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of Russian caviar, langouste from the Mediterranean, and a delectable conserve known as rose jam, which was concocted by the fairies out of sugar and the petals of the rose to please the palate of the gods in the days of the ancient Greek, are among the popular dainties which appear on the table of the wealthy Rumanian. Cocktails are sometimes served as an apéritif, but more often a drink peculiar to the country called tuica-pronounced as if it were spelled "zwicka." It is distilled from the juice of prunes, and not unpleasant to the taste; with the color of gin and the power of Satan.

Including the salle à manger in the Athenee Palace, there are a number of good restaurants in Bucharest-French, Russian, and German. Cina's is French and much frequented by the "smart set." Capsa's, also French, is excellent and popular, but less formal.

Before the war Bucharest had a population of three hundred thousand. It now slightly exceeds a million. In construction it closely resembles an Italian city. It has narrow sidewalks, uneven cobbled streets, and in many respects is a bit down at the heels-old, picturesque, and quaint. None of the New Yorkers' penchant for building and repairing agitates its citizens. It is safe to say that very little, if any, improvement has taken place there within the last fifty years. A happy little city where every one smiles and no one is very busy.

View of the Rumanian Atheneum in Bucharest

It is a sort of grandchild of the Champs Elysées, but leads out into the open country and the golf club instead of towards a bois.

Among the diplomats nearly every country is represented, and society is cosmopolitan and gay. Rumanian and French are the languages generally spoken; one hears very little English. The ladies do their shopping in London and Paris and are the last word in chic.

Little brown gypsies perform most of the household service, and music for dancing is often furnished by a gypsy band. When you spend an informal evening in the home of a diplomat, you The Chaussée is the fashionable park. dance to the strains of the Victrola.

The Calea Victoriei, the one long shopping street, winds from the Chaussée and passes the Palace.

Publishers Photo Service

Athenee Palace, one of the largest hotels in Bucharest

There are few pianos in Bucharest. For a Rumanian family to possess a piano is a mark of social distinction. But every one owns an automobile. If you live in Bucharest, you own an automobile or you own nothing at all. You don't have a beau or a sweetheart in Bucharest you have a "flirt." "Who is your flirt?" is the arch question that is banteringly asked.

As the city is small, in going to the country club or from one place to another without your own private conveyance, rather than take a taxicab, you are apt to step into one of the many birjas, or public victorias, with which the town. swarms. The drivers are all dressed alike in a fine black or dark-blue velvet pelisse. It is fashioned in a tightfitting basque, buttoned down the front, to which a voluminously gathered skirt is attached. It is splendidly trimmed with metal buttons, and in cold weather is lined with sheepskin. Around each driver's stout waist is a leather belt studded with rivets or a gay red girdle (sometimes a cord) knotted into a sash at the side. In winter they wear a high sheepskin or astrakhan cap, called the caciuli, which, I am told, is replaced in summer by a peaked cap. They all look fat. Perhaps the thickness of the sheepskin-lined pelisse has something to do with this. Be that as it may, they overflow their high, narrow drivers' seats like huge plump cushions. Some of the birjas are dilapidated; the horses are bad conditioned and poor. But when you see a well-kept turnout, polished harness, and horses fine and sleek, you can be sure that the horses came from Russia, and that the driver is a member of the Lipovan sect, which was turned

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out of Russia. This sect has curious rules and regulations. Its members practice austerities and are the "bluenoses" of Rumania. They deny themselves all pleasure, and abjure the fleshpots. They gather together for prayer and singing twice daily. They won't eat meat, listen to music, dance, drink any alcoholic stimulant, shake hands with or kiss a member of the opposite sex, or go to the movies. The average New Yorker would have difficulty in understanding

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why such people want to live. Their
women never allow their heads to be
seen bare. The sect is fast dying out.

It would take a good-sized book to
record one-half that is interesting in
connection with Bucharest and Ruma-
nia. The country itself as I saw it in
the last month of winter, with its wide
prairies and low, rolling hills devoid of
trees, reminded me somewhat of the
Dakotas and portions of Alberta, Can-
ada. But this impression was dispelled

when I caught sight of its little villages built of mud houses with thatched roofs or glimpsed an ox-cart toiling along the dirt road, a peasant trudging at its side.

I spent six weeks in the Rumanian capital-six of the maddest, merriest weeks in all my glad young life. At midday on March 15 I regretfully boarded the train for the six-hour journey to Constanza, on the shore of the Black Sea, and the one port of the Rumanians.

Why Work At All?

HAT man should earn his bread by the sweat of his brow is a dictum of the Scriptures that has been pretty well abolished in America, where, in the main, he now acquires, not bread, but canned goods and package foods, by the oil on a machine. Mr. Thomas A. Edison is on record as saying that the machine does not begin to do what it should for the relief of man from toil. He hopes to have machines doing everything needful before long, giving man a chance to be one hundred per cent sociable. It may not be a dream.

