World Unity/Volume 8/Issue 1/Text

World Unity Volume 8, Issue 1

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[Page 1]WORLD UNITY INTERPRETING THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE JOHN HERMAN RANDALL, Editor HORACE HOLLEY, Managing Editor

CONTENTS

APRIL, 1931 Vol. VIII No. 1

Romain Rolland Frontispiece The Rift in the Clouds Editorial The Old Homesteads, Inc. C. F. Ansley The Conscience of Europe. III. Robert Merrill Bartlett Economic World Welfare. I. Amos Stote Man's Three-Fold World Grover Clark Apostles of World Unity XXVII. John Burns Walter Walsh Elements of a World Culture VI. Philosophy John Herman Randall, Jr. Leaves of the Greater Bible IX. Muhammadan Prayers William Norman Guthrie The Problem of Armaments. II. Dexter Perkins 'Round the World Log of a Sociologist VI. White and Yellow-White and Red Herbert A. Miller The Meetingplace of East and West Horace Holley The Appreciation of Religion Taraknath Das Round Table

(Contents indexed in the International Index to Periodicals

WORLD UNITY MAGAZINE is published by WORLD UNITY PUBLISHING CORPORATION, 4 East 12th Street, New York City: MARY RUMSEY MOVIUS, president; HORACE HOLLEY, vice-president: FLORENCE MORTON, treasurer: JOHN HERMAN RANDALL, secretary. Published monthly, 35 cents a copy, $3.50 a year in the United States and in all other countries (postage included). THE WORLD UNITY PUBLISHING CORPORATION and its editors welcome correspondence on articles related to the aims and purposes of the magazine. Printed in U. S. A. Contents copyrighted 1931 by WORLD UNITY PUBLISHING CORPORATION. [Page 2]

ROMAIN ROLLAND

"The great lesson has not yet been learned; hate still flames below the embers which so lately ravished the earth." [Page 3]

EDITORIAL

WHETHER there is a real change for the better in economic conditions may as yet be open to question. The upward swing in the stock market, the increased activity in the textile and a few other lines, and the taking up of unemployment in certain industries, have all helped to change the psychological attitude of pessimism that prevailed in December and January. But whether it registers more than the seasonal activity that was to be expected remains to be seen. The grave danger is that "business prosperity" may return, in some measure, before the nations are forced to grapple seriously and intelligently with the world economic conditions that demand a larger degree of economic cooperation. This would only mean that the solution of the present economic maladjustments had been postponed to some indefinite future.

From the political viewpoint, however, there are two recent events that do register real progress, that will help to lift the clouds of discouragement that characterized the year 1930, and that will be reflected in general world economic conditions. The Franco-Italian naval settlement, which was announced carly in March, definitely removes one of the acute causes of fear and uncertainty that has existed ever since the London Naval Conference of a year ago. The agreement reached at that time to limit the building of naval armaments, by Great Britain, the United States and Japan, was conditioned upon an agreement being reached between France and Italy. This problem has hung fire for an entire year; again and again negotiations between these two countries have reached a deadlock. That a settlement has now been reached is a triumph for "the new diplomacy" [Page 4]and demonstrates the effectiveness of patient, persistent negotiation over even the knottiest problem. The success in this instance is due chiefly to the statesmanship of Mr. Henderson, M. Briand and S. Grandi. This settlement not only put an end to the naval competition between France and Italy, but also removes the danger that Great Britain might invoke the "escalator clause" in the London Treaty, thus plunging the five naval powers again into unrestrained competition in naval construction. This helps to pave the way for the World Conference on Disarmament to be held in 1932. If France, as reported, should decide to make Italy a loan of $100,000,000 it would tend tremendously to lessen the friction between these two countries besides greatly easing economic conditions in Italy.

The second outstanding event is the successful issue of the conversations that have been taking place in India between the Viceroy Lord Irwin and Mahatma Gandhi. The success of the Round Table Conference held in London on the Indian Situation was altogether dependent upon Mahatma Gandhi's attitude after the return of the Indian delegates. While no official communiqué has yet appeared, at the present writing it is understood that concessions have been made on both sides and a truce has been declared: civil disobedience is to end and the people living on the coast are to be allowed to make salt. It is expected that political prisoners will be released and Gandhi will no longer press his demand for an inquiry into alleged police excesses. This opens the way for a continuance of the conferences in India, in the hope that they will lead to a policy of cooperation between the Government and the Nationalists that may lead eventually to a free Dominion status for India.

The Franco-Italian naval settlement in Europe and the truce for India agreed upon by the Viceroy and Gandhi, in Asia, are the outstanding events that tend to brighten the present political outlook, and suggest that the world does move forward, even if slowly.

J. H. R. [Page 5]

by C. F. ANSLEY

"CIVILIZATIONS ARE BASED UPON AGRICULTURE AND DO NOT PROVE MORE STABLE THAN THEIR FOUNDATION. A WORLD ORDER WOULD BE LIMITED IN THE SAME INCONVENIENT, PROSAIC WAY; AND POSSIBLY SOME WHO WISH TO BUILD A WORLD ORDER WILL THINK BEST NOT TO ASSUME AN OVER-PRODUCTIVE AGRICULTURE BUT TO INCLUDE A FOUNDATION IN THEIR PLAN."

As long as the problem in farming is understood to result from overproduction, no patient consideration of the problem can reasonably be expected. The obvious solution is the rural exodus, which is generally held too slow, but which promises to continue until production is sufficiently diminished. If the momentum of the exodus should carry it beyond that point, the rural problem would become an urban problem, not to be dismissed. Civilizations are based upon agriculture and do not prove more stable than their foundation. A world order would be limited in the same inconvenient, prosaic way; and possibly some who wish to build a world order will think best not to assume an overproductive agriculture but to include a foundation in their plan.

The cleavage between different kinds of farming goes deeper than the cleavages made by national boundaries. The "grain factory," with its heavy machines, seasonal demand for wage labor, and absentee ownership, is a part of the metropolitan system. In the modern world it is new, though something like it has developed in other times of centralization. The grain factory [Page 6]is operated to produce grain to be marketed for money with which to pay dividends. Most remote in nature from the grain factory is the "subsistence farm," operated by a family to provide products for the use of the family. Hesiod had the subsistence farm in mind when he said, "A house, a woman, and a plow ox- these are the first needs of a farmer." The subsistence farm is older than the metropolis, older than Hesiod; it is neolithic. Its first needs are useless to the grain factory.

In our time, print is a metropolitan instrument. The grain factory is readily understood by the metropolis and is interpreted from day to day in papers and books; it is believed to have superseded other kinds of farming, in which nevertheless the great majority of the world's population are still engaged; and glowing prophecies of its future are staple. Reliance on the grain factory is an unquestioned article of faith to the metropolitan dictatorship of Russia as it is to the United States. These nations are not in accord about some things, but Russia has American approval in seeking the counsel of Thomas Campbell, the "wheat king; the cleavage between the two nations does not prevent unity in acceptance of Mr. Campbell's Montana grain factory as the ideal farm.

