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an appeal is argued only on those points on which there has been a claim of error in the lower court. There is reason for thinking that our way is better; but, at any rate, it is different. This is probably not generally understood in France or in the countries of the Continent.

There is still another reason why Europe misunderstands us. There is nothing there like our Federal system. Massachusetts' courts are as independent of New York's as if they were of another country. There is no ground here for Federal interference except as the Constitution is involved. Not understanding this, Europe expected the United States Government to interfere in the SaccoVanzetti case by exercising some kind of authority.

We ought to be better understood in England, which has a legal system like ours. But even there misunderstanding seems unavoidable. The London "Spectator," which, as we point out elsewhere in this issue, has been especially understanding in its treatment of America, treats the Sacco-Vanzetti case as if it were a political one, apparently utterly unaware of the fact that the prisoners' political views were introduced into the trial as a defense. The New York "Sun" recently quoted from several English journals passages that showed that they were quite ignorant of some of the elementary facts in the case.

Similar instances could be quoted of the misunderstanding of America's point of view at the Geneva Naval Conference. Intelligent Europeans have gone so far as to attribute Mr. Coolidge's withdrawal as a candidate to the failure of the Naval Conference. Europe, to which such a conference is of tremendous political importance, does not understand how little part that Conference at Geneva took in the minds of Americans or the thoughts of American politicians.

Understanding of America will come only with slow growth. To such an understanding a notable contribution is an article in the London "Outlook" (which has no connection with this journal) by Allen Raymond, the London correspondent of the New York "Times." His clear account of the salient facts in the Sacco-Vanzetti trial may counterbalance somewhat what he justly calls "attacks of cheap unfairness by distant public men unacquainted with the facts. of the court-room except as portrayed by propagandists." Sympathetic with the defendants, opposed to capital punishment, Mr. Raymond nevertheless expresses the belief, after attending the court-room at Dedham at the time of sentence, that Sacco and Vanzetti had had "all the fair consideration" it was

"possible to give them." He points out that, in spite of the law's being a faulty institution, it was the law that preserved Sacco and Vanzetti and others like them from lynching during war time, and that it was to the law that they appealed. He points out that the three men who reviewed the evidence "may be considered safely as competent a higher Court of Review as it is possible in fallible human society to obtain." As he justly says,

M

ANY preachers, teachers, and editors appear to be agreed that the times are out of joint, that the rising generation is in a parlous state, and that civilization as a whole is, metaphorically speaking, gyrating in a nose-dive or a tail-spin, or whatever stunt most vividly forewarns the spectators of a perilous smash. This is the gloomy view especially of the parlor intelligentsia whose philosophy of life is derived from the "American Mercury." The "Mercury" is their Koran and Mencken is their Prophet.

Nor is this frame of mind confined to the Menckenites. The September number of "Harper's Magazine," on the whole a very readable and stimulating periodical, is full of this kind of despondency. Take education, for instance. A Harvard graduate who is now a professor in a Western university has this to say of it in "Harper's: "

Democracy has swamped the colleges and, under its impetus, college men tend more and more to reverse evolution and to develop from heterogeneity to homogeneity. They tend to become a type, and, our civilization providing the mold, the type is that of the salesman. The attributes that distinguish it are shrewdness, craftiness, alertness, high-pressure affability, and, above all, efficiency. . . . But, at least, there is one force that moves counter to this one. The co-eds, in general, develop into individuals; and, in general, they oppose and dissent from the trend of college education. . . . If, hereafter, our colleges are to preserve any of the spirit that was lovely and admirable in their past, I am disposed to believe that the co-eds, those irresponsible and over-dressed young nit-wits, will save it unassisted. A world saved for high-power salesmen by irresponsible nit-wits! A lovely prospect, indeed!

Another contributor to this issue of "Harper's," an experienced newspaper man, is extremely despondent about American journalism. After reviewing

its present-day characteristics, he concludes that "Thus does the American press exemplify day by day the grandiose, the brobdingnagian art of ballyhoo."

Still another contributor, an eminent "behaviorist," puts the situation with striking lucidity thus:

To-day we are pre-eminently a verbally-reacting animal. This means that the laryngeal segment is the repository of most of our social and ethical training. Now if the stimulus does not activate this segment, "precepts," "shalls," and "shall nots" can never arouse socially acceptable substitutive reactions. It seems to me that almost the whole of ethics hinges upon the extent to which the child can be verbally organized.

It seems to me that, highly modern as this prescription is, it is not much of an advance over Socrates and Epictetus, and that even the unfashionable Micah, who said that the whole of ethics hinges on the cultivation of justice, mercy, and reverence, is easier to follow.

Still a fourth "Harper" contributor thinks that the trouble with American civilization is its mediocrity, its "collectivism." We are all suffering from the "intolerable tedium" of uniformity:

Everyone is aware that the failure of our civilization is precisely this failure in interest, for which nothing can make up. Our collective life is not "lived from a great depth of being," but from the surface; and the mark of the collective life is on the individual.

