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BRITISH THEOLOGIANS
ON THE WAR

One of the most extraordinary incidents in connection with the war has been the sending of a letter from a group of British theologians to the German theologian Professor Harnack. Not long after the war broke out, Professor Harnack made a speech in which he was reported to have described Great Britain as acting in the present war as a traitor to civilization. A group of men who acknowledge their debt to German scholarship, and in particular to Professor Harnack as a leader among scholars, have addressed to him a letter, dated August 26, in which they try to explain to him the motives of Britain in the war. They acknowledge that in matters of the spirit their sympathies are so largely German that only the strongest reasons could ever lead them to contemplate the possibility of hostile relations between Great Britain and Germany. They say that they have borne resolute witness against the endeavor made by foes of Germany to foment anti-German suspicion and ill will. But they declare that all hopes of settled peace depend upon maintaining inviolate the sanctity of treaty obligations-the more stringently binding in the case of guaranteed neutrality. They believe that the extension of neutralization appeared to be one of the surest ways of eliminating war. These considerations they regard as imperatively cogent when the treaty rights of a small people are threatened by a great world power. They quote the acknowledgment by the Imperial Chancellor of Germany that the protests of Belgium and Luxemburg were just, and that in acting from "necessity" Germany "was doing wrong' and acting contrary to the dictates of international law."" They call attention also to the disregard of the sovereign rights of greater states shown in the demand of Germany that Russia should demobilize her troops. "It was quite open to Germany, they say, "to have answered Russia's mobilization with a counter-mobilization without resorting to war." They express the belief that Great Britain in this conflict is fighting conscience, justice, Europe, humanity, and lasting peace." And as they conclude, they say: Great Britain is not bound by any treaty rights to defend either Servia or Russia. But

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she is bound by the most sacred obligations to defend Belgium, obligations which France undertook to observe. We have been grieved to the heart to see in the successive acts of German policy a disregard of the liberties of states, small or great, which is the very negation of civilization. It is not our country that has incurred the odium of being a traitor to civilization or to the conscience of humanity.

Though they recognize the fact that Professor Harnack may think them mistaken, they assure him, as fellow-Christians and fellow-theologians, that their motives are not open to the charge that has been made. The signers of this striking letter include Dr. Selbie, the Principal of Mansfield College, Oxford; Dr. Forsyth, of Aberdeen University; and F. Herbert Stead, Warden of the Robert Browning Settlement of London.

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of the miners' union the draft for a tentative basis for a truce. This plan for a temporary cessation of the labor war was prepared by two commissioners of conciliation who were sent to Colorado several months ago by the President. These commissioners say that "there should be established a three-year truce," subject to the understanding that the mining and labor, laws of the State be enforced; that law-abiding strikers be given employment; that intimidation be prohibited; that regulations and the current scale of wages be posted; and that grievances be first taken up with the proper officer of the company, then, in case of failure, through a grievance committee to be formed at each mine by the employees of that mine, married men to be in the majority on each committee, and, in the case of continued failure of adjustment, to a commission of three men to be appointed by the President of the United States, which shall be representative of each side, with a third member to act as umpire. Furthermore, " during the life of the truce" it is understood that certain conditions should be recognized: the waiving of legally enforceable contracts be

tween employers and employees, without the denial of voluntary agreements; the discontinuance of mine guards, though not of watchmen; the needlessness of the presence of Federal or State troops; no picketing, parading, colonizing, or mass campaigning that will interfere with the working operation of the mine; acceptance by both the employers and the employees of the decisions of the commission as binding; no suspension of work pending investigation; the allowing of the suspension of the operation of the mine for a cause satisfactory to the commission; the acceptance of penalties imposed by the commission.

In transmitting this proposed basis for a truce to the officers of the mining corporations and the miners' union involved, the President said: "I recommend it to you for your most serious consideration. I hope you will consider it as if you were acting for the whole country, and I beg that you will regard it as urged upon your acceptance by myself with very deep earnestness. This is a time, I am sure you will feel, when everything should be done that is possible for men to do, to see that all untoward and threatening circumstances of every sort are taken out of the life of the people of the United States."

