MINIMUM WAGE LAWS

"I heartily approve," says James Withycombe, Governor of Oregon, "of minimum wage laws where they are executed with due regard to the just protection of both employer and employee. Certainly the minimum wage works for the best interests of all concerned; as even the most selfish employer is coming to realize more and more that his own ends are best served when his employees are reasonably well provided with the comforts and necessities of life."

Yours for more minimum wage laws, and for gardens, parks, and peace.

DEFENSE AND NON-RESISTANCE

In to-day's New York "Times" (September 22) Dr. Lyman Abbott is quoted as saying, in a letter to the American Defense Society:

"If there are in this country any persons who believe that non-resistance is the duty alike of individuals and nations, they should set themselves to work to secure an amendment to, or an abolition of, the United States Constitution."

As I am one of those who believe in the principle of non-resistance as taught by Christ, I ask you, Dr. Abbott, in all sincerity, whether you, as a Christian minister, hold the Constitution in higher regard than the Sermon on the Mount. T. B. A.

Summit, New Jersey.

I do not believe that Jesus taught the doctrine of non-resistance. On the contrary, I believe his whole life was one of active and energetic resistance to the power of evil. But, if I thought otherwise, I certainly would not ask the President of the United States and the other officers of the Government to violate their sacred oath and fail to provide for the National

A DEFENSE OF GERMAN AUTOCRACY

In almost every issue of your valued weekly you attack the German state. You seem to consider it as some sort of mercilessly working machinery; or if you assign any human qualities to it, you make it appear as if the motives and aims of all its activities were purely materialistic and void of all morality.

You write much about the relation of the state to the people. You accuse Germany of making the people serve the state instead of the state serving the people, as in democracies.

It is true that in the United States, for example, the state (the Government) serves the people directly. But with what results? The Nation is weak, defenseless, unable to cope with both internal and external difficulties. In Germany, on the contrary, the state serves the people indirectly, and with results supreme. If I serve the state, I serve the people; by helping the whole I help myself, who am part of the whole. If I serve the state by military service, I serve the people and myself. If in time of war I put my property at the disposal of the state, voluntarily or under compulsion, it will be to the benefit of the people and ultimately to my own benefit. The state, then, serves the people by compelling the people to serve the

state.

A direct service which the German state does the people consists in the system of beneficial and most democratic labor laws. Where is the like of this in the United States? Strikes like the recent carpenters' and builders' strike in Chicago, a gigantic calamity affecting the welfare of thousands, are impossible in Germany.

CARL N. LISCHKA. Campion College, Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin.

A happy ending to the usually mournful story of miners entombed alive was that in the case of nine miners who were swallowed up in the Foster Tunnel mine at Coaldale, Pennsylvania, recently. For seven days rescuers tried to reach their imprisoned comrades; when the last barrier was removed, the men were found alive and well! The luncheons brought with them on the day of the disaster had kept them from starving.

If modern road-builders were to try to reproduce a highway like the Appian Way of the Romans, the cost would be about $500,000 a mile, according to Director Page, of the United States Office of Public Roads. In our time, he says, these massive ancient highways have no place; what is needed is, mainly, a highway to meet the conditions brought about by the stupendous increase in the use of motor cars.

The North German Lloyd steamship company, whose great fleet of vessels has been lying idle for over a year, apparently expects the war to end in the not remote future, for it has recently renewed the lease on the expensive premises which it occupies as its offices in New York City.

A Boy Scout in London won the heart of Filson Young, who after a tour of the slums wrote: "When I came away, I was escorted by a small atom detailed to guide me to the Elephant Tube station; it was an unknown world to me, but I cannot describe the sense of safety I had in that flaming pandemonium of South London while the small boy trotted beside me. When we parted, I tendered certain coppers to him so that he should return by bus or tram

car.

'But we don't take money, sir,' he said, and, saluting, departed into the night."

The United States navy has dropped the term "helm " and will in the future use the unmistakable word "rudder." Instead of the old

fashioned command, "Starboard your helm," the new directions will be, "Right rudder." The old phrase sounds more "nautical," but quickness of comprehension and action are nowadays essential, and picturesque terminology must suffer.

The attitude of a friendly Indian toward the whites in Colonial days is aptly brought out in "A History of Travel in America" in this remark of an Onondaga chief to a white traveler: "If a white man in traveling through our country enters one of our cabins, we treat him as I do you. We dry him if he is wet; we warm him if he is cold; we give him meat and drink to allay his hunger and thirst, and soft furs for him to rest and sleep on. We demand nothing in return. But if I go into a white man's house

and ask for victuals and drink, they say, ' Where is your money?' and if I have none they say, 'Get out, you Indian dog.'" The Indians as a race, says the author of the book, largely acted as this chief did, their hospitable attitude being later changed by the impositions to which they were subjected.

Pittsburgh's steel mills are reported to be paying a million dollars a day in wages. Steel is now being made at a rate which is far ahead of any previous year in the industry's history.

