IN

NHABITANTS of Berlin are becoming excited about the mysterious number 3,852. It has been discovered that these figures invariably come from adding the following: The year of one's birth, one's age, the year of marriage, and the number of years married.

Are you married? If so, try it out yourself. It came to 3,852, didn't it? In reality, however, it is not as mysterious as it seems, for 3,852 equals twice 1,926 and the year of birth plus present age always equals 1,926, as does also the year of marriage plus the number of years married.

It isn't your position, but your disposition that makes you happy or unhappy.

The wife of a dying man sent out for a preacher to come to the bedside of her husband, who was no better than he should have been. The preacher came and said, "You had better renounce the devil, my friend."

"Renounce the devil!" exclaimed the dying man. "Why I am not in the position to make any enemies now."

At Laconia, New Hampshire, there is a combined dance pavilion and moving-picture theater. The dancers try to watch the picture on the screen and step around the hall to the tune of a jazz band at the same time. It is quite a customary sight to see the hall filled with couples dancing to lively music while a tragic death scene is being portrayed on the screen. The venture is said to be highly profitable. What next?

A subscriber from North Carolina tells us of stopping at a rural hot-dog stand. After eating and drinking he read this sign: "If you eat here you'll never eat anywhere else." He lived to tell the tale.

Another sign, noticed in the window of a Washington pool-room: "This is God's country. Don't set it on fire and make it look like hell."

A buxom Irish girl approached the manager of the carnival side-show and said: "I want to speak to the Hindu mystic. Please tell her that it is her sister Bridget calling."

The New York "Evening World" tells of a bohemian art tea garden in Greenwich Village. Two bandits have visited the premises recently. Sightseers have the habit of walking in and out of this garden unannounced. A conspicuous sign has now been hung outside the gate:

Friends-ring once.

Enemies-ring three times.
Bandits-please phone.
All others telegraph.

From Punch:

Lover (with limited income): "Tell me, dearest, are you very fond of clothes?"

The beloved: "Clothes! My dear boy, I am the dowdiest little old-fashioned frump. No, my vice is pearls."

A newspaper in reporting the evangelist Mrs. McPherson's abduction puts the following words in her mouth: "I can still feel them as they took my head in their rough hands and cut it off."

"Well, did you have a good time on your vacation?"

"I had two weeks off. I spent a day and a half going to a place where I had nothing to do, nine days in doing nothing, two days with a headache from doing nothing, and a day and a half getting back to where I could do something."

Talk is not cheap over the radio. The Commercial Broadcasting Corporation is out with a rate card for covering air advertising. Prices vary with the time. In New York $100 pays for the hour from 6 to 7 P.M., $200 from 7 to 8, $300 between 8 and 10:30, and $150 from 10:30 to midnight, when it is presumed auditors will be yawning. These figures cover 52-times contracts. Three-minute talks before 8 P.M. in New York cost $50; ten minutes after 8, $125. Time and the wave-lengths would seem to put a considerable limit upon advertising oratory. Besides, it is easy to shut out the flow of commercialism.

"Fighting again?" said the mother to her little boy who came home with two black eyes and a bruised face. "Didn't I tell you that when you were angry you should count to one hundred before you did anything?"

"Yes, mother, but the other boy's mother had told him to only count up to fifty."

Mr. Edwin A. Krauthoff, of Kansas City, Missouri, questions the statement in our department of July 14, "Russia alone declines to admit the Bible as an influence for good." He points out the fact that the Rev. I. S. Prokhanoff is in this country at the present time for the purpose of raising a fund for printing the Bible in Russia in the Russian language, and states that permission has been granted by the Russian Government and that the American Bible Society is co-operating in the work. An inquiry at the American Bible Society brings the following comment:

"It has been extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the last four or five years to get Bibles into Russia. A few shipments for which permission was secured by Russians from their Government have been admitted. All others have been stopped, whether sent by way of the Black Sea, the Caucasus, China, or the Pacific ports. Permission, however, now has been granted to print considerable editions at the Government printing offices in Moscow and Leningrad."

