INTERCHANGEABLE MILEAGE

AND BUSINESS

H

OW will the business of the 'coun-try be stimulated; how will the revenues of the railways be affected; and what percentage of increase will there be in travel by rail, as a result of the bill signed by President Harding a few days ago, directing the InterState Commerce Commission, after notice and hearing, to require railways to issue interchangeable mileage books or scrip coupon tickets?

These are the interesting questions which are raised in connection with this bill, urged by the commercial travelers' associations as a means of getting more salesmen out on the road, thereby helping to improve business conditions generally. The Inter-State Commerce Commission, which is directed by the bill to fix "just and reasonable rates" to be charged for such interchangeable mileage, as well as to make other regulations governing its issuance and use, will hold hearings on the subject the latter part of next month, having set September 26 for this purpose.

While the railways did not make any strong opposition to the passage of the bill, they are known to be doubtful as to whether there will be sufficiently increased percentage of travel to make up for the losses they will sustain through the reduction in rates which, it is expected, will be granted to purchasers of the interchangeable mileage, and which was the real object sought in the bill.

The rate which has been suggested tentatively for these books is 2.5 cents a mile, as against the present basic rate on most of the railways of the country of 3.6 cents a mile. It has been estimated by railway officials that they will have to increase their passenger business by more than forty per cent in order to make up for the loss of revenue suffered through this rate reduction. The New England roads, a large percentage of whose receipts is derived from their passenger traffic, would have to see a particularly large gain in this class of business in order to make up for the loss through reduced rates. In addition, increased expenditures by the roads will be necessitated; and there seems to be much doubt as to whether the net revenues of the roads will be improved. The carriers of the country have not

(C) Harris & Ewing

PRESIDENT HARDING SIGNING THE MILEAGE SCRIP BILL This bill authorizes interchangeable mileage books for use over the different railway systems

been earning the dividend rate to which they were entitled under the Transportation Act; and any measure which is likely still further to reduce their earning capacity must be given most careful consideration before it is finally put into operation through direction of the InterState Commerce Commission.

The Commission, therefore, is expected to go fully into the question of the rate to be charged for the interchangeable mileage; whether it shall be transferable or non-transferable; what rules and regulations shall be required for the issuance and use of these tickets; and to what baggage privileges holders of such .tickets shall be entitled.

As indicated by Commissioner Esch, of the Inter-State Commerce Commission, when he appeared at the hearings held on the bill before the House Committee on Inter-State and Foreign Commerce, the Commission did not show itself strongly in favor of this legislation. He said they had hoped to find it possible to reduce fares and freight rates "in such a manner that all our people could enjoy the benefits of such reductions." He declared that the reduction in fares to a special class, as the purchasers of interchangeable mileage tickets would be, materially reducing the revenues of carriers, would make it more difficult to order a general reduction in passenger fares which might be

enjoyed by all of the people and not merely by those who by reason of financial conditions or otherwise are able to invest a considerable sum of money at one time in railway fare.

REMEMBER THE
HERRIN MASSACRE!

HE other day a Mexican paper ironi

Te dy proposed that Mexico should

control the United States in the interest. of humanity and law. One of the rea- . sons adduced was the Herrin massacre. If Americans do not want to be considered lawless by Mexicans, it behooves them to insist, and continue to insist, that the slaughter of twenty-three men in the Herrin mines last June should lead to the indictment and trial of its perpetrators.

Every move in that direction is of public interest. The State of Illinois is not unaware of the ill fame attaching to this crime, and through its AttorneyGeneral, its State Chamber of Commerce, and its press is urging action. Through State effort a special Grand Jury has at last been impaneled in Williamson County, and as an aid to non-partisanship in feeling neither miners nor operators were included in the panel.

The circuit judge's charge to the Grand Jury, as summarized by a newspaper correspondent, was in part "a defense of this county and its law officers,

a challenge to critics everywhere, and an exposition of the law."

It is to be hoped that this judge added a vigorous injunction to the Grand Jury to pursue murderers unflinchingly.

THE KU KLUX AND POLITICS

TH

HERE has been much discussion as to the influence of the Ku Klux Klan in the political situation. Sensationalists have been inclined to exaggerate it. In National matters it is practically nil; in the East and the Southeast it is negligible; in the West and Southwest it has had local effects in different ways, but has not acted consistently or for definite issues.