The Russian government is confident that its grain factories will make money. It equips them and keeps them going with money derived from taxing other kinds of farms. The American grain factories are financed by individuals or corporations, for private profit. Financing is generous in Russia but in America. has been somewhat niggardly so far. American faith in farming corporations expresses itself in a creed rather than in the purchase of stocks and bonds. The creed says that grain factories will be profitable, but there is hesitancy to participate in the profits. Financiers who have acquired farms from debtors and can not sell or rent the farms exchange them for stocks in farming corporations, attaining thereby relative ease and economy in management while the search for purchasers of farms goes on. There is natural reluctance to abandon what has seemed good property, but there is reluctance also to pay real money for stocks or bonds [Page 7]

THE OLD HOMESTEADS, INC.

of farming corporations. In the end, no doubt, the grain factory, wherever it is, will be kept going if it pays; and paying, in the end, will have to include replacement of worn-out machinery and of fertility mined from the soil. Because such American investors as are not caught with farms on their hands are preoccupied with other matters, Russia takes the lead in the field test of the grain factory. The outcome of the test should be instructive, in one way or another; it should show whether American investors would or would not have done well to put more money into stocks of farming corporations and assessments on such stocks. Professor James E. Boyle, of Cornell, holds that "All corporation farms in the United States can be divided into two classes: those which have already failed, and those which are going to fail."

The work of the grain factory is seasonal, and there is no need that anybody should live permanently on the land except such caretakers as correspond to the night watchmen of other factories. Migratory labor is characteristic. The jobs are not popular with American workers, but Mexicans are to be had in sufficient number, and such Americans as are thought necessary can be drawn from the reservoir of the unemployed. The labor organization that has been most prominently associated with factory farming is the I. W. W. The "conservative farmer" is typically not the migratory laborer on a factory farm.

Subsistence farming through its long history has been associated with other occupations. In a neighborhood of subsistence farmers, there is little occasion for exchanging farm products, since every family produces about what it needs, but there is much exchange of other products and of services; the farmer's income is considerably larger than the farm income. The American Indian farmer and the white pioneer often hunted and trapped, securing skins that were exchanged for other commodities. The Indian who grew corn and other crops might be a flint-worker. The white pioneer who farmed might be a gunsmith, a cabinet-maker, a minister, or a physician. Occupations were combined in like ways in the Greek city state and the medieval manor. [Page 8]When such horse-drawn machines as the mower and the reaper were introduced, some subsistence farmers enlarged their farming operations and looked to their marketable surplus of agricultural products to procure for them commodities that their farming did not yield. Such men came to be known in America as "business farmers" or "independent farmers." In Russia, the farmer with a marketable surplus is a "kulak." Russia, committed to the grain factory, has announced its purpose to "liquidate or wipe out the kulak. The process is accelerated or retarded as may seem judicious at the moment, but the kulak is to be liquidated. Measures in America are less direct but apparently more effective. There is little turbulence in America, such as Russia reports; but about two million persons have been leaving American farm homes every year; the exodus kept up at this rate from 1922, when the first attempt was made to measure it, until urban unemployment slowed it down to 1,543,000 in 1930. The exodus is not from the grain factory, where almost nobody lives; it is from the independent farm. For a number of reasons primarily poverty-independent farming becomes unacceptable. The American kulak liquidates himself. If acceleration of the process is desired, it may be effected at any time by providing more jobs that pay wages. It is found in the South that a mill job paying low wages for long hours of hard work will attract many applicants from farms. America, it seems, will experience no shortage of wage-earners as long as independent farmers last. To solve the problems of the independent farmer, it is necessary only to solve the problem of unemployment. There are too many farmers" only because there are too many people in the cities.

The independent farmer is almost invariably married. Like Hesiod’s subsistence farmer, he needs a woman. Among independent farmers, a young man who buys or rents a farm is understood thereby to announce that his marriage will occur before his independent farming begins. A young man who marries is understood to have made arrangements to buy or rent a farm. Independent farming is almost necessarily a partnership of man and [Page 9]

THE OLD HOMESTEADS, INC.

wife. Field work takes the hours of the man's day, with chores by lantern light before and after. It can not be neglected for house work, and no boarding house is accessible, even if the farmer made enough to pay his board. The young man must marry or find a city job.

Some investigations have indicated that the exodus from the independent farm is led by the young woman. Work there proves less attractive than the jobs that young women secure in city stores and offices. City work was once mostly man's work and drew young men from villages until villages became notably feminine, but times have changed. City work more and more has to do with finance and with buying and selling and is done more and more by women. The rural exodus might be approximately the same if it were not led by young women, but there is reason enough for it if the young woman prefers not to become the wife of an independent farmer.

The exodus is selective, taking by preference the unmarried young women and young men. Those who marry can not leave the farms so easily. For the married, even poverty on the farm is better than unemployment in the city; unemployment is a risk that a man may take for himself but not for his wife and children. So it happens that one who commits himself to independent farming by marriage may not thereafter find himself free to leave farming, whatever its fortunes. Marriage has this recognized disadvantage. No doubt there will be independent farms for some time to come, though the independent farmer and his wife, it seems, are growing older, and the birth rate diminishes.

Some power farming machinery is used on independent farms, but often they are not large enough to use the tractor economically. Horses and mules are much used, as, for example, in the eastern part of the South. Since the deflation of 1920 the outlook for independent farming has not encouraged the raising of colts. Horses diminish in number and grow older. A publication of the Department of Agriculture (Miscellaneous Publication No. 73) says of horses and mules on farms: "Indications are that the number will be reduced from about 25,000,000 in 1920 [Page 10]and 19,000,000 at present [1930] to about 10,000,000 to 11,000,000 or less by 1940, providing births continue at about present or lower levels. With the maximum increase that could occur under the stimulus of the most rapidly possible rising prices, the number by 1940 would not exceed 14,000,000 or 15,000,000." The passing of the horse, like the passing of the independent farmer, has been observed with satisfaction: it is said to release land for the production of human food. There is obvious reason to believe that in sufficient number both horses and independent farmers will pass. Whatever the iron laws of economics may decree, iron laws of biology now have the say.

Farms in the state of New York have been abandoned since 1920 at a rate above 250,000 acres a year. This is equivalent to an advance of wilderness on a hundred-mile front at the rate of about four miles a year. The passing of the horse is not, in fact, accompanied by an increase in land devoted to the production of human food. Temporarily it may be accompanied, in a favorable season, by an increase in the efficiency of the individual farmer; he is not giving so much of his time to colts or to children, but is devoting his strength to mining his soil.

The pecuniary rewards of the independent farmer seem to him to depend on his output. Whatever is true of his class as a whole, the individual is paid twice as much for two bushels of corn as for one bushel; twice as much for two hogs of a given size as for one. While the laborer of the grain factory receives wages, the pay of the independent farmer is on a piecework basis, like the pay in the city sweatshop. The independent farm, like the sweatshop, is a family enterprise by which all members of the family except the youngest endeavor to procure enough money to keep the family going. Weather and the market system make the rewards of the farm family's work less certain than the rewards of piecework in the city, which are fixed before the work is begun; but the independence of the independent farm is of the same nature as that of the sweatshop; the two are capitalistic enterprises in the same sense.

