probably many Chinese can compass. Recent developments there have reduced it once again to a political picture puzzle.

The Nationalist Party controlling southern and central China has split into two factions-the moderates and the radicals. The moderates, headed by the Commander-in-Chief, General Chiang Kai-shek, have their capital at Nanking, on the Yangtze River, and their base at the port of Shanghai. The radicals have their capital and base at Hankow. They are said to have offered the military

leadership to Marshal Feng Yu-hsiang,

long known as China's "Christian General." But Feng does not seem to have accepted; and, in any case, he is cut off with his army in the mountainous northern interior from active operations in the Yangtze region. Chiang, the moderate chieftain, who has directed the victorious advance of the Nationalists from Canton, in the far south of China, to the Yangtze Valley in central China, has started a new administration independent of the party committee at Hankow. Defying them and promising application of the principles of Sun Yat-sen, the Founder of the Nationalist Movement, he mas at the same time resumed an active irive against the militarists of northern China.

Meanwhile, the foreign Powers are eft considering how to deal with attiudes of both Chiang and the Hankow radical organization to the Powers' demands for the protection of foreigners. and for apologies and indemnities for the attacks on foreign officials and residents at Nanking. Apparently, Chiang is more ready to meet the desires of the

Powers than Eugene Chen, who handles foreign affairs at Hankow.

Chiang, it is reported, holds the allegiance of the cadets who have been trained at the Whampoa Military Academy. They have been the backbone of the Nationalist army. If they stay with him, he is likely to be the man to deal with. In China, as in Russia during the Revolution, the question just now is, "Who has the most bayonets?"

The Gain in China's Struggle

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ACED by the apparent collapse of the Nationalist campaign in China and the division in the party, most observers have tended to form the most pessimistic conclusions about Chinese affairs. "It's the old story," they say. "Just one more scrap for power between rival chiefs."

It is still early, however, to jump to that judgment. The situation may turn out in that way, but it still is to be seen whether General Chiang can rally effectively the support of the moderate and conservative Nationalists. If he can, there may be great gain from the present discord and disorder.

Had the Nationalist armies swept on to Peking without a break in the party ranks behind them, a far more troublesome issue might have arisen-for China herself as well as for the foreign Powers in their relations with China. At some time the question whether the moderates or the radicals were to control would have to be decided. With a Nationalist administration in command of the whole of China proper, it might have been difficult to avoid a period in which the

radicals would have seized and held power. That would have made more difficulties than a fight now. If Chiang and the moderates can dispose of the radicals by taking the time necessary to do it now, they will accomplish a great deal and save much time for the future.

Chiang may prove himself to be a sort of Chinese Kerensky. The question is whether he can be more for China than Kerensky succeeded in being for Russia. And, further, is there a Chinese Lenine or Trotsky or both-concealed somewhere in the background?

Mexico in Turmoil

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EWS despatches, even those from Mexico, are rarely so contradictory as those of recent date. The views offered as to the massacre of soldiers and passengers on a railway train in the State of Jalisco and as to the departure or banishment of Catholic prelates are colored and highly colored-by the sources from which they come.

No one can possibly deny the atrocity of the railway massacre. It has been described by President Calles as the most barbarous in Mexican historywhich is saying a great deal! But a first report that the bandits or revolutionaries drenched the cars with kerosene and deliberately burned the passengers was later admitted to be untrue; the slayers' allegation is that the soldiers hid behind and among the passengers and that they hadn't time to sort them out. Those who can may believe the charge of President Calles's Chief of Staff, General Alvarez, that "a group of bandits, organized by the Catholic episcopate and

personally directed by three priests, attacked the train."

Equally contradictory are the antiGovernment faction's assertion that the Government is executing bishops without just cause and that the prelates, including Archbishop Mora, titular head of the Mexican Catholic Church, have been formally banished, and the Governmental declaration that the prelates are fleeing because they know they are guilty of stirring up revolution and that Mexican bishops are leading an armed revolt.

From Chihuahua and some five or six other States come reports of uprisings and unrest.

Not for years has the situation in Mexico been more turbulent and dangerous than at the present moment.