From the "Progressive Grocer:" "Your cousin refused to recognize me in the grocer's last night. Thinks I am not his equal, I suppose."

"Ridiculous! Of course you are. he is nothing but a conceited idiot."

Why,

It is generally believed that Hearst's New York "Daily Mirror" is responsible for the reopening of the now famous Halls-Mills murder case. Detectives were employed for over a year by the above-mentioned tabloid in an attempt to discover new evidence. "Why should a daily newspaper interest itself to this extent?" some may ask. The answer is evident from recently reported circulation figures. As soon as the New Brunswick murder mystery resumed its featured position one hundred thousand readers were immediately added to the former circulation of the "Mirror."

Those of us who can remember the days, not many years ago, when we went to the movies for a nickel were given rather a shock when we noticed the regular $3 admission price to John Barrymore's new picture, "Don Juan," in New York City.

From "Gargoyle:"

"What is an opportunist?"

"One who meets the wolf at the door and appears the next day in a fur coat."

Answer to last week's problem: "Dame Mead made Edam.

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Scientific Facts

A

About Diet

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I

tion in the interest of liberty is a question which the facts as now known do not answer. One avowed purpose of Pangalos was to get rid of parliamentary government by making the Presidency of Greece, like the American Presidency, independent of parliamentary control. There is no Constitutional limitation upon the power of the American Executive. That power is not derived from Congress and is exercised independently of it. This is not so under the European systems of democratic government. Under those systems the executive is the creature of parliament. The European prime minister is simply that member of the parliamentary body whom the parliament chooses for the time being to administer the laws. In Italy this system broke down, and we have Mussolini. In Greece it broke down, and we got Pangalos. In France it has broken down, and at the moment we are not sure whether we have Poincaré or nobody. Whether Kondylis, who has succeeded to power in Greece, can restore parliamentary government, as he promises to do, in eight months may be doubtful, but it is hardly to be expected that he can make it efficient. At any rate, it is too soon to learn whether in this latest upset Greece has made any progress toward liberty or order. Pangalos at least had an idea for Greece; but he has gone the way of all dictators.

Wide World

General Kondylis

shall determine the conduct of the mining industry. The latest news from London has indicated that, after four months of struggle, neither owners nor workers are ready to give in. A conference between representatives of the mine

Keystone

General Theodore Pangalos

Number I

operators and the Miners' Federation broke without definite results or prosup pect of renewal.

Meanwhile coal is to be got in England-some being imported from other countries and some being produced under difficulties from British mines. An incident recounted lately by an Englishman just landed here from his country illustrates the situation. A friend who manages a factory needed new supplies of fuel. He made inquiries of the mining company from which he usually buys his coal. He was told that he would have to pay about double the previous price, but that a limited amount of coal could be furnished-enough to keep his factory running. Rather than shut down, he bought what he had to have.

Some miners are drifting back to work at seven and a half or eight hours a day, instead of the seven hours which was the union schedule. Just how many men are returning in this way it is difficult to estimate, but probably they are not enough to begin to solve the industrial problem or end the conflict. The strikers are being supported by funds from unionists in Europe and the United States, and also from the Communists in Soviet Russia. Despite their sufferings, the main body of them apparently are ready to go on behind their leaders. The issue remains, what it has been from the start, a test to determine whether the miners or the owners are strong enough to dictate the terms on which England may get her own coal.

moves. But there can be no substantial doubt that the agreement with Canada, which seems assured because of the consummated agreement with the British Government, will greatly increase the efficiency of enforcement.

Secretary of State Kellogg is to arrange for a conference between representatives of our Departments of State, Justice, and the Treasury and the Canadian Minister of Customs. The agreement, which is regarded as a foregone conclusion, is expected to follow closely the terms of the agreement recently negotiated by General Lincoln C. Andrews and his associates in London. After the agreements are in operation, it is said that ships cannot obtain clearance papers out of a British port or have their papers changed by the Canadian authorities until the United States authorities have been notified. Enforcement officials, therefore, will have advance notice of movements of liquor toward our coasts and, under the treaty with Great Britain, will be in position to pick up the ships at the twelve-mile limit.