The farmer is advised to lower his cost of production, to [Page 11]

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unite the farmers of his nation or the world, and to control the output of agriculture in the nation or the world. The owners of factory farms, being business men, may try these businesslike methods. What the independent farmer thinks of them and of measures or proposed measures of "farm relief" has to be inferred from such data as the absence of a market for his farm and the magnitude and steadiness of the rural exodus. He is said to clamor and to wail, but a word from the independent farmer himself is seldom heard from a platform or seen in print. When wages are offered, he appears. Farm relief has concerned itself primarily not with the independent farmer or his crop but with wheat, the typical crop of the grain factory. The owners of the grain factory are more influential than the independent farmer. Like the independent farm and unlike the factory farm, the subsistence farm is regularly a one-family enterprise, conducted by a man, a woman, and their children. It differs from the independent farm fundamentally in that it does not have as its object making money by supplying the market system with what it will take for what it will pay; the object of subsistence farming is to supply the household itself with products desired by the household. If any farm products are marketed, income from that source is incidental. Ralph Borsodi, the author of "This Ugly Civilization, is said to sell nothing from his farm. No doubt he makes money faster by giving his time to something else than he could by trying to sell his little surplus of radishes or asparagus. He may do better to give the surplus to some neighbor. Under neighborly folkways, he would lose nothing in the end by being generous clever," as country people used to say.

Though the theory of the subsistence farm is obsolete, many yet prefer a home with a little land to an apartment and no land. Doubt has been expressed as to whether the new woman will accept farm life; but when a subsistence farm is not occupied by a family, the occupant seems more likely to be a woman than a man. The move from the city to the land often comes about as a result of a mother's wish that her children may have their own playground and may have experience of plants and domestic [Page 12]animals. Such of the products of the farm as the household can use, including flowers, may be appraised at their full retail value, which is a remunerative return; but reasons other than pecuniary give the subsistence farm its chief appeal. It is the environment or habitat to which man has become adjusted. The association of the one-family home with the subsistence farm is very ancient and stable. Among the people of subsistence farms, monogamous marriage is not considered a problem; the people are rarely interested in substitutes or modifications.

Since man is gregarious, and since subsistence farming implies and requires exchange of services and manufactured products, subsistence farms are everywhere grouped in neighborhoods. The "settlements" of American pioneers were such neighborhoods, as were the city states of the Middle Ages and of ancient Greece. Neighborhoods of subsistence farmers make head against the wilderness. They farm intensively and increase their cultivated acreage. The neighborhood of subsistence farmers may be the largest stable social unit that man has yet developed. More ambitious organizations are local at most and no one of them now extant is very old. Maps showing national boundaries need frequent revision. In general the inhabited part of the earth is and, at least from the beginning of neolithic time, has been occupied chiefly by neighborhoods of subsistence farmers. Past all changes in national boundaries, the people of these neighborhoods are the meek who inherit the earth.

Europeans came out of neolithic time with many possessions—for example, with essentially all the farm crops and farm animals that we have now, except such crops as we have acquired from neolithic American Indians. The impress of the neolithic millenniums upon us is such that, as Thorstein Veblen said, into the neolithic scheme of life we should fall, if circumstances permitted, as our "state of nature." Our state of nature was life in neighborhoods of human scale, with each family farming and having some other occupation or occupations, and with no unemployed. It was this way of life that developed the Greeks, the Romans, medieval Europe, and America. [Page 13]

THE OLD HOMESTEADS, INC.

When the old American homes were built, Americans were living in this essentially neolithic way. We are understood to have changed everything since then. Some of the homes are razed as obstacles to the tractor; more of them are permitted to fall into their cellars, and around the cellars trees are covering the cleared and walled fields. The excavations and walls in the jungle may sometime interest savants, who will debate whether an older race vanished as a result of malaria or of incursions of barbarians. While the story of the ruins is still remembered, they tell us of a neighborhood life that seemed good, built on land that, for the purpose, seemed worth winning from the wilderness that now wins it back. In the growth in what was a dooryard, one still sometimes finds lilacs and a pair of "bridal elms."

The land abandoned, it is said, should never have been cleared; but it averages much better than the land that supported the Greek city states. Until centralization set in, American rural neighborhoods or "towns" had a chance to develop in something like the Greek way and obviously looked forward to some such autonomous development. What men became in ancient Greece, they might have become in the land New York abandons. Medieval Europe would have used such land and would have covered it with a "white robe of churches" worth going to see.

A farm that is accessible to one who has an urban job is held or finds a buyer. The migration from urban centers goes as far as commuting goes—not farther, to regions of independent farms. Subsistence farming is primarily not a business but a way of life, and it must be supplemented by a source of income. Many who live in cities work in the hope of achieving a financial status that will permit them to live in the country. Often the commuter who acquires a farm does what he can to make the house look as it used to look and furnishes it with such antiques as he can afford. The antiques are such furniture as was made and generally used in American neighborhoods when the houses were built. The ways that are said to be superseded are restored as far as means permit. Where subsistence farming is possible—that is, within the limits of commuting—there is no lack of a [Page 14]market for land. The soil is improved, not mined as the "wheat king mines his leased land. In "net" figures of the rural exodus, the suburban trend cancels more or less of the migration from business farms.

Farm families producing enough for themselves regularly have something left over for hospitality and for lean years. A square mile in subsistence farms has a larger surplus, investigation has shown, than a square mile cultivated in the less intensive way of the grain factory, which does not make the land flow with milk and honey. The abandoned square mile yields no surplus. A metropolis might have some support of various kinds from an inhabited hinterland such as built the metropolis, but our time is not the first to find the idea uninteresting. Decentralization of industry would increase subsistence farming but is understood to be detrimental to the metropolis, which prefers latifundia and unemployment and will try them out. When decentralization has come about hitherto, it has happened unplanned, without preparation. What has been done for rural communities has been done by themselves, through their own autonomies.

The incidental surplus of subsistence farming, while large per square mile, is inconsiderable per farm family. If subsistence farming were to support cities, there are not "too many farmers," as there are said to be. There is abundant land, but there are not enough farmers, and enough could not be provided without inconvenient delay. As the factory farm depends on the city, the city now depends on the factory farm. Field tests are to determine whether factory methods and business principles are sufficiently suited to agriculture.

If factory methods in farming do what is expected of them, hinterlands will lose what is left of their population, new profits will accrue to absentee investors, and food will be supplied to those who meet the terms fixed by the farming corporations. If farming, on the contrary, should once more prove that it is not a business but a way of life, rural neighborhoods may again attempt to develop a civilization of the kind known to the Greek and medieval city states and, until recently, to America also. [Page 15]Such a rural civilization, making country life as acceptable as metropolitan life, would not seem to Plato or Emerson difficult to achieve. George Russell ("A.E.) has told Americans something of what has been done in rural Ireland and has suggested what rural America might be. In the writings of others and in practical beginnings in Denmark and elsewhere, there are further suggestions that might be considered if the financial support of factory farming, under the Russian plan and the American, should disappoint expectations, or if urban unemployment should continue until rural industries return.