In thus intervening in this Colorado strike President Wilson is following the precedent set by President Roosevelt in the great anthracite strike of 1902. There are, however, some notable differences. In the case of the anthracite strike the commission appointed by the President was finally formed and accepted by the parties to the strike within about six months of the beginning of the strike, while the strike still continuing in Colorado has been in existence already for some eleven months. In the case of the anthracite strike the commission was appointed before there was any need of the use of Federal troops; but in the case of the Colorado strike, although Federal troops have been for several months employed in the strike field, and although they have been unable to prevent what the President's appointees consider a state of war, there has not yet been any commission appointed.

We hope that both the corporations and the miners will accept the good offices of the President and accede to the truce on the basis which he has proposed. But it is a disgrace to the Nation that it should be possible for war conditions to remain in any part of the country for so long a time, and that it

should be possible for any American to hold that in such a case the President must appeal for peace by request, not compel it by authority.

MEXICO AND THE UNITED STATES

The question is often asked, When will the United States withdraw its troops from Vera Cruz? Light is thrown upon this point and on the attitude of our Administration toward the present status in Mexico by what claims to be a trustworthy though unofficial statement of the President's position published in the New York "Times." According to this, the President is willing to withdraw our soldiers if General Carranza will "resign from his present office" and allow some other leading Mexican to succeed him; or he will recognize Carranza as Provisional President and withdraw the troops if Carranza will pledge himself not to be a candidate at the election for President; or, if Carranza does not now assume the title of Provisional President, our Administration will recognize his military command, will agree that he should be a candidate at the election, will recognize as President whoever is elected, and will then withdraw the troops.

If it is true, as Mexican despatches have stated, that Carranza has systematically

called himself First Chief and not Provisional President, and has exercised executive power solely as a victorious military commander, these proposals seem, partly at least, superfluous; the third state of things actually exists, it is believed, and the plan of the third proposal is likely to be carried out. The whole situation hinges on the fact that the Constitution of Mexico provides that a person who holds the office of Provisional President at the time of a general election shall not be a candidate in that election to succeed himself as President.

It is right that the United States should insist on the observing of every legal requirement in the establishing of a new Government in Mexico. It is also right that it should look not only to the letter but to the spirit of the law. We should not abandon our watch over Mexico's affairs until it is clear that the new Government is not only legal, technically speaking, but that it stands for fair dealing and is not a mere dictatorship under another name. Otherwise the whole question may have to be taken up afresh.

General Villa's position remains more or

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less of a mystery. In the only definite state. ment that he has made he declares :

This country [Mexico] should not again be under military government. The armies by our Constitution are secondary to the constituted Government, and it is now time that the country should be governed by the people, for the people, and not, as heretofore, governed by a military clique whose only object is personal welfare and not the welfare of the masses.

FEDERAL CONTROL OF THE
MISSISSIPPI RIVER

In the course of a speech recently delivered before a great audience in New Orleans in behalf of the Progressive party, Mr. Roosevelt touched upon one subject that has been too much neglected in spite of the fact that it is of National concern. To the people of Louisiana Mr. Roosevelt said that the Mississippi River, the Father of Waters, was at once their most valuable asset and their most dangerous liability. Mr. Roosevelt pointed out that the control of this river was absolutely beyond the power or resources of any one State.

Merely to build levees in the lower course of the river," he said, "will not avail. The levees must be built. But in certain great crises they will always prove useless by themselves. The water flows from State to State, now as the most potent aid to life and well-being, and again as fraught with the most terrible menace of destruction and of death. In the upper part of its course there is need to use the waters for irrigation. In the lower part there is need to prevent their ruining the land by flood. In all parts

the water needs to be harnessed for use in our industrial development."

Therefore, Mr. Roosevelt concluded, the control of the Mississippi River is a matter for National action. He suggested that the twenty-five million dollars which it is proposed to pay to Colombia the National Government could put to better use by devoting it to the improvement of this great river together with "the plant of the Panama Canal, and as many scores of millions extra as are necessary, in precisely the same way as it used this money to construct the Panama Canal."