The trouble with most of these despondent gentlemen appears to me to be that of the poet quoted by the late Barrett Wendell in one of his letters:

God made the only world he could
And when the work was done
He said that it was very good-
I disagree, for one.

Their disagreement, moreover, is nothing very new. David, in a moment of despair over his civilization, said,

September 7, 1927

"All men are liars;" and the pessimistic author of Ecclesiastes thought that the dead were more to be congratulated than the living and that the happiest lot of all was never to have been born.

Far be it from me to deny that modern civilization is full of puzzling and even disquieting defects; or to laugh at those amateur epistemologists who are honestly trying to get at the root of the matter. But if I might make my little contribution to the discussion I should venture to say that the trouble with the present-day American intelligentsia is that they are indulging in too much parlor thinking and too little kitchen doing. If this seems grossly materialistic, let me put it in the terms of G. Lowes Dickinson, the English philosopher, who was, at times, as delightfully despondent as George Santayana:

O

In India the emphasis is on the Eternal, in the West on Time. . . Now, as between these two altitudes, I find myself quite clearly and definitely on the side of the West. I have said in the preceding pages hard things about Western civilization. I hate many of its manifestations. I am out of sympathy with many of its purposes. . . . But . . . the West is adventurous; and what is more it is adventurous on a quest. For, behind and beyond all its fatuities, confusions, crimes, lies, as the justification of it all, that deep determination to secure a society more just and more humane which inspires all men and all movements that are worth considering at all.... And that development consists in a constant expansion of interest away from and beyond one's own immediate interests and into the activities of the world at large.

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In other and simpler words, the best antidote for Weltschmerz is to saw wood.

At this point some reader may reasonably ask: "Why not take your own medicine? Why devote your time to writing weekly articles of a more or less abstract nature instead of doing something of concrete usefulness?" A point well taken. As it is a damp and rainy day and as guests are expected, I will go down and build a fire in the living-room. I cannot saw the wood; my faithful and useful man-of-all-work, who behaves well without ever thinking of behaviorism or psychoanalysis, has already done that; but I can carry the logs from the wood-closet, lay the kindling, sweep the hearth, apply the lighted match, and thus prepare some warmth and cheer for my arriving friends. That, at least, is something concrete.

UT of a wilderness almost twice as large as the State of Massachusetts, a wilderness in which

is no human habitation, hardly a mark of human hands save some charred chunks of old camp-fires-the great wilderness of rock and water between Minnesota and Ontario-out of that wilderness, where I had sought and found solitude, I came, on a day not long ago, and, hunting for the Republican Party, plunged forthwith into a wilderness much more deep and dense.

One would hardly believe that a single short sentence of terse Anglo-Saxon words "I do not choose to run for President in 1928"-could so plunge a great and dominant political party into the midst of chaos. But in chaos the Republican Party is, alone and lost.

This is a restricted view-I have had a glass of small field--but it shows a sort of cross-section. The Republican Party along the Atlantic seaboard may, for all I know, see the way out. So may the Republicans of the Pacific coast, of the South. But those of the great midregion, of the States which compose the old Middle West, certainly do not.

AND this is true not at all because of

any general desire to have Coolidge as the candidate in 1928. There was no such generat sire, Not there. It is true not at all because of any deep disappointment that he is not to be the can

didate.

ment.

There is no such disappointThere has not been in that region in recent days, if there ever was, any deep devotion to Coolidge. There has been a sort of devotion to certain Coolidge policies. There has been a strictly orthodox adherence to the Administration as a party asset. But nobody, apparently, has loved Coolidge because he is Coolidge.

Coolidge's renunciation has caused no heart pang and sense of personal loss, as Roosevelt's renunciation did sixteen years ago. There are none who would count it a privilege to follow Coolidge into oblivion for a lost cause, as there were many who would have loved to follow Wilson thus.

One branch of the Republican Party in the Middle West positively did not want Coolidge as the nominee in 1928. Another branch did want him, but without enthusiasm, because he was, as they believed, the party's best asset. But those who did not want him apparently had no glimmer of hope that they might be rid of him, and those who did want him had no shadow of fear that they might lose him.

This, to me, is exceedingly strange, because, though I am not even the greatgrandson of a prophet, and though no seventh son has appeared in the direct line of my ancestry in all time, I have believed for more than eighteen months that Calvin Coolidge could not again be

President of the United States. It was on January 13, 1926, that I said in a signed article in The Outlook, "I do not suppose that Calvin Coolidge will ever again have the solid support that he once had from the West and the Middle West. I suppose that whatever hope there was of another term for Coolidge went glimmering in the last week of the old year [1925]."