Remembrance in France for American Women

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WAR memorial to commemorate the American women who gave their lives during the World War has been inaugurated in Paris. It bears the name of the Katherine Baker Memorial, proclaiming the service of one nurse, and through her all her compatriots. Katherine Baker was about to be admitted to the Pennsylvania bar when the war broke out. Leaving for France almost immediately, she joined the French Hospital Service. On the entrance of her country into the war she was transferred to the American Red Cross. Although greatly weakened by her constant service, she steadfastly refused to yield under the great strain, until further work brought on her death.

The Katherine Baker Memorial is eminently suitable as a tribute. It is not a marble monument. It is a home for destitute little French girls, and it will serve as a dormitory and classroom for thirty of them, where they will live and learn until they can care for themselves. The work has been completed under a French social organization, "La Tutelaire," on whose grounds the house stands, and which will continue its support. In all ways the erection, made possible through more than three hundred French and American donations, reflects the spirit of the woman whose name it bears.

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Edith Wynne Matthison

ers; or art may lend the whole of its substance to an etching needle making three hundred scratches on a small copper plate. Art plays magic with the sea of tone from a great symphony orchestra; yet the most exquisite and most marvelous musical instrument is the voice that is in every person when it is under the mastery of an artist.

Art is so real, so simple in its essence, so omnipresent, that the artists may be "ordinary" people carrying it into the normal affairs of their life. Many lives themselves are masterpieces of conscious, but concealed, art. But popular recognition and the praise wrought of understanding go almost without exception to the formal artistic performances in studios and on stages. Therefore it is gratifying to learn of the presentation for the second time of the American Academy

of Arts and Letters' medal for diction on the stage. The recipient was Edith Wynne Matthison. The only previous recipient had been Walter Hampden, in 1925. Although these people are dramatic artists of a high order, the medal which they received was not for their dramatic art, but for an art within that art, an art supporting that art-the beauty of common speech, which is ready to respond to the efforts of every man and woman.

"The River of Doubt"

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N interesting preliminary report has been published of the Brazilian expedition conducted by Commander George M. Dyott, an English writer and explorer. His party followed the course of the perilous journey taken through jungles and down dangerous streams by Theodore Roosevelt in 1914. Commander Dyott found extreme difficulty and met semi-hostile natives, but he was far better equipped than Roosevelt, es pecially in having collapsible canoes. Even so, he wisely sent back to Rio de Janeiro overland valuable records before daring the rapids in which the Roosevelt party was wrecked.

The report of this expedition says that it literally followed Roosevelt's footsteps. that it identified his camp sites and ref-f use piles, and even a felled tree "bearing the marks of Roosevelt's ax."

It is a little exasperating to read in press comments that now we have documentary evidence to support Roosevelt's "claim," and that the question is now settled as to whether Roosevelt "actually penetrated unexplored regions and made a trustworthy contribution to geography and science." There never was any doubt, at least among American geographers and those who took pains to know just what Roosevelt actually as serted about that trip, that he did precisely what he said he did. Paragraphers harped on the phrase "lost river" without stopping to ask when or how the river became mislaid. The question was as to where the Rio Duvida, a tributary to the Madeira River, which is in turn an important tributary of the Amazon, had its rise and course. Mr. Roosevelt himself stated the result in a telegram to the Brazilian Minister of Foreign Affairs upon his emergence from the wilderness. He said:

We have put on the map a river about fifteen hundred kilometers in length, running from just south of the thirteenth degree to north of the fifth degree, and the biggest affluent of the Madeira. Until now its upper course has been utterly unknown to every one, and its lower course, although

known for years to the rubber men, utterly unknown to all cartographers. Its source is between the twelfth and thirteenth parallels of latitude south, and between longitude 59° and longitude 60° from Greenwich.

In his address before the National Geographic Society he said also, "The work of the expedition of which I was a member was essentially a zoögeographic reconnaissance."

Mr.

We doubt whether a full and detailed account of the hardships suffered in that journey has ever been published. Roosevelt himself barely escaped alive; he was not at all inclined in writing or talking on the subject to put his own danger to the front. Here is a bare and incomplete statement made (not by him) in The Outlook for July 14, 1914:

The party ran out of provisions and were in a famished condition before they reached civilization again. Some of their canoes were upset in the rapids, and Mr. Roosevelt himself contracted a severe case of tropical malarial fever, so that when he reached Manaos he had lost forty-five pounds in weight. He also injured and infected his leg while working over the canoes in the rapids. This injury resulted in an abscess, which the doctor of the expedition had to open and treat by the insertion of a drainage tube. With this drainage tube in his leg and in an emaciated condition he was forced to tramp many miles over portages and through the forest, living part of the time on the flesh of monkeys and the boiled tops of palm trees.