Margaret Sherwood says in the "North American Review:" "For sheer escape from contemporary trouble, personal or international, who can help us can William Blake?... At its best, the lyric of Blake is one, entire, with singleness of thrust, driven home by passion of feeling, by sweet energy of meter, and by a clear, bright concreteness of phrase." Two examples may be quoted here:

"The Angel that presided at my birth

Said: Little creature made of joy and mirth,
Go, love without the help of anything on earth."

"To see the world in a grain of sand,

And heaven in a wild-flower;

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,

And eternity in an hour."

This harking back to the older poets in these troublous times is perhaps explained by Lawrence Gilman in the same number of the "Review." He says: (( The typical poet of to

day is chiefly conspicuous for his disdain of the poetical. His contempt for the traditional associations, the traditional materials, of poetry is deep and immitigable. His aversion to meter is incurable. He chooses to believe that he has discovered 'free verse;' and he will tell you that the time has come to 'strip poetry of its meaningless tatters of form, and clothe her in new, suitable garments.'"

So far from being discouraged by the danger of submarines, the Cunard Company is inaugurating a new service between Boston and London. The sailings will be bi-monthly; at present the steamers will carry freight only, but a passenger service may be instituted later.

The latest development of the canning industry appears to be, according to a note in the "Rural New Yorker," for the benefit of the domestic hen. "This plan of killing woodchucks and canning them for winter chicken feed," it says, "is a good one to consider."

Rather unexpected, says an English paper, was the reply of a Mrs. Tommy Atkins to a lady who inquired if her husband was at the front. "Yus," she said, "an' I 'ope 'e'll serve the Germans as 'e served me."

66

THE STORY OF THE WAR:
THE INVASION OF SERVIA

The double attack on Servia, by the German and Austrian army from the north and by Bulgaria from the southeast, is formidable and can be withstood only by quick and competent support from the Allies. Even if Servia is overrun by her enemies, however, it does not follow that the road to Constantinople is open. French, British, and Italian forces may attack Bulgaria and Turkey while Russia bombards the Bulgarian Black Sea ports-Varna and Burgas. Last week it was reported that the Allies had occupied Enos, a Turkish port on the Ægean, and it is thought that the large Italian expedition which sailed immediately after Italy declared war on Bulgaria (even yet, oddly enough, Italy is not at war with Germany) may be destined for Enos also. Meanwhile the Allies' forces which landed some time ago at Salonika, a Greek port, together with reinforcements landed at the same port, have moved northward, and last week a report, later questioned, said that this army had seized Strumitza, just over the Greek-Bulgarian frontier. It must be borne in mind that Greece, while perhaps entering a formal protest against the landing of these troops, has not seriously resented it. There is no resemblance whatever between the action of Germany in Belgium and that of the Allies in Greece. The German contention to this effect is without reason. When Greece took over Salonika after the Balkan wars, Servia consented only with the treaty agreement that Servia could use the railway from Salonika to Nish and Belgrade for the transportation of arms and troops in any war in which Greece was not involved. Greece still remains officially neutral.

The map on the next page shows that the strategy of the new Balkan war must center on the lines of the two great railways-one from Belgrade (Servia's old capital, now in German hands) south to Nish (Servia's new capital, perhaps already abandoned as a civic capital for a less exposed town), and thence south to Salonika; the other branching from

the first and running southeast through Sofia (Bulgaria's capital) to Adrianople and Constantinople. Up to October 20 the situation was this Servia, after brave and fierce resistance, had been driven south across the Danube by the Germans and Austrians, and its enemy had made some, but not great, progress along the Belgrade-Nish railway. Bulgaria had made two main attacks on Servia the first, proceeding west from Sofia, temporarily gained its object of cutting the railway at Vranja, about fifty miles south of Nish, thus placing the Servians between two enemies, although later, it was said, the Servians drove the Bulgarians back from Vranja; the other offensive of the Bulgarians is to the northwest from Sofia along the Sofia-Nish railway; this attack has penetrated Servia at the town of Pirot and threatens Nish dangerously. Finally, the Allies are moving against Bulgaria as above indicated; but censorship still leaves much uncertainty as to this, and particularly as to the numbers and composition of the Allies' forces; those which landed at Enos seem to have come across by sea from the Gallipoli peninsula, and more may very likely be withdrawn from the Dardanelles campaign.

No doubt, as has been already pointed out in this narrative, Germany aims not only at Constantinople, but at England's power in Egypt and the East. The idea is stupendous, but its accomplishment, even if Constantinople is taken, is not to be easy.

And even if Germany, without a navy, and against English and French naval force, can demonstrate that land warfare is independent of sea warfare, and can afford the men and material for such a gigantic campaign, there is another element in this situation which must be reckoned with. By the terms of the Anglo-Japanese treaty the two countries agree to "the maintenance of the territorial rights of the contracting parties in the regions of eastern Asia and India and the defense of their special interests in the said regions.' regions." It is also specifically agreed that if "either high contracting party should be involved in war in defense of its territorial

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