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grees are better off financially because of their skill as athletes. Attempts have been made to define the exact point where these indirect emoluments change the classification of the athlete who receives them. All these attempts have been in a measure unsuccessful and fruitful chiefly of bitter controversy. Sometimes the spirit of the rule has been sacrificed to a technicality; sometimes the technicality has been overlooked for the sake of a popular athlete.

Out of the controversy over the status of amateurs and professionals there seems to stand forth but one clear principle, and that is that the man or the woman who makes a business of sport

should be put in a different group from the man or woman to whom sport is a secondary interest in life. Rule committees will doubtless continue to give form and substance to this general principle. The successful classification of our athletes, however, depends not so much upon the existence of hard and fast rules as upon a broader understanding of the spirit of fair play. There should be no stigma of any kind placed upon the man or the woman who is openly a professional. The man or the woman who can teach others to swim or run is engaged in an honorable task. The professional tennis player who provides for the onlooker an interesting and stimulating

contest is certainly engaged in as useful an occupation as the actor who entertains the same public on the stage. If some of the social nonsense which we inherited from our English cousins could be removed from the discussion of the status of athletes, there might be more leading players who like Mary K. Browne would frankly and openly step across the line into the professional field. That in itself would eliminate a large proportion of our present controversy. No rule will ever be devised half so effective as an enlightened athletic conscience. The problem of the amateur and the professional is one to be settled by education rather than legislation.

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The Last Stand of the Indian

This article comes to us from a responsible source. As its author is living in

Mexico, he has asked us to withhold his name

HE real gist of the Mexican question is that it is the last stand of the Indian. Not that all Mexicans are Indians, but the Indian element is so overwhelmingly preponderant that what becomes of the InIdian will decide what is to become of Mexico.

After four hundred years of Spanish rule and contact, about sixty per cent of the population of Mexico is still pureblooded Indian-in racial traits closely akin to the North American Indian. Some forty per cent have in their veins an admixture of Spanish blood, which

beating of the tom-tom or the flow of oratory, and with tremendous powers of resistance. This Indian element has taken much less part even in the revolutions that have swept over Mexico than is generally assumed. The population of Mexico is about 15,000,000, and yet at no time during all the revolutions have there ever been more than 60,000 men under arms at any given time, with all factions counted together. It is this hopeless inertia of the Indian which has been the curse of Mexico down through the centuries.

OR

varies from the slightest trace to nearly For four hundred years the Mexican

pure-blooded Spaniards. It is assumed, however, that the forty per cent average one-eighth Spanish blood (which is probably too high), this would make, quantitatively considered, five per cent Spanish blood in Mexico and ninety-five per cent Indian blood.

This Indian element has always been an inarticulate mass of humanity, a dead weight round the necks of those Mexicans who have tried to uplift their country and the despair of all those foreigners who have tried to help them. Eighty per cent of the population have never learned to read and write, and hence have been the easily manipulated tool of any leader, good or bad. The character of this Indian population differs, naturally, as there are many, many tribes, but, generally speaking, they are humble, polite, affectionate, not so much lazy as utterly lacking in initiativegood workers if made to work, but otherwise will not work at all; like all primitive peoples, easily roused by the

FOR

Indian has watched the white man come and go, bringing into Mexico the culture of the land from which he came, developing mines, building railroads, establishing factories, and constructing all the woof and web of that which we call civilization; but in it all the Indian has taken no part beyond that of doing the white man's bidding. The attitude of the Indian has seldom been one of hostility, not even of passive resistance. His attitude is simply that it is all too much trouble. Where it is more trouble to resist than to adopt the civilization that is forced on him he will adopt it. The lack of education for all these four centuries has not been due to lack of opportunity, but to lack of interest. It is true that education has not been crammed down the throat of the Mexican Indian, but he has been exposed to it for quite four centuries, and it has never taken. Many of the old Spanish monks were good men and true, who spent their lives as did Las Casas-trying to teach

the Indian; but their labor went for naught, even as the labor of a paternal Government in the United States has gone for naught for over a hundred years in trying to teach the Indian there, and the Indian has wrapped his blanket about him and stalked away into the silent sunset of a dying race. Every bit of the civilization which is in Mexico today has been the work either of outand-out foreigners or of the Spanish blood which flows in the veins of the Mexican,

