L

CONTRIBUTORS'

GALLERY

OUIS V. LEDOUX is a connoisseur of Japanese art and has one of the leading collections of Japanese prints in this country. He is vice-president of Ledoux & Co., mining engineers and metallurgists, and the author of several volumes of poetry. Mr. Ledoux trans lated the Japanese play which is published in this issue in collaboration with Michio Itow, who is a well-known Japanese dancer and producer. Michio Itow has had a wide experience, having worked in Moscow and with Dalcroze. William Butler Yeats wrote for him when he was in London an imitation Japanese play called "The Hawk's Well," the costumes for which were designed by Edmund Dulac.

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By Fullerton Waldo Making Chicago a City Beautiful.... 223 By Robert H. Moulton

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THE CASE OF THE REV. PERCY GRANT

Ο

N Sunday, January 21, lower Fifth Avenue, New York, in the immediate neighborhood of the Church of the Ascension, was filled with people vainly trying to go to church. The next day the newspapers of the city filled columns with reports of the sermon preached that day by the rector of the church and with reports of the circumstances under which it was preached.

T The most obvious observation on this event is that the Church is still very much alive. Although in some places and to some degree the Church may have lost its hold upon people, it is evident that under some conditions the Church may become the center of intense popular interest and the subject even of timely news.

In this case the occasion for the interest was the demand by the Protestant Episcopal Bishop of New York, the Right Rev. William T. Manning, upon the rector of the Church of the Ascension, the Rev. Percy Stickney Grant, to withdraw from the ministry of the Church because of views he had expressed.

Undoubtedly a great many of those in the throng at the church on that Sunday were there simply to satisfy their own curiosity; but a great many were there because they were supporters of the rector, and a great many were there because they were vitally interested in any issue in which the Church was involved.

With some of the opinions which Mr. Grant has expressed and which are associated with his name we do not agree. Indeed, even among those who are leaders in the liberation of religious thought from unsound tradition Mr. Grant's cpinions have not been generally regarded as of great weight. The ques tion, however, which has arisen is not solely or chiefly the merit of Mr. Grant's views.

One question, it seems to us, has already been decided, and decided rightly. If Mr. Grant is to be removed from his charge and from the Episcopal ministry, it is clear that it will be as a result, not of arbitrary authority, but of open trial. In this respect Mr. Grant's case differs radically from that of the Rev. J. D. M. Buckner. There is no indication that

JANUARY 31, 1923

the authorities of the Episcopal Church are to proceed except in accordance with the means provided by the Church for a full and fair hearing of the

case.

If there is to be a heresy trial, it is not likely to be productive of much good. Heresy trials in these days have two disadvantages, as The Outlook has had occasion heretofore to point out. In the first place, heresy trials differ from ordinary trials in that the court is not selected before the issue is raised, but afterwards. Therefore the case brought before it is not submitted to impartial judges, but to those who have already made up their minds. In the second place, heresy trials generally bring advantage to no one but the accused. To repeat what we have said before, once heretics were burned; then they were spared, but their books were burned; nowadays, the only effect is to give the books a wider circulation than ever.

If Mr. Grant is tried, we do not believe that any one will be convinced who is not convinced already. Doctrinal controversies under such circumstances. have little effect except to caution the timid against expressing their views. The best way to deal with those whose views are unbalanced is to leave them to the conscience and intelligence of the people who constitute the churches. This, it seems to us, is the way which is sanctioned by the earliest practices of the Church, and which has proved to be the best throughout all the Church's history.

N

IS A COTTON FAMINE IN SIGHT? EARLY two generations have passed since the United States felt the pinch of a cotton famine. Now, according to the Federal Department of Agriculture, we approach it again. The boll weevil, the boll worm, and reviving demand from a cotton-hungry world have reduced our visible supply of raw material to the danger-point.

All that we have to do to make certain of a cotton famine within the next five or six months, the Department announces, is to continue drawing on our stocks at the present rate of consump. tion and export.

"Should consumption by American mills and exports continue at the present rate," says the Department, "it is estimated that the supply in the United

States will disappear before next August."

The crop of 1923 will not be available for use before the early fall, and much of it will not be available then. What would happen if the last bale of the present stock should be fed to the maw of demand, at home or abroad, before the new supply becomes available?

The great textile industry would close down, of course, so far as cotton is concerned. The price of the raw material, already nearly double the average price of last year, would shoot to still dizzier heights. Tens of thousands of workers would be without work. Prices for cotton fabrics of all sorts, from gauze to cord for automobile tires, would soar like a sky-rocket into the blue sky. The entire country would suffer in countless ways.

It seems inconceivable that the Nation should run short before harvest of its third main crop. Yet "American cotton mills are well filled with orders ahead," the Department's announcement continues, "and Great Britain, France, Italy, Spain, and Belgium have taken more cotton so far this season than for the corresponding period last year. Germany has taken about 125,000 bales less than last year, and Japan and China nearly 300,000 bales less."

In terms of dollars, cotton vaulted over wheat into third place among American crops last year. The value of the 1922 cotton crop, surpassed alone by corn and hay, is estimated by the Department at slightly less than $1,200,000,000. Cotton fetched nearly half as Prosmuch again as the wheat crop. pects for 1923 are for a greater crop than last year-though here again enter boll weevil and kin as ≈ of the equation -with a probable price recession because of greater supply.

Certainly it would seem that the Nation's cotton field is large enough. If we were to strip an area equal to the State of Pennsylvania of all cities, towns, buildings, woods, and every other growing thing, and then treat similarly another area equal to the State of New Jersey, and then make of them both an unbroken field of cotton, we still should have to borrow a few thousand square miles from the neighboring State of New York before we could say, "Here is the size of our cotton patch."