The adventure of the so-called River of Doubt was, in fact, one of the most thrilling episodes in the history of exploration. The Roosevelt big-game hunt in Africa was child's play compared to it. Yet ingenious detractors tried in vain to make it take the aspect of a comic imposture. Scientists know better.

"Lost" Lands of the North

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HILE there remain "blind spots" on the map of the Arctic North men will not be content. Wilkins is back from exploration and hazardous adventure; MacMillan is preparing to set forth.

Captain George H. Wilkins this year made his second attempt to discover land north of Alaska. With a group of three airplanes he established his base at Point Barrow, prepared to search for the solid ground that, according to Eskimo folk-lore, rises out of the vast frozen sea. In one of the planes he and his pilot, Carl Ben Eielson, "took off" one day toward the end of March in the direction of the "Pole of Inaccessibility"-the

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George H. Wilkins

Arctic point most difficult of access. They were forced to land their machine on the ice after they had gone 550 miles without finding land. Twice they were able to get into the air again; but after they had returned to within seventy miles of Beechey Point, east of Point Barrow, they came down and could not rise again. Their low-powered radio set sent the code message for "engine trouble"

through to Point Barrow; but then for sixteen days, while their fate was unknown to men, they worked their way afoot over rough ice, around gaping breaks in the ice, carrying only enough provisions barely to last their trek, to the shore at Beechey Point. Thence to Point Barrow a messenger carried the news of their safe return.

Commander Donald B. MacMillan, a veteran of the North, will sail some time in July with five other scientists, to be frozen in until the summer of 1928. Their primary object is further information about the geology, the botany, and the zoology of Greenland.

While exploration goes forward in the North, another phase of adventure, the attempt to fly between Paris and New York, has been marred by the tragedy of a fatal accident to Commander Noel Davis and Lieutenant Stanton H. Wooster, the pilots of the American Legion, a large biplane which was nearly ready to make the attempt.

The President on
Foreign Policy

RESIDENT COOLIDGE, in his
address before the twentieth an-

PR

niversary dinner of the United Press Associations in New York, has given significant definition to the policies of the Administration in dealing with the troublesome problems of Mexico, Nicaragua, and China. His statement is to be welcomed as a clear re-emphasis of essential American principles for which he has the right to expect cordial support.

Before going into the specific questions which he chose to discuss, the President directed his attention to the press and its function in treating matters of foreign policy. Paying a tribute to the press of the United States for its standards of public service, he urged upon its consideration two points. The first was the importance of giving fair and considerate representation to foreign peoples. The second was the duty of reporting and discussing the policies of our own Government from a loyally American point of view.

No doubt, much harm is done by the inconsiderate or malicious misrepresentation of other countries in correspondence, comment, and cartoons. And, while a little mischief now and then is relished by the best of men, the President is unquestionably right in urging that the treatment of other nations should always be just and so far as possible friendly in spirit.

As to discussion of Go policies by the press, the ter

President's speech put no limitation on freedom of criticism. He requests only that criticism should be soundly based on American interests, and not designed to embarrass the Government in discharging its obligation to protect those interests. In this his contention is not only right but timely. There has been a tendency in some quarters to adopt the point of view of other nations, rather than our own, in attacking the decisions of our Government. Naturally, the point of view of the other party to a dispute must be taken into account; but to substitute it for our own is to cease to be a useful critic, and to become instead an irritation and possibly a danger.

Mexico has presented the most troublesome problems with which the Administration has had to deal. The controversy over the application of the new Mexican Constitution of 1917, nationalizing the land and subsoil rights, and its effect on agricultural, mining, and petroleum titles acquired by citizens of the United States before its passage, have become familiar matters of news. With the President's statement of the duty of the Government to insist upon preservation of legitimate property interests there can be no quarrel, and he should find the country solidly behind him. A question might be raised, however, regarding the argument as to the treatment due to these interests from the present Mexican Government on the basis of the agreements reached with the preceding Government of of President Obregon. When we insist that President Calles should do what we understand the representatives of President Obregon agreed to, we should be ready to have the same principle applied to our own policies. Would we like to accept the theory that President Harding and President Coolidge should be bound by what President Wilson agreed to? It is a question that must be considered if we wish to be fair in setting up a precedent.