The inevitable result of this has been that, as the foreigner was the creator of this wealth, he is to-day the owner of it. On the basis of assessable valuation, at least three-fourths of the taxable wealth of Mexico to-day is owned by foreigners, who likewise pay more than threefourths of the taxes; and consequently the Government is supported and enabled to maintain itself in power only by means of the taxes which are paid by the foreigner. One must have a great deal of sympathy for the Mexican viewpoint and realize that to a Mexican this situation must be very galling and inevitably breed resentment against the foreigner who, economically speaking, owns Mexico. When the recent Mexican Congress sat in session and passed laws regulating the rights of foreigners to hold and acquire property in Mexico, few of them actually realized that threefourths of their salaries as Congressmen were being paid by taxes on the foreigners whose economic fate they were deciding.

From the Mexican view-point this situation is undoubtedly very regretta

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ble; but whose fault is it? It is the result of the continuous apathy and lack of energy of the Indian during the four centuries that he has been in contact with Occidental civilization. Over one hundred years ago Humboldt, after visiting that country, likened Mexico to a beggar sitting on a sack of gold. For the century since his visit Mexico has continued to sit on the sack; with this difference, however, that during those hundred years the foreigners have entered Mexico in larger numbers. They have bargained with the Mexican for the right to develop the country, to translate the dead material contents of the sack into the satisfaction of live human wants, and in a perfectly legitimate way have acquired legal and just rights to three-fourths of the developed wealth of the sack; and the Mexican's only claim to decide what shall be done with the entire sack is based on the fact that he sat on it first.

From a stockholder's standpoint, the Mexican does not own a majority interest in Mexico. He is a minority stockholder. He has bartered away his majority rights, just as the North American. Indian often bartered away his rights to great potential wealth, turning it over to those who could and did develop it.

The greatest development of Mexico took place during the government of Don Porfirio Diaz, when foreign capital was not only permitted to come into Mexico, but invited to come in and in

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An Indian Settlement in Mexico vest in mines, railroads, factories, and everything that would make Mexico a modern nation. For practically three decades foreigners came in, put their capital and their energy into the development of the country, and made money opment of the country, and made money for themselves and their Mexican associates, and the country prospered and they were welcome.

It is only in the last few years that the movement of "Mexico for Mexicans" has taken place and the concerted effort to push the foreigner out of Mexico has been manifest. And the foreigner who is being thus pushed out asks himself, Whence comes this change in atmosphere, this cold wind which is blowing up from a new quarter?

TH

HIS new wind which has sprung up is the flowing together of several currents in world affairs which have moved toward a common goal. One of them (and the principal one) is that wave of Socialism which has swept over the entire world like a vast ground swell and which broke most violently in Russia, where it met the highest peaks of resistance, and ebbed out most peacefully in the United States through the channels of freedom of speech and thought. Apparently, humanity as a whole makes progress only by building up peaks in its social structure and then leveling them off in order to raise the common base. The two countries in the world where the highest and slenderest peaks

were raised were Russia and Mexico. In both countries about eighty per cent of the population could not read or write. In neither country was there any substantial middle class between the highest and the lowest to serve, as it were, as a safe ascent for those who go up the social scale and break the fall of those who must come down. Economic and social conditions in the two countries were remarkably alike. Otherwise there was nothing in common, and is not to-day. However, the iron hand of despotism both in Russia and Mexico promptly crushed or exiled those turbulent spirits who wished to break up the existing social order. Those who were exiled either voluntarily or involuntarily found a common refuge and meetingplace in the two oldest republics of the world, the United States and France.