The successor of Pius X was elected by the Conclave of Cardinals at Rome last week. His name is Giacomo della Chiesa. He was

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born not quite sixty years ago at Pegli, on the shores of the Mediterranean near Genoa, of a family of the Italian nobility. His rise in the Roman Church has been dramatic. He was ordained a priest in 1878, served as an ecclesiastical official in Spain until 1887, became Secretary to Cardinal Rampolla in 1887, became Archbishop of Bologna in 1907, and a Cardinal in May, 1914. Cardinal Rampolla was Papal Secretary of State for Leo XIII, and would perhaps have been elected Pope to succeed Leo if Austria had not exercised the veto, which she then possessed, but which was abolished by Pius X. The new Pope has been so short a time a cardinal that very little is known either of his personality or of his policy, outside of the hierarchy of the Italian Church. His long and intimate association with Cardinal Rampolla, however, indicates that he has been trained in diplomatic statesmanship of a high order, as well as in dogmatic theology of a conservative type. An estimate of the effect of his election upon the Roman Catholic Church, written by an ecclesiastic of that Church, will be found elsewhere in this issue.

THE YALE SCHOOL OF RELIGION

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In our "Commencement Notes months ago mention was made of the fact that the Yale Divinity School has been renamed the Yale School of Religion. The fact is of more than transient interest. What it involves needs to be adequately understood. In making the changes that required the change of name the Faculty of the School and the Corporation of the University felt that they were not making a new departure, but rather were returning on a higher plane and with wider sweep to the ideal of the founders" of Yale in 1701, to train men "for Publick employment both in Church & Civil State."

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This broad conception of Christian obligation has in our times discovered new fields of service, in which a thorough study of religion on its theoretical side must advance hand in hand with the widest study of it on its practical side. Provision must be made for the thorough training of a Christian ministry for service in all these new fields, as well as for the pastorate of churches. Twenty years ago provision for these new demands made a beginning which has been steadily followed up along with the expansion of philanthropic social work at home and foreign missionary work abroad. Such was the demonstration

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The plan then adopted actually instituted five schools (for convenience called departments) under the one name, Divinity School—a school for the training of pastors and preachers; a school for that of the foreign missionary, whether layman or ordained minister; a school for that of the teacher of religion, apart from the preaching office, in church or college; a school for the training of social workers; and a school of research in the history and philosophy of religion. It then went on record that the school thus reorganized "may now not inappropriately be termed the Yale School of Religion and Christian Science." The plan thus outlined was put at once into operation. Besides the courses given in these departments there is large use of those given in other departments of the University. In the Department of Missions its own courses were thus supplemented in the current year by more than one hundred others given by more than thirty professors.

What those best qualified to judge think of this scheme was expressed in 1909 by Dr. John R. Mott, President of the World's Student Christian Federation, in a letter to President Hadley: "Your plan is literally great. It is most timely as well as prophetic. It is adapted to meet the requirements of the modern world as no scheme which I have seen in operation on either side of the Atlantic."

The large increase-$1,500,000—of the School's endowment required for the fully developed operation of such a scheme is now proceeding at an encouraging rate. The sought-for organizer and head of such a School of Religion took office in 1912, when Dr. Charles Reynolds Brown, of Oakland, California, became its Dean.

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he went up to tell the New York Compensation Commission just how the heavy stone had fallen and hurt his back. Maddalena said he had been sick six weeks and they needed the money, for she was the oldest of seven, and, yes, that was her mother nursing the baby over there. They were all so anxious that they had come along to see if Giuseppe would surely get his money.

No, they had no lawyer. The Commission is a court without lawyers. Perhaps that is why the cases are passed upon so rapidly. Sixteen in twenty minutes is the rate at which they were handled the other day. If these sixteen claims had been tried at law, each case would have taken more than a year to decide, sometimes far more. Twenty years' work done in twenty minutes! As a laborsaving device the State Workmen's Compensation Commission ought to win the approval of even an efficiency engineer.

In the issue of August 8 The Outlook published a short summary of the New York Workmen's Compensation Law and pointed out some of the obstacles in the path of the five Commissioners. Since then the public hearings have been of daily occurrence in New York City, and a short interview with one of the Commissioners, Mr. John Mitchell, leader of the anthracite strike, has brought forward several interesting by-products, as it were, of the new law's application.