The fifth contribution to a symposium on "The Coming World Order," edited by Archie M. Palmer. [Page 16]

THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE

by ROBERT MERRILL BARTLETT Lately on the Faculty of Peking University

III

As I entered Romain Rolland’s garden I looked over the hedges to the blue depths of Lac Leman and to the towering Swiss Alps. His Villa Olga was a poet’s retreat in a quiet land, yet close to the center of action where he could feel the pulse of the nations. The breath of the Orient was in his home—in the ebony and ivory furniture, scrolls and embroideries; and the culture of all the world in the books massed in his library. He sat in a great chair, and I before him, studying his fascinating personality. He was tall and slender, moving with an enthusiasm youthful for his sixty-three years. A slight bend in the back, gray hair and moustache and a face marked by discipline, gave proof of his years of struggle. Suffering had chiseled its lines on his strong, poetic face. His blue eyes were piercing, yet filled with genial friendliness; I was absorbed by the gaze of those grave and burning eyes, and then received with affectionate fatherliness. He was dressed in black, with high vest and clerical collar, an austerity which augmented his beautifully ascetic face. I never looked at a figure who so gripped my imagination. I felt at once that here was a hero who was more than worthy of the respect which I had held for his brave spirit.

When I told Monsieur Rolland that I had first seen his name in the bookshops of the New China, he spoke of his deep concern for the Chinese people,

“The Chinese who have come to me lately have revealed a spirit of discouragement as if the task were too great. They seem [Page 17]sensitive to the noblest ideals for their land, but almost crushed under the burden of its problems. And perhaps most significant of all, they are grasping now for a moral force. Tell me what you think of their struggle."

I spoke something of the intellectual movement that lies back of the maneuvers of war lords, which makes China the center of the greatest renaissance of history. He asked about the program of the New Thought movement. Were its leaders being heard today or had changing political factions nullified their efforts through persecution? A Chinese friend had told him of the exile of the literati and their tragic unhappiness. A keen sympathy that is bred only through intimate contact with the Chinese conflict was revealed in his words:

"All this is close to my heart. I have helped to found a Franco-Chinese literary organ which has for its purpose the progress of friendship between Europe and the Orient and the advancement of liberality in China and France. A number of the free spirits of both countries are its supporters and contributors. The government of China has not been very cordial to its progressive tones. It is encouraging to hear you say that these Chinese literary men have some real following. I believe that they and their people have the qualities to battle through this crisis of darkness.

"Our own efforts in Europe are terrifyingly difficult. Most of the prophets who rose above the war conflict and sacrificed for the ideals of internationalism are now as ill received and unpopular as during the war, while those who have exploited the people and played the rôle of leadership in devastating Europe are still kept in power. Those who have suffered for the freedom of new ways are terribly alone. Independent spirits seem to be spending themselves in puerile struggle against the entrenched error of old ways. Progress toward international understanding is almost negligible. The great lesson has not yet been learned; hate still flames below the embers which so lately ravished the earth. This is an age of terror, yet filled with possibility, an era when human enterprises are in a state of flux more [Page 18]pronounced than civilization has ever known. I think back and realize that progress has been made. I recall the dark days of the nineteenth century when Tolstoy in desperation wrote 'What Shall We Do?', when Maupassant went mad and the pioneer spirits were groping in an awful darkness. The world is being stirred with an analytic questioning such as we felt during the Dreyfus Affair, only on a colossal scale."

Knowing Rolland's close contact with Gandhi I was eager to find how the Indian stood in his estimation since he had written so incomparably of the Mahatma in his biography. "Had Gandhi not lost during the past months by his salt campaign?" I mentioned Mr. Wells and others who questioned his statesmanship.

The face of Rolland lit up with that glorious animation which marked him one with the heroes of the ideal, displaying that creative sympathy which made him the brother of Beethoven. Michelangelo, Tolstoy, and the great souls he has made his comrades.

"Who can say conclusively that Gandhi is not a statesman' He is the master statesman of the highest social motive and the incarnation of the ideal in our day. A man like Mr. Wells may not understand him and his Oriental setting. Mr. Wells and I are old friends; he was one of the first to receive Jean Christophe in England. He has an audacious mind to tackle the complete history of twenty centuries in one study. Some of us tremble in making a critical survey of only twenty years. How few Westerners have the background and patience to understand Gandhi and Indian ways of thought. Many are unwilling to peel off the prejudices of thought and seek patiently and zealously to grasp the other view. No matter what culture we may deal with I have learned that there is always something rewarding to be discovered. The Eternal Spirit has spoken in many ways and to many souls scattered through the ages of time. Few Westerners are fit to criticize Gandhi or Oriental thought.

"Great Britain is fair and eager to do what is right by the Indian people; Ramsay MacDonald and others have that ideal. [Page 19]

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Moreover Gandhi’s enterprises are not directed against Great Britain or solely at the independence of India. They include caste uplift, freedom for women, unity of Hindu and Muslim, self-support for poverty-stricken villages and non-violence.

"Westerners have much to learn from the Orientals. They offer profound discoveries in the deep realms of contemplation and mature reflections for our troubled Occident. My last two biographies, 'The Life of Ramakrishna' and 'The Life of Vivekananda and The Universal Gospel', have undertaken something of that study. These books have only recently been published in French and will soon be released in English."

Those who know the Orient find in Monsieur Rolland a remarkable comprehension of the profound wisdom of the East. He is more than a scholar of complex Oriental studies, he has become the most thrilling interpreter of East to West. His late biographies are a phenomenal contribution toward a fraternity between the two major philosophic divisions of the race. He told me that the Oriental students of Europe opposed him in his effort to write the life of Gandhi, some distrusted his interpretation of the East and others feared his introduction to the learned West of so dynamic a person as Gandhi under boldly liberal treatment.

Questioning me about American conditions, he showed a critical appraisal of Americanism which was not cluttered with those phobias against motors, radios and bath tubs which are corner stones for the denunciations of certain European critics. He said, "The soul of America is contending against a new and mighty material civilization. Her quarrel is not with its outward forms; her concern must be to keep the soul aspirations of men alive in a day of mammoth tension. Your duty and mine is to nurture that divine flame. America is driven by feverish forces and the contest will be decided by her response to the inner flame.

"It is the task of the free minds of the earth to transcend nationalism and make one fraternity of all nations. Mind should be slave to no one. We are made to bear the light, to defend the [Page 20]light, and to build about us the fellowship of mankind. On its surface the soil may seem foreign, but we plow deep and discover below the shallow differences of nationality and race the same hopes and fears.

Monsieur Rolland spoke swiftly, with flashing brilliance, one telling figure after another, his face alight with the creative vision of the genius who draws beautiful humanitarian expressions from his rich mind.

“Can we be expected to love or hate a nation when in every country we find the noble and the low? We belong to no one nation, but to the whole of mankind. When I wrote ‘Jean Christophe’ my first letter was from a young Chinese who wrote, ‘I am Jean Christophe. You have laid bare the struggle of my life.’ Then came others from young seekers in all parts of the globe—Japan, India, Africa and the Western World.”

The letters Monsieur Rolland has written to the intellectual pilgrims of other lands constitute a great literary work. During the World War he wrote to hundreds of pacifists, disillusioned and struggling patriots, disabled soldiers and heart-broken home folks who had lost their loved ones. Some day these letters may be published. The letter that Tolstoy wrote Rolland when he was a struggling young professor in Paris, and which led to his dedication to art for the sake of humanity, is to me one of the noblest gestures of all literature. I told my host how the story had stirred me and he exclaimed:

“Ah, the greatest leaders are those whose hearts beat for all men! Our profession does not matter so much, if only we have the passion for light and live in heroic action, striving to lift the curtains of darkness and raise the windows for light.”