In certain social clubs down in Greenwich Village, in New York, young Russian Communists like Trotsky foregathered with young Mexican agitators. In the offices of "Big Bill" Haywood, the I. W. W. headquarters in Chicago, Russian Communists and Mexican agitators were equally welcome. All three had declared war on the same enemies-viz., government, clergy, and capital. Russian Communist literature was translated into Spanish in these offices and disseminated throughout the copper-mining camps of Arizona and Sonora, the southwest corner of the United States and the

northwest corner of Mexico. When the United States finally became too hot for "Big Bill" Haywood, he went to Russia and died there.

"Parlor Socialism," later known as "parlor Bolshevism," was then much in vogue among certain intellectuals of New England, and they often took part (more or less as an intellectual dissipation) in these meetings of agitators. Two of these who became rather deeply involved in Russia and in Mexico were John Reed, a young journalist, a Harvard graduate, and his wife, Alma Reed. They were with Carranza as newspaper correspondents for a considerable period. and exercised considerable influence over the coterie which surrounded him in those days and who were the real authors of the Mexican Constitution of 1917. Later on they both went to Russia. John was appointed the first Bolshevik Consul-General from Soviet Russia to New York and attempted to come home in that official capacity during the war. He was, however, interned on landing, later went to Russia, died there, and at one time there was a rough monument to his memory in the public square in Moscow. After his death his wife, Alma, came back to Mexico and became engaged to Filipe Carrillo Puerto, the leader of the Communists in Yucatan, who was killed two years ago in the De la Huerta revolution and to whom monuments are now being erected in Mexico, as the idol of the proletariat.

In France much the same thing was happening. There, however, the revolution in Mexico got its real start in the person of Don Francisco I. Madero, a young scion of a wealthy Mexican family in northern Mexico, who was sent to Paris to study. He became an enthusiastic "parlor Socialist" at first, later a real Socialist. He espoused to the uttermost the theories of Karl Marx, whose works he read in French, and came back to Mexico and started the "Madero revolution," with results which are known to the world.

THI

HIS revolution met with a tremendous sympathy in the United States, because it was not realized that the pendulum would swing just as far in the other direction and that the revolution had as its aim the destruction, not only of the existing Government in Mexico, but ultimately both the clergy and capital. In Mexico an anti-capitalistic movement necessarily becomes an antiforeign movement, because all the capital there is in the country is foreign. All the labor is Mexican, and any clash between labor and capital immediately

assumes an international aspect and patriotism is invoked on the side of labor against the foreign capitalists. As all the Governments in Mexico since the revolutions have started have ridden into power on the platform of the protection and advancement of the rights of the proletariat as against capital, and as all capital is foreign, it is easy to enlist the sympathies of the Government on the side of labor. In fact, their support is pledged in advance.

represented in the framing of the Constitution of 1917, and no provision was made in that document for the protection of capital as against labor. There was no need of it. There was no Mexican capital to be protected. The framers of the Constitution and their advisers were thoroughly imbued with the spirit of class struggle, of the fight between labor and capital, the poor against the rich, and the proletariat against the aristocrat. The acrimony of this strug

In the same manner the diplomatic gle, which is ever present in all countries,

Keystone

Travelers Along the Path of Civilization

representatives of all foreign Powers in Mexico City are placed in a peculiar position, because the only rights they are ever called upon to protect are the rights of capital as against labor, because those are all the rights of their nationals which there are in the country. The Government of Mexico, which is a labor Government, has appreciated this fact, and it is quite natural that it should attempt to establish rather closer relationships with the labor movement in the United States than with the United States Government, as they naturally feel that the labor party in the United States is closely akin to them, whereas the Government of the United States, through its diplomatic representatives, while representing both capital and labor, is forced by the peculiar exigencies of the case to make all its representations on behalf of capital, because there are no other American interests in Mexico. Likewise the Mexican Ambassador in Washington must make all his representations in the United States on behalf of labor, because there are half a million Mexican laborers in the United States, but no Mexican capital.