Over the equivalent of all that area

the natural enemies of cotton wreaked their destruction last year. They pulled down the yield to 141 pounds (or about one-third of a bale) to the acre, a decrease of more than twenty-five per cent from the 1920 average.

The weevil sleeps in the soil over winter. The bite of cold reaches the sleeper's vitals. The greater the cold, the greater the slaughter. The milder the winter, the greater the survival of the pest. Nature, therefore, is making now, in the sterile months of the year, the dimensions of the next cotton harvest.

What a choice! Shall we look at the coal-bin or the cotton crop as we take what winter brings?

industrial stir of to-day the greater prosperity of to-morrow. The lean years seem to be passing; the fat ones seem on the way. And these men of foresight are preparing for what they call the big pull of 1923-the pull of freight in growing dimensions as the year progresses.

Nine of these railway executives have recently announced their buying plans for the year. They include the purchase of more than 37,000 freight cars to replace the disabled vehicles which must be retired and to bring their equipment up to a standard which will enable them tc deliver the goods offered them. These nine roads and two more have announced their intention to purchase, in addition, more than 800 locomotives this year-about one-third of the entire number ordered and installed in 1922 on all the transportation lines in the country.

The Inter-State Commerce Commission either received or approved during the first three weeks of the new year applications for the issuance of securities to finance equipment purchases to the total of $30,000,000. These applications did not include the Pennsylvania Railroad's announced plan to purchase 300 new locomotives during the year.

On the basis of these purchases and the betterment programmes now being worked out by other carriers, an unofficial estimate is made that total purchases of railway equipment plus additions to terminals and trackage will cost, the roads between $750,000,000 and $1,000,000,000 during the present year. This would establish the high mark for ten years.

Announcement has been made by 35 railways of trackage extensions contemplated in 1923. The total trackage to be constructed by these roads measures

more than 400 miles. For more than ten years the railways have virtually stood still, and the growth thus forecast for the present year-which may reach 1,000 miles when all returns are inindicates a departure from previous policy.

In addition, the railways have been conducting for the past six months an intensive campaign of repairing badorder equipment. The latest available report shows that the number of badorder freight cars has been reduced by almost sixty per cent since last summer.

The lesson of preparedness may have been accentuated by the recent distressing car shortage, which not only curtailed business activity but railway earnings as well. Whatever the impelling cause, many of the carriers seem to have decided to put their houses in order.

LITTLE'S BIG BOOK

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ITIZENS who are not lawyers will be surprised to learn that there has been no digest and codification of Federal laws since 1878. Never before has such a time elapsed in the publishing of a compendium of Federal laws, nor have any of the States (with one single exception) allowed their statutes to go uncodified for twenty-five years. Every lawyer knows what a tedious and intricate piece of work it is to find out what the law of the United States is on any given topic. There has been a general and definite demand for some recognized and authoritative work of the kind needed.

Now Mr. Edward C. Little, of Kansas, who is Chairman of the Committee on Revision of the Laws, for the House of Representatives, has completed such a work and the House has twice approved of the book as valuable and needed. The Senate, however, for some reason or other seems to hang fire on this matter, although a high authority in legal literature, Dean Wigmore, of Northwestern University, has declared: "The state of things has now become intolerable. Since the completion of your draft revision the failure to act has become a disgrace on the part of Congress. The shame of leaving the Federal laws in this condition is no longer excusable On any ground."

To-day, if any one wants to know precisely what the Federal statute law is on any individual point, he cannot be sure that he is right until he has examined minutely thirty-six volumes of statutes. He is lucky if he finds what he wants even then, for many enactments on individual points are hidden away in appropriation bills or under other misleading titles, and even the

most accurate and painstaking of indexers of the thirty-six volumes may easily overlook some reference which might be pounced upon greedily by a contesting attorney.

There are many things which ought to be done in the few weeks remaining of the present session of Congress. It is to be hoped that this greatly needed piece of legislation will not be neglected.

SPEEDING APPROPRIATIONS

HE present session of Congress is notable, aside from the fact that it is a fourth session, in the accomplishment of at least one commendable feat that so far has failed to attract general attention.

It has made a new speed record in the passage of the appropriation bills. As this is written, somewhat less than six weeks since the beginning of the session, the appropriation bills are further advanced in the process of legislation than they have been at corresponding periods within the memory of man. The House has passed all the bills save two, and the Senate has only four to pass. Bills covering authorizations for the five departments of Treasury, Commerce, Labor, State, and Justice have emerged from the conference stage and are now law.

Furthermore, there has been a tonic absence of the customary tedium of committee hearings, involving the presence of one-fourth to one-third the membership of the two houses. This year, for the first time, the appropriation bills have been handled by one committee in the House and one in the Senate. The celerity with which the bills have moved testifies to the effectiveness of the change from the cumbersome methods followed for generations.

But not all the credit for the new record lies in the halls on Capitol Hill. It is true that Congress has given the bills the right of way, but there has been a firm hand on the throttle and a skillful one. The Director of the Bureau of the Budget, General Herbert M. Lord, who, with Presidential direction and support, framed the estimates and told hungry departments and boards how much money they might have to spend next year, has a large share in the honor.

It was General Lord who achieved the balanced budget for the first time in American history. The measure of the Nation's receipts was taken so far as expert opinion could take it months ago, and by that measure General Lord cut the cloth of National expenditures: He cut literally-cut more than $520,000,000 under last year's expenses, cut into our