The fire of heroism was in his words, and I thought of his years in a Paris attic, of his efforts in music, drama and history, as he sought to carry the ideal to his fellowmen, with almost fifty years of silence without recognition!

Music, painting and poetry do not hold men as they once did. They do not fulfil the possibilities in modern life I once thought they would. Science is now the center of man’s efforts [Page 21]

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and the most appealing mode of reform. Multitudes who do not heed the esthetic appeal may be led through science toward unity and enlightenment."

At the dinner table I sat opposite father Rolland, age ninety-four, between my host and his charming and brilliant sister, Madelaine Rolland. His words through that memorable meal were balanced yet radical, his face was always serene, yet clothed with the passion of a prophet. In the intimacy of his home I realized the qualities which have made him beloved by a host of disciples. In every land today are those who breathe new hope and determine to strive more bravely because of the inspiration of his life and his manifestoes to mankind. Has there been any figure like him since Tolstoy? Here is a superior man of universal mind, whose love is with every fighter for truth, and whose heart has a place for all the oppressed!

"The spiritual fellowship to which I belong is the very freest. Tolerance is the first attribute of religion. I want to give that message in 'Ramakrishna,' and recent letters about the book from Muslims and Hindus prove that some are ready to follow. Religion is tolerance, light, love! Communism is a religion, a worship of material forces. It may succeed in a certain type of society, but its regimentation of men and its material code do not permit play of the innate divine spark. The spirit of man cannot be enslaved!

"Religion justifies itself if it can preserve the soul against the encroaching demands of a material world. We need to recover the mysticism of the Orient. Too much contemplation has proved itself disastrous in India, but we must give heed to the divine fire within. Christianity began as a mystical faith; its spiritual glow died down, but was renewed in the middle ages. It must be recaptured and redefined for modern civilization.

"I want to finish my autobiography before I lay down my work. The first section, telling of my youth, has come out in the 'Prabasi Bengali Review of Calcutta. I want to tell of my inner struggle. Zweig and Jouve have related events but have not given the inner life. My career has been possessed by certain [Page 22]inexplicable ideals. I grew up in a humble home in Burgundy under the devoted care of my parents, but there was something more than training and environment. I had an innate longing for the music of the German masters, a craving to see Italy, and a desire to know about the Orient. As far back as I can remember there was this divine endowment which gave me a kinship with the men and causes that I have struggled to love."

Monsieur Rolland sat at the piano and played for me from his great companion, Beethoven. He bent over the Adagio from the Fourth Quartet, his pale, statue-like hands playing with the skill of a master. And then he plunged into The Last Symphony. As I watched his bent, gray figure my mind traveled a long pilgrimage through the years of his stormy, valiant life. "I am terribly alone these days," he had told me. "Peguy is gone, killed just as the Armistice was signed. Almost all of the old fraternity, which made the famous 'Cahier de la quinzaine,' were taken by the war." I thought also of the words of René Lalou, "His virtues are absolute sincerity, hatred of every baseness and every hypocrisy, love of heroism and divine music."

He rose, the deep triumphant notes resounding through the room.

"How wonderful it is to have that privilege of communion through music, and to be able to speak with the great spirits and to interpret their message to men!" I exclaimed with feeling.

"Ah, but it is only out of long silence!" he said.

I had brought with pride my original editions and Monsieur Rolland withdrew with them after his playing to write a personal message in each volume. After his cordial farewell, I walked into the Swiss moonlight through the great trees and down to the lake. I sat by the water to review my high experience; and read the challenge he had written on the pages of my books—"Si vous voulez trouver Dieu, servez l'homme." "Non moi, mon frère, mais toi!"

We comprehend the silent, wonder-working power of human conscience, when we stand in the presence of the free spirits of mankind. They renew our hope, for they are pioneers in "The [Page 23]

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struggle to think the best thought, and to express it, in tone and color and form and word; the staggle to do the greatest deeds, and lead the noblest and most useful lives; the struggle to see clearest and know truest and love strongest."

These are the creators of "The dream of a warm, throbbing, one-hearted empire of brothers!"

We join hands with Wells in waging scientific attack on the blunders of international living, with Zweig in growing beyond the barriers of nation and race, and with Rolland in making the enlightened spirit our motive power for creating a new world.

We reach hands across the seas and become one with fellow-spirits there. We will never feel alone, or bow before defeat! Never will we hate or wage war! But we will strive in valiant devotion to make tolerance and brotherhood supreme. The awakened conscience of man will banish the black clouds of today. Enough light and love will redeem mankind! [Page 24]

1. THE WORK OF THE INTERNATIONAL CHAMBER OF COMMERCE

by AMOS STOTE Publicist, Paris, France

DURING the years 1914 to 1918 the world had a continuous demonstration of the fact that economics, which comprehends all reasonable and progressive human activities, must have peace with understanding for its full expression.

Since June 24, 1920, the International Chamber of Commerce has been developing a routine of economic international procedure, establishing methods of international intercourse, and presenting the basic principles of the economics of peace to influential bodies throughout the world.

Today the International Chamber of Commerce is represented in forty-six countries, its Council is composed of representative men of national and international importance and outlook, from those twenty-eight countries. In each of those countries it has active Committees and nineteen of them, in turn, maintain official representatives permanently located in Paris, the headquarters of the International Chamber of Commerce.

During the last ten years the International Chamber of Commerce has represented the business world at thirty-five conferences held under the auspices of the League of Nations, and at the request of the League. These conferences have had to do with problems of international finance; international transportation and communications; tariffs and all forms of customs barriers; double taxation imposed upon the nationals of one country resident in another; the reform of the calendar; international aviation; protection of industrial properties belonging to na- [Page 25]

THE WORK OF THE INTERNATIONAL CHAMBER OF COMMERCE

tionals of other nations; international law, exchange and checks; arbitration of commercial disputes; combinations of rail and air transportation; the standardization of international economic statistics, the unification of international letters of credit, bills, orders and checks.

In every instance the International Chamber of Commerce has sent observers,, in many instances delegates and groups of experts composed of representatives from a number of nations, to those meetings of the League, always at the request of the League. It is not too much to say that the International Chamber of Commerce is in constant communication and cooperation with the League of Nations and the thirty-five meetings of the League in which the I. C. C. has participated but represent the more formal gatherings in which these two bodies combine in their service to world welfare.

As the League of Nations represents the expression of statesmen and governments that peace shall prevail throughout the world, so the International Chamber of Commerce represents the expression of the leaders in business, of practically all nations, that peace shall prevail throughout the world. A peace of understanding, of advancement, of hearty goodwill based on mutual advantages for the workers and consumers of all countries.

All in all the International Chamber of Commerce has been represented, by invitation, at eighty-one different international conferences during the last ten years. These have ranged from meetings of the International Association for Air Traffic, to the International Law Association, to a Baltic and White Sea Shipping Conference, to a congress held in the interests of the European silk industries, to the Congress of the International Maritime Committee, to several conferences concerned with air postal service and air traffic generally, to the general assembly of the Central Council to Encourage International Travel, to the Continental Publicity Union, to the Congress of the International Federation of the Technical and Professional Press, to the Congress of the International Telegraphic Union, to the assembly of the International Union of Transport Insurance, to the World [Page 26]Congress of Automobile Transports, to the meeting of the International Commission to Coordinate Agricultural Production, to the Diplomatic Conference Concerned with International Expositions, to the Congress of the International Federation of Grain and Seed Merchants, to the Session of the International Statistical Institute, to the Congress of the International Cotton Federation, to the Conference of American Chambers and Associations of Commerce, to the International Conference for the Treatment of Foreigners.