The situation is further complicated by the fact that no capital interests were

is intensified in Mexico by not only racial antagonism but by that vague feeling of resentment and discontent which has been stirred up in the ignorant Indian mind by the smooth-tongued foreign agitator.

PRESIDENT CALLES has recently made

statements which correctly reflect the trend of affairs in Mexico to-day. One is the belief that the great bulk of the ignorant, inert mass of the Indian population of the country who form the working classes can raise themselves up into a strong nation of good citizens, and the other is the idea that the economic preponderance of foreign holdings and wealth in the country must be changed into a Mexican preponderance. With both these ideals one must have all sympathy, but those who have lived years and years in Mexico and have the good of the Mexican people really at heart do not believe that the great bulk of the Indian population can, unaided, raise themselves above their present level. In fact, it is doubtful whether they will ever travel along the path of civilization any farther than they are actually pushed by others.

With regard to changing the preponderance of foreign property into Mexican preponderance, this cannot be done quickly without destroying much of the wealth which has been justly created, for there is not in Mexico sufficient wealth to buy this property. The one-fourth cannot buy the three-fourths. This condition, regrettable as it may be from the Mexican view-point, has been the gradual growth of centuries, and there is no rapid way of changing it without infringing upon the right of private property, upon which our civilization thus far has been erected.

There is only one righteous way in which Mexico can attain that economic independence ardently desired by the President and achieve the salvation of Mexicans as a people, and that is to make the individual Mexican as good, as strong, and as learned a man as the foreigner in his midst.

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A nation is never any stronger than the individuals which compose it. If Mexicans can be trained as individuals to measure up to the physical, mental, and spiritual strength of the nations with whom they must compete, they will see to it themselves that the proper share of this world's goods passes into their hands. Along this line any and all of the enlightened nations of the earth will gladly pass Mexico a helping hand,

but they cannot acquiesce in any attempt of Mexico to arbitrarily take from foreigners duly and legally acquired property without just compensation and in accordance with that justice on which international law is founded.

Moreover, merely taking the property away from the present owners and bestowing it upon the Indian will not make a great nation of Mexico, or even add to its material wealth. The Indian must

be spiritually and morally reborn. He must become a new race which can reach for eagerly and absorb that civilization which is encroaching upon him from all sides, or he must join his brethren the North American Indians on the lonely trail that leads down the western slope into the dim valleys of the "Vanishing Race." Which will he choose? It is the last stand of the Indian.

Murder by Motor

Appalling Record Revealed in a Study of Connecticut Automobile Accidents

W

HAT can be done to protect human life and limb from the steadily rising results of automobile accidents in America? The problem seems so far to be beyond human skill. Two years ago a conference on motor traffic was held at Yale University, New Haven, which inaugurated a system of study with the view to remedial measures. A second report has been issued from the Yale Press, covering 1924 and 1925, compiled by Richard Shelton Kirby. The results are startling as to the evils, the conclusions arrived at impotent. Speed madness rules the country, congests the streets, costs more than 20,000 lives per annum in the United States, to say nothing of countless injuries and waste of property. It is no exaggeration to say that the evils and extravagances involved make the acts of the Demon Rum look small, even when compiled for the Anti-Saloon League Almanac.