Why Republicans never saw the possibility that Mr. Coolidge himself would see this situation, why they made no provision against the contingency of his seeing it, I cannot tell. But they did not. There were Republicans, both radical and regular, who, prior to the renunciation, were prepared to oppose Mr. Coolidge for the nomination. Many were prepared to make his nomination certain. But nowhere was anybody prepared to do anything independently of a Coolidge candidacy. His renunciation, therefore, left all of them, his foes as well as his friends, completely flabbergasted.

September 7, 1927

ular Catholic (especially of one so qualified for the office as is Governor Smith) would be ineffective; that it would be far more effective if some Catholic could be got to present that view. To me it seems that the experiment has not been successful; the motive is somewhat too obvious.

It is not even sure that the entire South is so troubled as is Judge Crabités about the question of Governor Smith's religion. The following extract was reprinted in the Springfield "Republican" of August 13 from the Charleston "News and Courier:"

"Democrats quarrel among themselves and beat around in circles while all this is going on. One leader is not good enough because he is a 'wet,' another because he is a Roman Catholic, and another because he is a 'dry.'

"As though any of those questions were of importance by the side of that other, whether the average citizen has a chance to be the independent owner of a home, a farm, a store. Whether the average man shall live at all except by sufferance of the mighty in money.

"Woodrow Wilson was the representative of the average man. . . . Conservative, cultivated gentleman that he was, not even Andrew Jackson was hated by men of great possessions as he was, and they still hate his memory because they fear it.

"Governor Smith is far from the kind of man that Mr. Wilson was, but he is like him in that he is a representative of all the American people except the one in a hundred or a thousand who has most to hope from a Government controlled and operated as a subsidy of the Mellon interests.

"The Democrats can win in 1928 if the Democratic defeatists do not deliver the party into the hands of the enemy before the campaign begins."

Chicago, Illinois.

ELLEN GATES STARR.

The Protestant Clause"

IN

N the issue of The Outlook of August 17, in the article "Is It Time for a Catholic President?" by Judge Crabités, I find this language: "When Jefferson and his Virginia friends insisted that the Federal Constitution should proclaim that no law shall be passed respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, what was really back of their minds was to protect the Episcopalians of Virginia against the Methodists of North Carolina," etc.

This statement may apply to some of Mr. Jefferson's Virginia friends, but I do not believe it was true of him. I do not

believe, therefore, that this statement of Judge Crabités's is historically correct. Do you propose to let it go unchallenged?

It is interesting to note that Judge Crabités gives no credit whatever to Mr. Jefferson and his Virginia friends for desiring to establish freedom of worship beyond the seas, but readily accords such a worthy purpose to Lord Baltimore and his English Catholics.

I suppose that Protestants generally believe exactly to the contrary of both statements made by Judge Crabités. What is the truth?

The article also contains this language: "Events often move slowly. It may take a few more decades to eliminate the 'Protestant clause' from the Constitution." Does he mean that it should be eliminated and that the United States should support the Catholic Church?

In my opinion, the solution for the problem which may be presented is less Fundamentalism,

more Modernism, more evolution, more science, in which event, religious superstition, both Catholic and Protestant, will crumble long before the "Protestant clause" will be stricken from the Constitution.

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Georgia against the Quakers of Pennsylvania. . . . These men never thought of Catholics and Jews when they carried out their give-and-take program.

What was back of the mind of Thomas Jefferson and his associates is not a matter of conjecture or private interpretation. This is what Thomas Jefferson himself says on this point in his autobiography:

The bill for establishing religious freedom, the principles of which had, to a certain degree, been enacted before, I had drawn in all the latitude of reason and right. . . . With some mutilations in the preamble, it was finally passed; and a single proposition proved that its protection was meant to be universal. Where the preamble declares that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed by inserting the words "Jesus Christ," so that it should read, "a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion:" the insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend within the mantle of its protection the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo and the infidel of every denomination.

While it is true that religious intolerance was characteristic of the colonies, it is equally true and significant that when the colonists united in the defense of a common cause they at once saw how mean was their narrowness. Their common patriotism brought the dawn of religious tolerance. When, on November 5, 1775, Washington issued his order against the celebration of Pope's Day, declaring that "the observance of that ridiculous and childish custom of burning the effigy of the Pope" would not be permitted, his action signified that religious persecution, under the law, was no longer in our country compatible with patriotism.

It was with no misgiving, such as fills Judge Crabités, that Congress in its resolution of February 15, 1776, authorized the appointment of Charles Carroll of Carrollton on a committee of three of its members, and instructed him to "prevail on Mr. [Father, later Archbishop] John Carroll to accompany the committee" on its momentous mission to Canada.