So much for a telegraphic presentation of the various and varied world problems on which the International Chamber of Commerce is engaged, to which it contributes highly specialized and technical service and from which it secures invaluable material which it puts at the service of powerful bodies in many countries devoted to promoting world unity as a soundly economic force for the advancement of all mankind.

There could hardly be a more concise and explicit presentation of the purposes of the International Chamber of Commerce than it has given of itself, in the following sentences:

"To restore and improve the mechanism of international exchange of goods and products.

"To remove the economic causes of international conflict.

"To reduce the barriers which hamper the development of international trade, and thus increase general prosperity.

"To express the views of the business world on the great questions which affect international trade relations.

"To work toward uniformity of commercial practice and of laws governing business transactions.

"To realize, on a permanent basis, the international cooperation necessitated by the economic interdependence of the modern world."

In addition to the twenty-eight countries in which the International Chamber of Commerce has national committees, its membership records cover a total of forty-six countries. At its Paris headquarters men of all nations are meeting almost daily. Its working staff, its executives, the resident representa- [Page 27]

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tives of the nineteen countries which maintain Administrative Commissioners in Paris; these form a cosmopolitan body working toward world betterment such as could scarcely be found in any other spot on earth.

Through the 949 organizations it represents it becomes the international mouthpiece of the most powerful economic institutions of all countries and, through the tens of thousands of members of these national organizations, it wields a subtle influence far greater than any casual observer could imagine.

Combined with this vast economic pressure for the understanding of international affairs, is an associate membership of the I. C. C. composed of 2423 individual members, men who head great organizations and who employ countless thousands of workers all over the world. Through its sum-total of direct contacts its influences permeate every great industry in existence.

Comparatively few people, even among those considered best informed on such subjects, know that the idea of the Dawes Plan was originally conceived by the International Chamber of Commerce and proposed at its meeting in Rome in 1923.

The International Restoration Committee of the I. C. C. was an instrumental factor in the working out of many of the complex and unprecedented problems which arose after 1918 in connection with the practical reestablishment of an economic peace the only peace which could conceivably have any hope of endurance.

The International Chamber of Commerce realizes that the much discussed "freedom of the seas" has small economic importance so long as the ports of all the world erect customs barriers which make the seas merely a no-man's land leading to nowhere.

Trade has long since ceased to follow the flag and commerce can not put its trust in armies and navies which destroy trade. Business goes where honorable commercial practices are established, where flags and their suggestions of force have been replaced by credit standards, by constructive services, by the wills of nations to make their commerce desired by other nations. [Page 28]World unity and world prosperity are interdependent. Both can live only by the steady increase in world understanding. One of the most prompt and practical ways by which world understanding is now being daily advanced is through the vast numbers of men from all countries who are living and doing business in all other countries.

Most of these are younger, more elastic men. Frequently they are shifted from one country to another. Frequently they are called upon to travel and trade in a number of surrounding countries. They become acquainted with the habits, customs, practices of several countries. It is part of their job to understand these ways and with understanding comes respect and appreciation.

Broadly speaking, it is the purpose of the I. C. C. to smooth the way for these commercial internationalists.

Yet more broadly speaking, it is the purpose of the I. C. C. not merel preserve but to multiply peace through proving its economic advantages to all the world. [Page 29]

MAN'S THREE-FOLD WORLD

by GROVER CLARK Consultant on Far Eastern Affairs

MAN lives in a three-fold world—social, physical and psychological. He thus stands in a three-fold relation to his fellowmen, to material things and to that body of experiences and ideas out of which come men's conceptions of the gods.

Because of the conditions under which they have lived, each of the three main divisions of civilized man has been concerned primarily with one of these worlds, one of these relations, and each has gone farther than either of the others in solving the problems arising in its particular field.

China has been a country of many people living close together. Its principal problems have been social, those involved in the relations of men to men. The continued existence of so many people living so close together depended on the solution of these problems. The Chinese, in the practical application of their ethics and in their social customs, have gone farther than any others in the solution of these problems of the relations of men and men.

The Western countries have been comparatively thinly settled. The comparatively few people have been faced with enormous opportunities and great demands in developing the lands they occupied. Their principal problems therefore have been those arising in the physical world out of the relations of men to material things. On the successful solution of those problems, the conquering of Nature so that it and its forces might be man's servants, supplementing human energy in the tasks which men faced, depended the success of the men of the West in meeting [Page 30]the demands on them and realizing their opportunities. Westerners have gone farther than any others in the solution of the problems of the relation of man to the physical world in which he lives.

India has been a land of mixed races frequently engaged in quarrels which created an insecurity of life and property discouraging to concern with the things of this physical life. India's climate, too, discourages physical activity. Yet the conditions of life for the ordinary inhabitant of India have been hard. Thus the Indians have concerned themselves chiefly with the problems of securing emotional and intellectual release from the harassments of daily living—with the problems of the psychological world, with the relations of men to gods. They have achieved more than any others in the solution of these problems, in the practical understanding of and mastery over the workings of the human mind.

Now steam and electricity have cut away the barriers which for many generations have separated these three great branches of the human race. The three streams of civilization are merging. Each can make its own vital contribution to the new civilization of the world as a whole which inevitably must develop. Whether that civilization will develop peacefully, whether these contributions will be made and accepted with willing appreciation, will depend on whether men are wise enough to understand, and to act on the understanding, that each can learn from the other and that what benefits all is most beneficial to each. [Page 31]

XXVII—JOHN BURNS

by WALTER WALSH Free Religious Movement, London

I HAVE before me the admission of a war-advocate that the civilization of the powder-cart must one day come to an end, since there are at work potent agencies which make for far-off unity, when mankind will be welded into a homogeneous whole. The internationalizing of the world is proceeding stage by stage towards a state of society in which war will no longer be an essential instrument of policy. But he leaves to others the privilege of expediting the warless world of the future.

Among the hasteners of world unity is numbered a Londoner by birth, but a Scot of Scots by parentage and character, known in his early years simply as "John," passing by successive degrees to "Honest John," "Lord of Battersea," and graduating as "The Right Honourable John Burns." There was nothing of the carcerist about John Burns. Every one of his achievements bore the shape of his own vehement individuality. In his contribution to world unity there was nothing imitative. It was sui generis. It has its discounts, by way of warning. It will repay tracing.