The most obvious is the increased willingness of employers to install safety devices in their factories. The fact that insurance premiums are reduced in direct proportion to the precautions taken to safeguard employees is a powerful argument for the " safety first

idea.

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"Also you can see that the new law will tend to bring employer and employee automatically into closer relations,' said Mr. Mitchell, "since by its provisions the old custom in many industries of hiring men by number is done away with. Now the laborer's name and weekly wage must be kept in writing. It is likely to give one a different feeling to learn that James Smith, who received $9.60 per week, has lost his right arm in the company's service, instead of the old report that Laborer No. 11,729 has been injured.

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FOR WHAT SHALL WE PRAY?

if James is paid, and it creates a far better feeling among the workers. In the old days, even if the employer wanted to pay a fair compensation, his insurance company made him fight the case, and a lawsuit goes further than most things to stir up strife between capital and labor."

A DEMOCRATIC TRIBUNAL

It is not for nothing that this is named the Workmen's Commission. With no desire to be hard on capital in its struggle for existence, the Commissioners seem to feel that they have been appointed chiefly to see that labor receives that redress which the courts cannot give. The whole tone of the hearings shows this spirit. As the chief attendant expressed it, pointing to a bench full of anxious claimants: They don't need to be afraid of us. We're for them. If it wasn't for this here Commission, they wouldn't get a cent."

Sometimes the worker himself makes it difficult to win his case. At one of the hearings recently a big, eager longshoreman gave the Commissioners a lot of trouble by insisting that he had hunted for work at least a week earlier than the limit of the period for which he was declared incapacitated. The man wanted to show that he needed employment and wasn't lazy, and he nearly wrecked any endeavors to give him compensation for the time he was disabled. Finally the whole Commission broke into laughter at his obtuseness, while the representative of the insurance company smilingly agreed to make no objection to payment for the full time of unemployment.

There is one class of citizen to whom the new law has proved disastrous. It has literally taken the bread from the mouth of the shyster lawyer known as "ambulance chaser." The cutthroat methods by which he was used, on the one hand, to hold up the companies for large damages, and, on the other, retained seventy-five per cent of the money collected for his fees and costs, are impossible now. An injured employee has still the right to take his case into court, and a defeat at law will not prejudice him in applying to the Commission later; but there are not many workingmen who will give up their immediate relief from the State for the tedious uncertainty of legal redress.

It is a pity that some of our judges throughout the country could not visit the hearings and mark the celerity and brevity with which

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the awards are made. It might be a good idea for the Bar Association's Committee on Reform of Legal Procedure to look in occasionally and take a few notes. Besides despatch, there is shown a generous spirit of kindness and fair play. The relations between the Commission and the representatives of the insurance companies seem amicable. But it is the treatment of the workmen and the workmen's families that is so amazing to any one familiar with the court of a city magis

trate.

"The most democratic tribunal ever conceived" is the way one lawyer described it. It is to be hoped that the march of time and familiarity with misfortune may not tighten the broad sympathies of the Commission or make rigid the administration of its justice.

FOR WHAT SHALL WE PRAY?

We print on another page the President's proclamation requesting Americans to meet in their various places of worship on October 4 for special prayer on account of the war in Europe. This proclamation, beautiful alike in its spirit and in its form, will appeal to all Americans, whether Roman Catholics, Protestants, Jews, or Agnostics. Even those who doubt the value of prayer may well join in this common expression of deep desire for the speedy recovery of Europe from this epidemic of war.

For what shall we pray?

In the time of William of Orange, those prayed well who prayed for religious libertythe right of every man to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience.

In the time of the American Revolution, those prayed well who prayed that the Colonies might be emancipated and that a new nation might be born, "conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

In the Civil War, those prayed well who prayed that the slave might be emancipated and the Union preserved on the basis of justice and liberty.

To-day those will pray well who pray that military despotism may be destroyed, the reign of the sword may be ended, and the reign of the conscience and the reason may begin.

Righteousness and judgment are said by a Hebrew poet to be the habitation of God's throne. Enduring peace-the peace of

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