For Nicaragua, and indeed for the whole of Central America down to the Panama Canal, the President has declared what amounts to a new-or at least a freshly stated-doctrine of moral responsibility. Briefly put, it is the responsibility to support legally constituted governments, discourage revolutions, promote good order, and protect. foreign interests, without assuming control of internal affairs. In general, the program which the President has outlined commands accord and allegiance as a logical complement to the Monroe Doctrine and an inevitable obligation of the United States because of its geographical position and the vital necessity of security. But the President's

definition of the policy is so momentous, and its application in detail is so complicated, that it demands fuller and more careful consideration than can be given as this issue of The Outlook goes to press. It will receive attention later.

As regards China, what the President has said is a reassurance that the fundamental American principles of independence of action in the Far East and of respect for the integrity of the Chinese Republic will be pursued. There can only be hearty agreement that it is necessary to protect the lives of citizens of the United States in China, and so far as possible their property, during the civil war there. And the President has given a guaranty that, while this is being done, our Government stands ready to negotiate with any authentic Chinese Government and to come to an agreement to regulate future relations.

Altogether, the President's speech is a clarification of the international position of the United States which was needed, and the principles he has affirmed should secure country-wide support.

To American Catholics

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S Americans, loyal to your country, and as Roman Catholics, loyal to your Church, you may wonder why multitudes of Americans not of your faith are distrustful of the influence of the Church you love and remain unsatisfied by the result of the Smith-Marshall correspondence. Even among those who, being thoroughly convinced that he has no allegiance which in the slightest degree would interfere with his allegiance to his country, would not hesitate to vote for Governor Smith for any office, who, moreover, resent any attempt to apply a religious test to any political candidate, there are many who still feel that the Roman Catholic Church is not merely a religious body, but a political power which has in it elements of danger to American institutions. Whether it is reasonable or unreasonable, their feeling is not the product of religious bigotry. It has its origin in history and experience.

Of course, I do not expect or wish to persuade you that that feeling is justified; but, as a fellow-American and a Protestant (a liberal Protestant, I think I should be generally called), I should be glad to have you understand, even if you cannot share, the point of view of those who have this feeling and some of the reasons for it.

We here in America (a Nation made up of all the peoples of the world, of many creeds, Gentile and Jew, Protestant and Catholic, and people of no

creed) must learn to live together, and work together and govern ourselves; and if we are to do that, we must, as far as we can, understand one another's points of view. It is for that reason that I write this as a contribution to that effort we all should constantly make to understand one another.

In the first place, what has evoked such correspondence as that between Governor Smith and Mr. Marshall is not the objection of those of one creed to the political advancement of those of another. It is not a question of religious doctrine at all. This should be plain to any one who remembers what happened in the Presidential election of 1908. If there is one point of doctrine on which a greater, deeper feeling has centered than on any other it is the belief in the divinity of Christ. In that belief is involved an emotion of personal relationship of the believer in Him whom he calls his Master that has its counterpart in feelings that have easily risen into passionate conflict. If religious doctrine. as such were a touchstone in American politics, it would have appeared at the time when William Howard Taft, then, as now, the most eminent Unitarian layman in the country, was nominated and elected to the Presidency. It is true that at that time the question was raised: but it was brushed aside. Mr. Taft was overwhelmingly elected. If there was any consideration of his creed, it was so minute as to be utterly negligible. We may safely dismiss religious belief as such in noting reasons for the political position in which Roman Catholics find themselves in this country. It is not a matter of theological doctrine at all.

It may seem a far cry to go back from America in the twentieth century to Europe in the Middle Ages, but Protestant views of the Roman Catholic Church have their roots deep in history. One of the claims of the Roman Catholic Church is that to permanence of nature and aim. Its power as a Church rests upon the continuity of its life and its authority. It invites reverence for its past. And those who examine the past find that as an organization it has continuously through the ages exercised political power. Its Popes have claimed sovereignty over kings. One has only to mention the claims of such Popes as Hildebrand (Gregory VII), Adrian IV. Alexander III, and Innocent III to recall the power of the Church in directing and controlling the political course of sovereigns. Those who cherish the institutions of liberty which we in America have inherited from those who had gained them by long and bitter struggle in England cannot forget that