Coincident with this utterance on the part of the eminent inventor, the American Federation of Labor has announced its purpose to bring about a five-day week in organized industry. That is to say, a working period of forty hours per man out of the one hundred and sixtyeight that comprise the week. That would mean less than two full days of time, with one hundred and twentyeight hours left for recreation, the uplift, and slumber.

The basis of this demand is that machinery has so advanced output as to make it economically possible for man to acquire a further period of respite. Mr. Henry Ford added emphasis to the point by announcing a five-day week in his works. This move was made while the delegates were gathered at Detroit, and helped frame the new policy. Mr. Ford's factories, it should be stated, are non-union. The difference between Ford and the Federation is that he proposes to pay for five days' work. The Federation wants pay for six, though exerting itself but five. Here is where the crux lies.

Probably there are lines of industry that would lose but little if the five-day week went into full effect. These are those where the forty-four-hour week is in effect. The forty-four-hour week was the outcome of the Saturday half-holi

By DON C. SEITZ

day, inaugurated in New York about
forty years ago. This was a summer-
time concession that has come to cover
most establishments, in cities at least, all
the year round.

Employers have generally found the
four hours of Saturday wasted. The
men do little more than start and stop
their machines. For a time this was
overcome by making up for the half-day
lost by extra time worked during the
week. This disappeared with the arrival
of the forty-four-hour scale.

William Green, the head of the American Federation of Labor, is a sensible man. He says the men can speed up enough during the five full days to earn pay for the sixth, so that the advantage can be enjoyed without curtailment of income. This is undoubtedly correct if men can be brought to do it. There is the rub.

That there is ample room for increased exertion without hardship is beyond dispute. So great a part of production is due to machinery that workmen in many instances are mere watchers, or, at the most, feeders, of these devices. In the printing trade even feeders are dispensed with by the use of automatic devices. In paper making the pulpwood grinders are fed from hoppers, which can be automatically operated. The conveyor has stepped in to relieve the shovel and pitchfork quite generally. Mr. Edison is undoubtedly correct in his assumption that mechanical devices can be contrived that will do even more. Those who frequent factories can observe that not more than forty per cent of the worker's time is productively employed. It is easy to idle at tasks unless the chain system used by Henry Ford is in operation. This sundry visitors at his plant representing the Federation have. termed slavery. They describe the method as one of endless monotony,

from which men flee after a couple of years. Probably there is some truth in this. The thinkless thrusting of bolts into holes all day long cannot be a very refreshing occupation.

The discussion so far is, however, confined only to the attitude of organized labor and mass-production factories. These two have become a sort of privileged class enjoying benefits denied others, and that could not be universally beneficial unless all classes of workers and producers were included in the scheme. Organized labor and organized industry profit by the unrelieved toil of the farmer and the unorganized workers generally. These include the vast bulk of our people and, in particular, the farmers. All wealth coming from the soil or the sea, farmers, miners, and fishermen have to provide the base upon which all others stand.

These three classes care for all the others, either in the low price at which they furnish food and raw materials or in the high prices they pay for finished articles and prepared sustenance. All have to buy back the bulk of what they sell in its improved form, providing always the material to be embellished, made useful, and enhanced in value. So, while it sounds easy to cut down hours and increase pay, the question rises as to how much more the heavily laden backs can carry.. Mr. Ford denounces the farmer as archaic. He would do away with him as such, employ machinery, produce more food, such as milk, synthetically, and do away with what he seems to regard as the cumbersome processes of nature. This calls for an industrial revolution too great to be brought about in time to synchronize with Mr. Green's movement. The merits of the suggestion do not need to be discussed.

The whole problem is one of propor

tion. Yet it is not entirely one for the United States. We are competing in world markets with German tradeunionists who are willingly working twelve hours a day six days in the week. France and Italy are also busy in the same field, working far harder and more faithfully than we in America. These factors cannot be ignored. The competitive principle is ruthless and takes small heed of obstacles or artificialities.

We are now working under the highest tariff ever known, with shorter hours than the rest of the world, higher wages, and higher rates of transportation. Earning power is being capitalized to the

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nth degree. Our load is cumulating, yet it is proposed to lighten it by doing less, because, despite his belief, Mr. Green gives no assurances. He does not know whether men will do as much in forty hours as they do in forty-four. That they could is already admitted.

It can be safely said, however, that we are still some way off from the dolce far niente, the "sweet do-nothingness" of the Italians. Americans do not like to loaf. However tempting the extra day may appear, it will be found in practice that the average man, if it comes, will turn it to some sort of account. The twelve-hour day was industrial slavery. The ten-hour merely miti

gation. The eight-hour was sensible and salutary. But it is possible to come to the vanishing-point.