John Burns (who has just celebrated his seventy-first birthday), being the son of a Scottish engineer working in London, as soon as schooling was over was apprenticed to his father’s trade, and continued his education at night schools. Apprenticeship over, he signed on as ship’s engineer trading for a year on the coast and rivers of West Africa. He was just twenty when he returned to Battersea with a hundred pounds in his pocket, and resumed a wooing which had not gone altogether to his mind. But the gods work for us. A meeting he was addressing on [Page 32]Clapham Common was roughly broken up by the police, the bronzed and vigorous engineer just back from Africa was collared and marched off to spend a night in the local prison, on seeing which the chivalrous heart of his sweetheart (who was among the crowd) sprang to meet his, and he gained as fine a helpmeet as public man ever had. Honeymoon over, the volcanic agitator was off to France, Germany, and Austria on a six months' study of social and economic conditions. (Later, he was to spend six weeks in the United States.) He came back from Africa with empty pockets, and resumed work as a journeyman engineer. Other work awaited him. Building engines was all very well for bread, but to build up organization for labor was his pleasure; and to both ends he dedicated an athletic frame, a tireless energy, and a combination of student and organizer without which he could not have got very far with the hundred Trade Unions and forty strikes he was called upon to handle in successive years.

In these years the agitator is plainly seen merging into the constructor; the destroyer is also builder; the first steps toward unity are taken, perhaps without conscious perception of the further goal.

The abolition of class war is a necessary condition of world unity; but it implies the removal of causes; it presupposes justice, to the securing of which the young Battersea engineer now set himself like an industrial Elijah. This hot gospeler who was afterwards to ascend the marble steps of Whitehall first footed a lemonade box at the corner of a Battersea street, and promulgated a gospel, if not of a new heaven certainly of a new earth; a gospe! which materialized into the Battersea Labor League, the general principles of which were that the working-classes under a competitive system must everywhere and always work together through trade and labor unions, combine for civic and political ends, and thus, through agitation and votes, compel those reformed conditions human beings justly require. The League program aimed at direct labor representation in Parliament, on the County Council, the School Board, the Board of Guardians, the Vestry, and in fact, all legislative and administrative bodies from the least to the greatest.

This gospel, proclaimed in [Page 33]Battersea, has gone 'round the world. "Live up to the Battersea standard came to be a kind of slogan.

John Burns himself was the firstfruits of the Battersea League, which, in 1889, got him elected to the newly-formed London County Council as its first Progressive Member maintained by the workingmen on their subscription of £2 a week. Here he established a record for British Municipalities by arguing the Council into acceptance of what came to be understood as "The Municipality the Model Employer" idea. All Municipal employees were to have fair wages, a maximum week of fifty-four hours, overtime abolished, contract labor abolished, direct labor in every possible department, and so on. The full Socialism of Robert Owen (of whom Burns was a disciple) being out of the question, the next best was to cause cooperative brotherhood to penetrate peacefully as far as possible into the competitive system. With his tremendous vitality, health, and quickness, the Labor Member of the L. C. C. acquired not only an intimate acquaintance with the business affairs of the Metropolis, but unrivalled acquaintance with London itself, so that he came to be good-naturedly referred to as "The Member for London," and gained kind, if not always convinced, hearing for his grand vision of London as a mighty Commune. If he has not seen the complete fulfilment of his London dream, he has at any rate seen his loved Battersea (where he still resides) proudly recognized as the best administered district in London; an important and fair city of two hundred thousand people, if it stood alone, and were not lost in London.

It is not to be supposed that this "steam engine in breeches" as he was described by an amazed beholder, reached those proud heights without some falls by the way. In 1886 he was arrested on a charge of riot and violence in the West End. Along with Hyndman and other Social Democrats, Burns was steering a mob of unemployed safely to Hyde Park, when some windows were broken by the way, the police fell upon the crowd, and Burns next day was defending himself in the Old Bailey, was acquitted, and left the dock with his fortune made. A year later, he was [Page 34]again arrested, along with Cunninghame Graham, when the police fell foul of a meeting in Trafalgar Square. It was a meeting of sympathy with Ireland, and had been prohibited. Horse Guards reinforced the police. Several men were killed, and hundreds were savagely beaten in the streets, and prison cells. The champion of Ireland got three months in Pentonville. Sic itur ad astra. John Burns was a made man.

The year 1892 saw Burns in the House of Commons as Member for Battersea—soon recognized as "Battersea’s Labo: Statesman and his faithful constituency returned their champion again and again, in 1895, 1900, 1905, 1908. In the Campbell-Bannerman ministry of 1905 he accepted the Presidency of the Local Government Board with a seat in the Cabinet; his tenure was renewed under the Asquith Government of 1908, and was retained till the beginning of 1914, when it was exchanged fo: the Presidency of the Board of Trade. The first of these offices he held continuously for eight years, the second only for six months. when, as official reports phrase it: "He could not accept the necessity of war, resigned without any public statement of reasons, and took no further active part in Parliament."

It has to be noted, however, that, on the conclusion of the war in 1918, he desired to return to Parliamentary life, but since the Battersea men now required him to become a member of the Labor Party, sign its constitution, and accept its program. he withdrew his candidature, saying: "I do not believe in political indentured Labor. A war against Militarism must not end in conscript members of Parliament." His life since then has been strictly private.

How shall we explain the final severance of an attachment so long and faithful? On John Burns’ side it has to be recalled that he never was an official member of the Labor Party. Though returned by working-class votes, his position in Parliament was that of an Independent Radical, a Socialist in theory but an Individualist to the finger-tips, a Radical Democrat sworn to manhood and womanhood suffrage with all that follows thereon. On the Battersea side were such facts as these. Their member’s [Page 35]

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too-conservative use of the opportunities afforded by the L. G. B. and the Board of Trade. In proportion as he won golden opinions on one side for the vigor of his administrative orthodoxies, he lost color with the Socialist and Left-wing Laborites in proportion as he appeared to ignore his earlier heresies. Above all, the approach of the Labor Party within sight of office. Something may also be set down to the fact that this "intellectual compound of the terrier and the bull-dog" (as an American admirer described him) was no flatterer of Demos. His own greatest victory in life, he said, had been the conquest of himself, and he did not spare the drinking habits, and still less the betting and gambling which were the greatest curse of the workmen's class, because the greatest obstacles to their salvation.

Experience shows that to preach righteousness is to make rough the road of a popular Parliamentarian. He declared that the maxim which had most influenced his life was Thomas Paine's: "The world is my country, and to do good is my religion." The agnosticism of Burns went deeper than did Paine's, but perhaps his vision of the Commonwealth of Man, through virtue, justice, and law, went farther.

John Burns was a consistent Anti-imperialist. The British Empire, he declared, was not made by the soldier but by the engineer. The Colonies came out of the civilian, not the military, mind. Empire always means war. It was his Anti-imperialism that made him the consistent champion of Irish independence, and gave him a fitting place under Campbell-Bannerman who restored freedom (as far as it could possibly be done after a war of conquest which destroyed two independent Republics) to South Africa.

In 1899, when Britain went to war against the two Boer Republics, The Transvaal and the Orange Free State, John Burns was Member for Battersea, but without office. He was promptly in the field with his two pamphlets: "The New Imperialism" and The Trail of the Financial Serpent," the latter being an expansion of a notable speech in the House of Commons, in the course of which he denounced "newspapers owned by [Page 36]blackguards and edited by ruffians," quoted the shares of the Chartered Company with names of shareholders, lords and commoners, many generals included in "the Rhodesian gang" . . . "The trail of the financial serpent was over this war from beginning to end."