When the Federal Congress adopted Dickinson's address in which "all the old religious jealousies were condemned as low minded infirmities" it laid the foundation of religious tolerance. That this was the thought of the Union patriots was made clear on July 4, 1779, when in

16

old St. Mary's Catholic Church at Philadelphia the "Te Deum" was solemnly chanted in commemoration of the third anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and General Washington and the officers of his staff were invited to the ceremony; and again when, after the victory over Cornwallis at Yorktown, the members of Congress, the Supreme Executive Council, and the Assembly of Pennsylvania were invited to attend a service of Thanksgiving held in the same church on November 4, 1781.

It was therefore but natural that when the Constitutional Convention had conIcluded its debates and the whole frame of the Government with its powers and duties had been agreed to it adopted as a final clause the words of Clause III, Article VI:

No religious test shall be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

That clause was not voted without discussion. It was voted unanimously by all the States of the Confederation, as is attested by the Journal of the Federal Convention. Quakers from Pennsylvania, in whose State any one holding public office was required to denounce under oath as "superstitious and idolatrous" the "doctrine of transsubstantiation, the adoration of the Virgin Mary and all saints, and the sacrifice of the Mass," joined without reservation their votes with the votes of Representatives from every other State; with the Catholic Representatives of Maryland as well as with the Episcopalians from Virginia, the Methodists from North Carolina, the Congregationalists from Massachusetts, the Baptists from Georgia, to make this clause the Supreme Law of our Nation and to place it at the very end of the Constitution in evidence of its all-embracing character.

The Outlook for

At its first session under the Constitution, Congress agreed to the first ten Amendments, and submitted them to the Legislatures of the States. The first of these reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

One after another the States of the Union have embodied in their Constitutions the spirit of that Amendment. The record of court decisions leaves no doubt as to the true meaning or scope of that Amendment.

Much more might be said on this subject, but this is doubtless enough to make clear to your readers the fact that there is no historical background for the statement of Judge Crabités.

WILLIAM F. MONTAVON,
Director, National Catholic Welfare
Conference.

1312 Massachusetts Avenue N. W.,
Washington, D. C.

A

S an old friend of The Outlook I wish to register my disappointment at the wholly inadequate manner in which you have dealt with the Sacco-Vanzetti case. I freely concede that I do not know all there is to be known in regard to this case, but I have followed it with great care and have read every word of Governor Fuller's decision and the decision of the advisory committee, many of the statements by the Defense Committee, the full argument before the Massachusetts Supreme Court, the decision of that Court, and, in fact, for the last three weeks have read practically every word in regard to the case which has appeared in the New York "Times." I believe, therefore, that I have a fairly good basis for forming an intelligent opinion in regard to this case, and my opinions, in connection with such other matter as I have read, may be summarized as follows:

1. That Sacco and Vanzetti did not receive a fair trial.

2. That Judge Thayer was not a fairminded and impartial judge.

3. That Judge Thayer should not have been the sole and final judge of his own errors and prejudice.

4. That the Massachusetts Supreme Court refused to consider the case on its merits and decided that these men, even

if innocent, must die, because all legal formalities had not been complied with.

5. That until some one gives convincing answers to the many weaknesses in the evidence the "New Republic" of August 24 states some of these weaknesses-most reasonable-minded persons will continue to believe that Sacco and Vanzetti are innocent.

6. That Governor Fuller's decision is not convincing.

7. That the advisory committee's decision is equally unconvincing.

8. That the refusal of the Federal Government to open its files-when it is claimed that these files will prove the innocence of these men-is difficult for any fair-minded person to understand.

9. That the commission of unlawful acts by others has nothing to do with the question of whether Sacco and Vanzetti murdered Berardelli in 1920.

10. That the fact that legal delays usually result in guilty persons escaping punishment is no proof that Sacco and Vanzetti are guilty of murder.

11. That your two recent editorials"Terrorism vs. Law" and "The Law's Delay"-while clearly indicating your belief that these men have had a fair trial and were guilty of murder, give no reasons bearing directly on this issue, but bring in side issues which are not germane to the question which at the mo

ment is the one of most vital importance. Instead of contributing anything to this discussion, your editorials merely tend to confuse and obscure.

12. That free-handed and impartial justice is the corner-stone of the American Nation, and that such justice should be administered just as fairly for the poor and ignorant as for the wealthy and educated.

13. That no greater peril can face any democracy than the subordination of true justice to legal formalities and legal technicalities. The necessity for the latter is recognized, but they must remain means to an end and under no circumstances be permitted, as in this case, to become the end itself.

14. That no personal reputation is as important as the need for true justice. No one desires to injure personal reputations except as this is incidental and unavoidable in the effort to obtain justice, but neither should any one deny justice in order to save personal reputations.

15. That on this important question The Outlook has signally failed to grasp the real issue, has failed to assist its readers to a clearer understanding of the real facts in the case, and has ranged itself on the side of injustice.

Having been a regular reader of The Outlook since 1909, and therefore being