To repeat, the question before the country is how far it can care for the two privileged classes at present involved without an economic overload too great to carry. Will it not give workers more time in which to compete with the farmer and the fisherman, to the disadvantage of both, while these are still compelled to support the privileged ones in the style to which they are accustomed? "We must maintain our standard of living," asserts organized labor. Yes. But how are the unorganized going to maintain theirs?

Music and the Movies

Is the Theater on the Verge of a New Development ? By CHARLES L. BUCHANAN

T is possible that a revolutionary development, artistically speaking, is taking place in the moving picture of to-day. Probably very few persons are aware of its significance; for the reason that the movies are working under the stigma of the popular appeal, and, as a result, they are looked upon with contempt or indifference by even those reviewers whose professional business it is to perceive and report the new. Movies are still "vulgar," "coarse," "sentimental," "Pollyannish," and so on. The fact that there are good and bad movies, just as there are good and bad jazz tunes, musical shows, plays, and anything you please, never seems to enter any one's head.

Some time the writer would like to debate the matter from the purely theatrical standpoint. He would like to contend that the standard of excellence in the films is possibly higher than the standard of excellence in the so-called legitimate theater. He would like to submit a list of ten or a dozen pictures that he saw last year at an average price of 40 cents, and challenge you to match it with a list of the same number of plays seen during the same period at an average price of $3.30.

But this article has another purpose in mind. It wishes to direct attention to a certain phase of present-day cinema development that is not receiving the high degree of official critical recognition it deserves.

How many of the thousands upon thousands of persons who have witnessed that extraordinary spectacle "The Big

Parade" are appreciative of the fact that possibly fifty per cent of the overwhelming emotional impact they received from it was owing to the exceptional and inspired appropriateness of its musical spired appropriateness of its musical accompaniment? This does not for one moment mean to depreciate the merits of "The Big Parade" as sheer picture. To the contrary, it is high time that some one came out in the open and challenged our critics to show us anything anywhere near its equal. Anybody ought to be able to see that the picture is superbly cast, superbly directed. But it is something more. There is one moment in "The Big Parade" that may be the greatest thing the modern theater of this or any other country has accomplished. Reference is made to the advance through the woods; at which point, as Mr. Laurence Stallings himself has finely and generously pointed out in a letter to this writer, Mr. King Vidor, the producer, has made a "close approach to stark symbolism." Your solYour soldier and your artist can join hands at this moment. Its quality of gaunt, taut, naked inevitableness is insurpassable.

Notice, however, when you see "The Big Parade" again, the marvelously impressive music that Axt and Mendoza have written to accompany this scene. One is tempted to the indiscretion of placing this music on a level with certain moments in "Parsifal." The three notes of "Over There," given out in augmentation and portentously harmonized, followed by a brass passage of tremendous significance, make this scene a thing of unforgetable pathos and terror.

Of course, any one can see that what Axt and Mendoza have done is to apply the Wagner system of characteristic thematic material and thematic development to a number of popular and sometimes commonplace tunes. That in itself is no trick at all; any expert musician could have done the same thing. The remarkable aspect of the matter is the inspired, clairvoyant, at times really great manner in which this material is manipulated; so adroitly, in fact, that the screen action finds a complete, continuous, simultaneous reflection in the orchestra. Note, for example, the strident, cacophonous sound that is the musical equivalent to Jim's warning shout to his two companions in their improvised shower-bath. Without realizing it, the audience is receiving at this moment as definite an impression through its ears as it is receiving through its eyes. Mention should also be made of the exquisite deftness with which the "Melisande" theme is developed, the gauche appropriateness of the "Slim" theme, the pathetic eloquence with which the "Buddies" theme is varied, and, above all, the really sublime moment when the advance through the woods begins. Every intelligent person in the community, desirous of the artistic and emotional fitness of things, owes a vote of thanks to the organizers of this stupendous scene.