In Connecticut, where 249,458 autos were licensed in 1925, it is revealed, the fruits of science and sanitation are destroyed with tragic increments by the automobile. For example, in 1910 diphtheria killed eight times as many persons as automobiles did. In 1925 automobiles killed 354, three times as many as died from diphtheria. The scourge of typhoid fever in 1910 killed five times as many persons as automobiles. In 1925 the devil wagons killed nine times as many as the dreaded fever. Moreover, "there are about thirty thousand children born into Connecticut homes each year. At the present rate of killing and maiming, at least one in one hundred will sooner or later be killed by an automobile and at least one in four (or one in each family) will be injured." This appalling prospect is steadily am

By DON C. SEITZ

The

plifying instead of decreasing. Connecticut death rate from automobile accidents is nearly eight 'times as great as it was fifteen years ago. More than thirty per cent of the State's deaths from accidents in 1925 were due to motormachine mishaps, a proportion nine machine mishaps, a proportion nine times greater than it was in 1910. In this State, a great highway to the rest of New England, the proportion of auto deaths to other accidental fatalities averages fifty per cent greater than anywhere else in the United States.

In the years from 1918 to 1926 the number of Connecticut accidents increased fourfold, the total exceeding 92,000 in number, with a resulting property loss that seems incredible. In 1925 alone this was reckoned at $2,130,000, twenty times that caused by forest fires in the State and about one-third of the insured fire loss. With an average value of $1,000, it will be seen that this represents the worth of more than 2,000

cars.

The accident rate is outfooting the increase in machines; while what may be called auto-density has increased two called auto-density has increased two and one-half times since 1918, the mishaps have waxed four times as many as in that year. The statistics gathered by the survey show that school-children under ten and persons past middle life der ten and persons past middle life furnish most of the victims. Of the total killed, one-third were children and young people under twenty; nearly onefifth were children under ten.

The accidents seem to be fairly distributed over the State, despite the tremendous tide of travel that flows over the Boston Post Road. Milford, between Bridgeport and New Haven, showed the highest percentage-28.1 to the 1,000. Shelton was the lowest, with 7.4 per 1,000.

Where and how do the accidents mostly occur? The report says about four-tenths happen at street intersections and six-tenths on the open roadplainly the result of reckless driving, "cutting out" and like practices causing collisions. Compared with the trolley or railroad, the automobile is a jumping Juggernaut. Juggernaut. It strikes a pedestrian in one accident out of every six, the trolley or train one in twenty. This is readily understood when the pervasive character of the auto is considered. Children number half of the pedestrians struck.

As to responsibility, in six out of ten smashes the car was operated by the owner, in two by the owner's chauffeur, and in two by the owner's "friend." These proportions have remained unchanged for three years. There is evident merit in a trained chauffeur as against the casual owner who "drives" his car and is all too commonly seized with speed madness when he lays hands on the steering gear.

The percentage of accidents is amazingly large. In 1924 one private car in seven (128 per 1,000) was involved. In 1925 there was an improvement, the number lessening to one in eight.

Jitneys and busses make a worse showing than private cars, probably because of more constant operation. Three out of four meet with a crash of some sort in the course of a year.

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over 1924. "Inattention" was the cause of twenty-five per cent of the whole ghastly record. Carelessness has been increasing at a rapidly rising rate since 1923, despite all efforts to make machines fool proof and improved regulation of traffic. Failure to observe right of way was responsible for about one-fourth of the trouble, "skidding" one-eighth, wrong side of the road onetwelfth. Fast driving is accountable for the largest toll. It is interesting to learn that but one accident in sixty or seventy is due to intoxication. The luck of drunkards or the efficacy of the Volstead Act may explain this curious circumstance, according to the point of view.

To recur to the child problem, fifty out of one hundred of those killed or injured through their own fault were carelessly crossing the street; thirty stepped out from behind some object; five were coasting; and the rest playing in the highway. The number struck rose from 1,554 in 1924 to 1,707 in 1925. Bicycles and animals are held re

sponsible for about one-sixth of the accidents. Unknown drivers, along with motormen, are credited with one-quarter of the collisions, though the motormen -probably because of decrease in trolleys are lessening in the figures gathered.

The greater proportion of accidents is credited to drivers under twenty, with those under thirty next in order. Age seems to bring caution or fewer drivers.