An example of this was seen the other day in the announcement that in Texas Earle Mayfield, "Ku Klux candidate," as the newspapers called him, had won in the "run off" primary for the United States Senatorship which followed the first primary, in which six candidates engaged. An examination of the facts shows that his Ku Klux support was only a minor matter. The Ku Klux candidates for State offices made a poor showing and were defeated by large majorities. The prohibition issue was prominent in the State campaign. Mayfield was "dry." His opponent, Ferguson, was "moderately wet;" and the fact that when Governor he was impeached and removed from office told heavily against him. If the Texas primary showed anything, it was that Mayfield was the stronger man personally, and that the prohibition sentiment is still strong in Texas. It is even intimated that the Democratic situation is so unsatisfactory in Texas that a good liberal Republican might have a chance.

There have been some queer developments in the Ku Klux Klan. Thus in Georgia it has been alleged that Negroes were being asked to join, and in New York it has been charged that the Negro "Moses," Marcus Garvey, had been approached by the Klan. There are many indications that the Ku Klux is soon to pass away as a disturbing element. Yet not many weeks ago newspaper accounts stated that "a crowd totaling nearly 30,000 from Chicago and northern Illinois gathered to witness the initiation of nearly 3,000 new members into the secret council of the Ku Klux Klan. The ceremonies were performed in an immense field three miles northwest of Springfield. Similar ceremonials, celebrating the initiation of tens of thousands of new members, have taken place in other parts of the country."

Officially the Ku Klux has promised not to wear its regalia in night raids and disclaims any intention of regulating supposed evil-doers by violence. As a terrorizing agency it is practically dead.

But its attractiveness to the great class of "joiners" is strong, for it combines mystery and publicity uniquely; it is a "secret society" which, as the Chicago incident above quoted shows, thrives on flashlight photographs and press notices.

THE

A NAVY ON THE SCRAP HEAP HE "scrapping of navies" is a new industry in the world. In the past the business has been of the single-order variety; it has never been carried on in a wholesale manner. "The old order changeth," however, and now the breaking up of battleships and cruisers and destroyers is to be performed on a grand scale. A beginning already has been made.

While the naval treaty which was signed by the United States, Great Britain, France, Italy, and Japan at the Washington Conference on the Limitation of Armaments has not yet been ratified by all the Powers signatory thereto, the United States already has sold two of the old battleships which were on the list of capital ships to be scrapped and is preparing to ask bids within the next sixty days on five other vessels of the same class.

The two battleships which already have been sold are the Maine and the Missouri, with the exception of the Wisconsin, also on the junk pile in the yards of Henry A. Hitner's Sons, in Philadelphia, the oldest vessels of the larger fighting class in the Navy; and it is stated that both of them would have been disposed of even if there had been no naval treaty. Nevertheless they are among the twenty-eight American battleships listed for scrapping in the

Α'

RT knows no class distinctions. No two men in civilized society could be farther apart in environment and tradition than a New England farmer and a royal prince of Europe; and no two men could be more distantly removed from the stage type of artist with flowing tie and bohemian tastes. Yet John Lillie, farmer, of Dorset, Vermont, and Prince Eugen of Sweden have in common the love of art and the gift of creating beauty with paint and canvas. As a landscape painter each is among the most interesting and original of contemporary artists. Next week The Outlook will publish an article about John Lillie by Zéphine Humphrey. Week after next The Outlook will publish an article about Prince Eugen by H. G. Leach. Each article will be illustrated with reproductions of the artist's paintings.

treaty assented to by the five great naval Powers in Washington on February 1 last. The five other battleships on that list which, it is announced, are to be put up for sale in the immediate future are the Georgia, Rhode Island, Nebraska, Virginia, and New Jersey, all of which have seen seventeen years of service. The Maine and the Missouri, of 12,500 tons each, had been in the Navy for almost twenty years past. The Wisconsin, sold previous to the Armament Conference, had seen more than twenty-one years of service.

In addition to the battleships, a large number of other vessels have been sold recently by the Navy, although not as a result of the naval treaty. Many of them were old and useless and would have been sold anyway, while others were disposed of because of the post-war paring down of the Navy and because of the necessity for economy.

Most of the vessels recently sold by the Navy for scrapping have been bought and are now in the Delaware River yards of the Henry A. Hitner's Sons Company, in the northern suburbs of Philadelphia. This concern, the principal one in the United States engaged in the business of navy scrapping, now has in its possession quite a formidable modern armada. It includes, in addition to the three battleships named, two cruisers, eleven torpedo-boat destroyers, four monitors, eight submarines, about one hundred and forty sub-chasers, several colliers, tugs, and mine planters.