The co-operation of the Canadian authorities is, perhaps, more important even than that of the British, since so large a proportion of the illicit liquor which finds its way into this country comes by water from the Maritime Provinces of Canada or, by land, directly across the border at points farther west.

their food in the form of yeast when they got it, were questions left to other prophets.

All the rest of us have to do, it seems, is to trust to the chemists. We all like, at times, to imagine to ourselves the happy life of South Sea Islanders, lying under trees in the sun and allowing ripe breadfruit and bananas to drop into their laps. But in these less kindly northern latitudes, where the sun sometimes fails to shine and occasionally it rains, no such easy solution of the problem of living is in sight.

To be fair to them, the chemists did admit that-so far as we can see-we never can be free from the care and cultivation of the soil. But H. Foster Bain, Secretary of the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers, sounded more realistic in his treatment of the world's task of developing and using its resources. He called some of the chemists' predictions "fairy promises" which fail to deal with the hard facts of life. He discarded chemical synthesis as a sclution of the problem of dealing with limited mineral resources. Engineers, he said, are interested in dealing with present values, and not with the hope in some far-off future of "marvelous synthetic substances held up to dazzle our cyes." He warned the public against being "lulled to sleep by a false sense of security" as a result of the theoretical possibilities of chemistry, and remarked: "Substitution and synthesis usually require some form of preparation or manufacture. Both of these absorb power. It would be only by happy and rare accident that production of new raw materials produced rather than used power." Time for many wars and years of troubled peace, he suspected, remained before the needs of modern civilization can be met by synthetic panaceas. There are the words and thought of the practical technician.

Day dreams are delightful. But afterwards it is salutary to direct the mind back to the immediate actualities of a hard-worked world.

War Bread in Peace Time

ELGIUM and France might have been encouraged by the good news from the nutrition chemists at Williamstown about the prospect of food from the air and sun, and also by the black case they made out against white bread. For the Belgian and French people have gone back on the war basis of "black bread"

as part of the national effort to economize, pay off their debts, and redeem their depreciated currency.

The plight of Belgium and France is a striking example of the stubborn facts of the actual world. The bills for war may be put off, but they cannot be dodged. And the money that has been spent in war is gone. It has not been transformed into any productive enterprise. It has been literally "blown in." A nation recovering from a war may inflate its currency and so secure a passing period of apparently easy money, artificial expansion of business, and illusory prosperity. But when the exchange value of its currency slides too far down and inflation has to stop, there will follow a period of hard times or of panic

depending on how far the process has gone. During the process of readjustment to sound principles the actual costs of labor and manufacture will be higher, products will be dearer, and foreign trade will be lost because it is harder to sell in competition in markets abroad. Germany has learned this by ruinous experience, in which a powerful and ruthless class of financiers and industrialists practically bankrupted the state and great numbers of the middle and professional classes. Belgium and France, now that they have taken the hard road of return to sane finance, will have to learn the same lcsson, in terms undoubtedly less harsh but equally inevitable.

Europe suggests, of course, that part of this difficulty might be met by canceling the war debts. But this would not mean wiping out some of the costs of war, although it might seem to many Europeans to accomplish that happy result. It would merely mean transferring them to the account of the people of the United States. Whether Europe or America should bear them has been allowed to become, unhappily, a matter of bitter and unreasonable dispute. But if Americans will stop to think what it means to Europeans to be eating war bread in peace time, nearly nine years after the Armistice, it may aid an understanding of their point of view and further at least a more kindly consideration of the whole complicated question of restoring the normal life of the world.

An Anglo-American Incident
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HAPPY incident of the celebration on August 18 of the 339th anniversary of the baptism of the first white child of English parentage born in what