Accidents due to defective highways, it is pleasant to learn, have become almost negligible. The State suspended around 8,500 drivers' licenses in 1925. around 8,500 drivers' licenses in 1925. The courts seem to be pretty lenient with offenders beyond stiffening the sentences of drunken drivers. Town prosecutors "nolled" one-quarter of the total cases in 1925. This is a special feature of Connecticut justice, much appreciated by the heedless, the town prosecutor having full power to act, for justice or other reasons that make mercy meritorious in the State. The judges are also kind-hearted, it would appear, suspend

ing jail sentences to the extent of 7,837 days in the year. There is no speed limit in Connecticut, but "speeding" is subject to punishment under a law that went into effect July 1, 1925. Jail sentences served were 5,057 days. Some $255,000 was collected in fines. With such a legal situation no wonder the report observes, "There have been but few encouraging features to record." It adds: "The situation will improve just as soon as sufficient right-minded people in each community apply themselves intently to their local problem of accident prevention." The report holds out no hope from legal remedies, concluding: "Motor accidents will be almost a thing of the past when each individual who uses the highway is not content to simply obey the law in letter and spirit, but habitually regards the rights of others more than his own convenience."

Since the average American's idea of liberty is to do as he pleases to some one else, the hope expressed is more than distantly utopian.

L

Reed and the Rubric

A College of the Vigorous Northwest which Has the Courage of Its Individual Convictions

INCOLNIAN to his boots-and including his boots. That's Coleman, of Reed College, out here in the fragrant, climate-blessed Northwest. He looks cut out of spruce lumber—and he is. The Japanese, with their acute symbolism, create bright and convincing similes which engrave themselves on memory. Of genuineness in character they aptly say, "Sincere as is the pine tree on the sky." The Northwest is a man's country, covered still, after the wastage of lumber companies and forest fires, with myriad heaven-pointing spires of pine and fir, spruce and hemlock and cedar, with the cathedral redwoods soaring in big naves and transepts over them all. "Only God can make a tree," Joyce Kilmer wrote just before he died in a far country. And only God can make a man. Big men are like big trees.

Coleman didn't make Reed College, but he represents it faithfully. On the other side of the continent it is and it means to be, as Dartmouth intends and is, "a small college;" small in size, but great in hope and courage. With remarkable fitness, it seemed, on the very

By GEORGE MARVIN

day this article was born in Portland President Hopkins, of Dartmouth, met and shook hands with President Coleman in complete agreement on their common and uncommon ideals in education. Two unstandardized institutions face to face, opposed to quantity production of human material, dedicated to the enrichment of life, inspired not by "selling" but by giving. Some one said the other day, emerging from an inundation of figures in a quantity-producing institution of learning, that such universities put him in mind of the shredded-wheat industry, which proudly asserts in its advertising that the product from the time of its entry as raw material to its exit as merchandise is "never touched by human hands." Reed College, steered by President Coleman, proceeds on the opposite hypothesis.

The tree idea is a good deal more than a happy simile; it is a fact and a guiding principle, an unavoidable association. Coleman got his fill of factory methods. He is a baccalaureus of Toronto, an M.A. of Harvard. He has had an academic career teaching English at Spo

kane, at Whitman College, and as head of the English Department during eight earlier years here at Reed. What stamped him, though, were the five years spent, between 1920 and 1925, as President of the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen. Sixty-five per cent of the industry of Oregon is trees. About the same percentage holds good of the entire Northwest, overlapping the California line to the south and reaching far north across the Canadian border of British Columbia. The "Loggers" kill the trees and the "Lumbermen" transport them and saw and plane them into flooring and ceiling, "commons" or "rustics," door-jambs, window-casings, moldings, and lath. But, with identical interests and habits, these related tree-men got along not so well together until the bigtree Coleman came along and made their Legion actually Loyal. From governing his republic of evergreens, and imbued with knowledge of what it takes to make both trees and men, the president of the lumberjacks came on June 1, 1925, to be President of an institution which embodied in its scheme many of his own

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