In all, it is a fleet with a tonnage of approximately 125,000. As navies go nowadays, this doomed navy is perhaps not large, but there are important nations with navies much smaller in tonnage. At the beginning of the European War the smallest of the Great Power navies was that of Italy, which was of 285,460 tonnage, not much more than twice the tonnage of the "Hitner Fleet."

The great part of navy scrapping, not only for the United States, but for the other nations signatory to the FivePower Treaty, still remains to be done; and when the full fleet of heavy-tonned capital ships which are to be discarded upon final ratification of the naval treaty are thrown upon the market this newborn industry of turning battleships wholesale into the crucible for peacetime purposes will receive a new impulse and make some of the short-lived navies thus formed formidable indeed.

A PIONEER IN

PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE

T is natural that public interest in Dr.

I stephen centered

the fact that when he died the other day he was within a few months of com

Keystone

pleting his hundredth year and that his life was notable, not only for its longevity, but for its continued activity. In our interest in this fact perhaps there is a little danger of not laying sufficient emphasis on the value of Stephen Smith's contributions to the cause of hygiene and the public health. In addition to a long and notable career as a physician, he began over sixty years ago to take an earnest and active interest in those matters which were then astonishingly little in the public mind. A writer in the New York "Herald" thus depicts the condition of things in New York City in 1851, when Dr. Smith entered Bellevue Hospital:

New York was a foul city. It was
as bad when the Civil War was over.
There was no health department, no
tenement supervision. The streets,
many of them not drained, reeked
with garbage. Animals ran loose.
The butchers operated where and as
they wished. Cholera came and killed
thousands. Smallpox was epidemic
every five years. Typhus arrived
with the immigrants and ravaged the
tenements. The
"health
so-called
wardens" were girmill keepers, pay-
roll grafters.

In the reforms that followed Dr. Smith took an active and efficient part. He was a leader in the forming of a Citizens' Association in 1864, over which Peter Cooper presided. The report made by that association has been summarized as follows:

There were 495,592 persons living in tenements or cellars, at an average density of 247,000 to the square mile. Scattered among these tenements were 173 slaughter-houses, under no sanitary supervision whatever. More than five hundred places were designated by the inspectors as "plague spots," one of them being Washington Market and another Castle Garden. In two days the inspectors found 644 and in two weeks more than 1,200

cases of smallpox, with not the slightest attempt at seclusion of the patients.

Out of the agitation which followed this report came the establishment of the first Department of Health of New York City. From that time on Dr. Smith was prominent in all municipal and National health efforts, and when the National Board of Health was organized in 1879 he was made a member by President Hayes. Add to this that he was the first President of the American Public Health Association, that he did a great deal to make the administration of hospitals and nursing efficient and modern, and that these were only a few of his notable contributions to the public health, and it will be admitted that his ninety-nine years of life were as full as any one man's could be of earnest work for the welfare of the people.

.

that a German had succeeded in remaining in the air without a motor for twelve and a half minutes. That article appeared in The Outlook for August 16. Since then German aviators have apparently proved that a man in a glider under proper atmospheric conditions can keep aloft indefinitely. If there is any limit to the time which a man can remain in the air in a glider, it would seem to be the limit of human endurance. First came the news of a German remaining aloft an hour or more. This feat of Herr Martens aroused extraordinary enthusiasm among the spectators. Then came the news of Herr Hentzen's feat of keeping up for two hours and ten seconds, as we reported last week. Since then Herr Hentzen has added an hour to his record. More than that, other fliers have remained in the air for periods far exceeding the one which was a record less than a month ago. These German fliers not only keep in the air, but remain perfectly still like a kite, or soar in great sweeping curves or with sharp dives.

Not less extraordinary is the fact that some of these gliders have succeeded in landing on points higher than those from which they started.

Still further, in these tests in Germany, a Dutch aviator, Herr Fokker, the designer of the famous Fokker airplane used by the Germans during the war, glided aloft for three minutes with a passenger.

The French trials which have been taking place have resulted in no such sensational results. Edmund T. Allen, the American who took part in the French trials, has in the meantime gone to try his luck in Germany.

A special despatch to the New York "Evening Post" says that the feats of the Germans are the result of six years of experimentation, involving studies of the flight of birds with moving pictures of birds on the wing. One of the results of this experimentation was the discovery of the use which a bird made of its head in flight. Study of these birds' heads convinced the Germans that the birds