In a broader sense, the score of "The Big Parade" indicates what we may expect from a future synthesis of screen and music. No one needs to be told that from time immemorial music and

dramatic action have gone hand in hand. The point is that, for possibly the first time, a great dramatic spectacle has found an equally great musical expressiveness. There are a number of reasons why this is important; a number of reasons why credit should be given where it is deserved. For example, here are two musicians, Axt and Mendoza, who are attempting to furnish the moving picture with an appropriate musical accompaniment. Here is a producer, King Vidor, who, besides possessing a genius for screen direction, is evidently a man of vision and idealism. Let there be official critical recognition and encouragement of what this combination has effected. For the combination, in one form or another, is here to stay. Make no mistake about that. It would be a hopelessly short-sighted and obstinate person who would ignore the significance of the present widespread popularity of the films. It would be a musical Philistine who would deny the potentialities of dramatic action as a stimulant to the perception of musical sound. Wagner's theory of a synthesis of the arts is receiving a democratic ratification daily in every movie house throughout the land. Why, otherwise, should your movie manager find it advisable to retain the services of a pianistorganist at anywhere from fifty to a hundred dollars a week?

makes a fetish of a Mozart quartet, your guardian of the "legitimate" theater, will turn up their noses (and with ter, will turn up their noses (and with reason) at this conglomeration and adulteration of the various independent art forms of the past. Theoretically, they may be right in deploring the present

Judging Judges

Next winter the Senate of the United States will sit in judgment at the trial of a Federal Judge. The meaning of an impeachment and trial is graphi cally told in next week's issue of The Outlook.

tendency of the age in the direction of a mechanicalized and synthetic appeal. But the fact is that it is the tendency of the age, and it behooves us to make the best of it. It is conceivable that the personal identity of the various arts will tend more and more to lose themselves in a fusion, of which music and the screen will represent the dominant components. Personally, I think that this combination is already upon us. It will probably prove the essential form of the art expression of this age. Take the No doubt your musical purist who vitaphone, for example. Consider its

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unlimited possibilities. Why should we not screen a "Pelleas and Melisande," let us say, and send it throughout the entire country to the accompaniment of the vitaphone? And is it not conceivable that we shall eventually put "The Ring" or "Meistersinger" on the screen to the accompaniment of a Toscanini and a Philharmonic orchestra?

One thing is certain. The holierthan-thou art attitude of the past is hopelessly out of date. It is high time our music critics woke up to what is really going on in this day and generation. Anybody can play safe, and tell you what a great composer Beethoven or Wagner is; let our music reviewers accord the amount of consideration to the achievements of Vidor, Axt, and Mendoza that they would accord to a third-rate composition of Stravinsky or Casella. Were we to hear a great orchestra under an inspired leadership do the finale of Part I of "The Big Parade" we should have something more genuinely characteristic of our times than all the Carnegie Hall pretensions of the American composer put together. The score represents the possibility of a heightening of musical expressiveness, in which the life of our times will be voiced by a more dynamic, vital musical speech. It is a thing oftentimes of a sheer, intrinsic beauty; in its entirety it stands for a new development in the American theater.

Stairless Stanford

By GEORGE MARVIN

A University Built Close to the Fertile Ground

HEN Andrew D. White, then President of Cornell, was showing old Senator Stanford over the buildings of the institution at Ithaca, their tour of inspection led them through elevatorless buildings of several stories. After climbing the last of these, the aged Senator stopped to wipe the perspiration from his face and catch his breath.

"I tell you, Andrew," said he, "when I build my university, there ain't goin' to be any stairs in it. That's one sure thing."

Nevertheless, when in 1887 Leland Stanford Junior University came to be built, thirty miles southeast of San Francisco, on the broad acres of the Senator's ranch at Palo Alto, some stairs had to be incorporated in its plan. They were omitted in a one-story inner quadrangle

and minimized in an outer quadrangle with its related buildings of two stories. Lavish in all other respects, the Stanford bequest was stingy on stairs. The "university for both sexes" that Leland Stanford and Jane Lathrop Stanford, husband and wife, created in memory of their son, was built close to the fertile ground of the Santa Clara Valley. Architecturally it aspires not; its growth is lateral in one dimension, reaching out, hovering, brooding. There is nothing high about it anywhere; nothing high in its immediate landscape except the solitary monumental tree, the "palo alto," which gives to the neighborhood its musical Spanish name.

Spiritually the University seems as stairless as it is materially. It is close to the ground of fact. Architecture, with a not altogether accountable propriety,

images forth the spirit of times and peoples, the animating thoughts of builders and contrivers, the soul or lack of soul in enterprises. Generations of believers built their religion into the Gothic cathedrals of Europe which now visibly proclaim their faith. In a corresponding concreteness the missions built by the Franciscan adventurers through Mexico and the Southwest typify a faith of loneliness and endurance. They are very pure, those dead-white or ivory creations of the missionary spirit. St. Xavier, in the Santa Cruz Valley of Arizona, is as chaste as the dry desert air that washes continually about it; as dedicated, as faithful, as a wayside cross. The warm brown quadrangles of Leland Stanford, designed by a firm of Boston architects supposedly to conform to a mission type of architecture appropriate to Califor

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"Architecturally it aspires not; its growth is lateral in one dimension, reaching out, hovering, brooding. mission may, perhaps, be best fulfilled close to the fertile ground in which its roots are deeply planted

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