamentalists. The scientific mind never crystallizes, and it is unlikely that science will ever settle down to a state of established rest. It may therefore be a long time before the Einstein theory is either established or disproved.

Professor William MacDonald, historian, of Yale, in addressing the ComImittee of One Hundred on Scientific Research, pointed out that our force of pure science workers was rapidly being depleted by large companies and laboratories engaged in applied science, which offer far larger salaries than these men could earn as professors. This is in line with the recent utterances of Secretary Hoover, who clearly sees that all our material progress depends on the basic, underlying stratum of research in pure science. In a different way, Dr. R. A. Millikan pointed out the same thing by showing that our entire mechanical culture rests squarely on the discovery made by Galileo that the natural state of mat

ter was not simply that of rest, as had been taught by Aristotle and erroneously believed by the whole world for two thousand years. From this discovery, simple as it sounds, our entire science of mechanics took root and the mechanical or industrial revolution finally resulted.

Our leading scientists are at present seriously concerned with the important obligation which rests upon them, to use their influence to guide the paths of the future in such a way that no event or accident of history shall injure the future health of this invaluable growth called science. It is such problems as this,

rather than the grist of new knowledge of the second order of importance, which largely occupies the thoughts of the leaders of the American Association when they gather in conclave during the annual meetings.

A way must be found to keep uncovering more Galileos.

B

UFFALO BILL, P. T. Barnum,

and Brigham Young figure amusingly in the tales called forth by the dedication of Yale's fine new building for the Peabody Museum, whose invaluable scientific collections are at last reinstalled after seven years of storage.

Buffalo Bill joined Professor O. C. Marsh's military escort when that adventurous geologist was hunting skeletons of dinosaurs for Yale, and one night, after Marsh had been explaining how the region now covered by the Rockies was in prehistoric times a lake, Buffalo Bill remarked: "The Professor told the boys some pretty tall yarns to-day, but he tipped me a wink as much as to say, "'You know how it is yourself, Bill?" "

Barnum, it will be remembered, ran a museum of his own, and an old newspaper cutting relates: "Marsh once met

Barnum in a railroad car. He knew Barnum from his portrait, but Barnum did not know him. They entered into conversation, and Barnum told him of a number of curiosities which had been picked up for his museum but which his agent offered for sale before they could be put on exhibition. 'Some little cuss up in New Haven bought them,' said

To Brigham Young, however, Yale's Museum and its distinguished emissary were precious. Without Marsh Brigham would have been at a loss to explain why the Book of Mormon recognized the existence of horses in ancient North America. European scientists, Huxley among them, asserted that there were never any horses in this hemisphere until Europeans brought them. But Marsh, by discovering fossil horses in the West, refuted Huxley, and greatly consoled the Mormons.

Visitors at the new building of the Peabody Museum, on Pierson-Sage Square, see those same fossil horses, and recall Marsh's statement: "I first laid my full conclusions, as shown by my own specimens, before Huxley when he visited me in New Haven in 1876. He in

Underwood