But a curious thing now happened. His Battersea constituents signalized themselves in the war against war in South Africa to such an extent that they received special acknowledgment from Cronwright-Schreiner in his book: The Land of Free Speech (a devastating record of the writer's rough pilgrimage of peace to tell the British people the truth about the war), but the Member himself was strangely absent. When they formed a "Stop-The-War Committee in Battersea, many public men were invited, but, wrote the Secretary: "Our member of Parliament, Mr. John Burns, did not reply." When the Committee held a public meeting to protest against the suppression of free speech, the Secretary again writes: "Mr. Burns, M.P., who had spoken against the war in Parliament, was invited to speak, but I am sorry to say did not trouble to reply." At length, along with other public men, their Member agreed to address a public meeting, but "cancelled his engagement" on learning that Mr. Cronwright-Schreiner was among the speakers. Why in this tremendous hubbub the Member failed his constituents remains one of the puzzles in a brave career.

Next came the supreme test of 1914, and again John Burns responded with a magnificence remarkable even in him. It is, of course, a sorrowful fact that neither he nor his colleague, John ("Lord") Morley, deigned a word to set at rest the speculations of the public mind as to the reasons for their joint resignations from the Cabinet that fateful August. Not till Lord Morley's post-mortem Memorandum on Resignation appeared, fourteen years after the event, were the facts known. This is not the place to treat of Lord Morley's action, up to the resignation, but his record leaves no doubt that John Burns was the sole entirely righteous member of the Cabinet. His perception of the realities of the situation was crystal clear, and his revolt was prompt and [Page 37]

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unfaltering. From the first moment he never hesitated or bated breath or counted the cost to himself: "Burns is never furtive," wrote Morley. The waverers in the Cabinet were emphatic in their opinion that "Burns was right" in condemning the idea that the entente forced Britain into a Central European quarrel. Here is a limelight scene at Morley's home, the evening after a Cabinet meeting. Burns arrived. "Have you heard the news? Simon has been got over by the Prime Minister, and after him, Beauchamp. So you and I are the only two."

But why, as during the Boer war, must there be a "but"? Well, the present writer understands these articles to be in essence historical, in which case all relevant facts have to be presented, especially if, as in this case, they help to explain an influential personality. The fact then is, that as the Member for Battersea ceased public protest against the Boer war after its commencement, so he denounced the commencement of the 1914 war, but offered no protest against its continuance through four awful years. Even to have been made acquainted with the facts revealed by Morley too late to have any influence on events, would have equipped and fortified the feeble minority of citizens who during those bitter years kept the white flag of peace flying. Perhaps in those four years of passivity we have the reason why, when the war was over in 1918, the men and women of Battersea desired to make terms with their former hero. It is certainly true that a man may hopefully try to stop a war before it begins (to borrow a useful bull), but never when it is in full career. That, however, is a consideration proper to the mind of a philosopher, rather than to a rebel and man of action like John Burns.

But it is vain to mourn that men are not gods! [Page 38]

VI. Philosophy

by JOHN HERMAN RANDALL, JR. Department of Philosophy, Columbia University

IN EMPHASIZING the service that philosophy can perform in fostering the spirit of world unity, I have no desire to dis- sense of their mutual interdependence and their cooperative enterprise of human living. Yet I believe that philosophy has a peculiar function, a function not fulfilled by any of the others. In a sense, it is a deeper function; for only by a philosophic understanding of the ultimate differences that exist between the cultures and ideals of the many groups, nations, and civilizations of mankind can the unified world made possible by present-day forces, economic and intellectual, be actually realized. For the philosophy of which I am speaking is not a thing apart from the currents of living, not a specialized inquiry into a separate realm of problems. It is the philosophy which William James defined as hard thinking about fundamental difficulties. It is the effort at a patient understanding of the possibilities of our present world situation, of that ideal symphony of mankind there shadowed forth, and of the many obstacles that confront our discordant and jangling life. It is bringing human intelligence to bear on what mankind can make of itself and what methods it can employ. It is giving thoughtful direction to the forces and instruments that offer promise of world unity, and yet left to themselves may so easily fail to achieve it.

At the very outset, it is well to recognize clearly that no path to world unity is automatic and foolproof. We cannot rest in the comfortable assurance that the economic organization of [Page 39]

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the world will of itself ensure intelligent cooperation, or that the unified body of science will create a common respect for truth. We can hardly trust religion to foster human brotherhood, or education to make men wise. All these paths, essential as they are, and hopeful as we may be of where they can be made to lead, must be pursued by men deeply aware of the need for reaching the goal, with a burning conviction of the absolute necessity of creating a spirit of world unity. Else they may wander in the wilderness and lead us to the very pit of destruction.

The forces which have in so many ways brought the peoples of mankind closer together have at the same time separated them widely in interest and aim. They are all divisive as well as unifying factors; they have built fences as well as bridges. The economic growth of our industrial age has indeed bound the world into one economic organism; yet it has likewise fostered nationalistic rivalries and warfare, and aroused the entire East against the imperialistic domination of the West. Science has labored to build up one great body of truth in which all minds may dwell without passion, and has worked out methods by which beliefs may be removed from the realm of discussion and controversy to that of verifiable fact. Yet that same science is disintegrating the older civilization of the West, and building a body of ideas and a temper of mind far more alien to Eastern cultures than Christianity ever was. Religion may well lead men from the narrowness of their particular interests and projects to a vision of the unified and shared religious quest of the ages. Yet we can hardly forget the tale of religious hatreds, intolerance, persecution, and warfare. Education might be the great instrument for creating a mutual understanding among men, a new attitude of cooperative living. Yet it is at present the most potent means of perpetuating intolerant nationalisms, religious fanaticisms, and Western complacency. Bernard Shaw has remarked in his disillusionment that our educational institutions are the most conservative in our society and will be the last to be reformed.

Now philosophy too must bear its full burden of responsibility; it too has been divisive. The quarrels of philosophers are [Page 40]notorious. The first recourse of every group with a sense of superiority over its neighbors has been to erect an imposing philosophy justifying its prejudices. Not only has philosophic thinking rationalized group differences, like those between Englishmen and Frenchmen, individualists and socialists, Westerners and Easterners; it has magnified even personal differences in ideals and tempers of mind. Philosophers have a reputation for thinking up seductive reasons proving that everybody else is wrong, and either a rogue or a fool.

This outcome of precise thinking is quite understandable. It is the very nature of philosophizing to aim at an intellectual organization of men's beliefs around their fundamental ideals, to strive to attain by thinking a harmony of the knowledge which they believe true with the values and aims they believe good. Our richly diverse world contains many differing types of knowledge or systems of belief, as varied as the wealth of Hindu thought, the sober systems of the Chinese, the rabbinical lore of the Talmud, the intellectual realm of Catholicism, and our modern natural science. It harbors likewise many differing traditions of values, as embodied in the civilizations of India, China, or Islam, in Catholic Europe, in Protestant Europe, in modern industrialism. Now philosophic thinking endeavors to define these beliefs precisely, to organize them into a consistent whole, and to distinguish this whole sharply from other wholes. Where before there had seemed to be a common body of knowledge, the philosopher points out definite alternatives, intellectual choices, clear differences. The history of theology, which is a philosophic organization of religious beliefs, emphasizes this divisive character of precise formulation: we all remember the passions engendered by the difference between homoousios and homoiousios. Philosophy likewise states precise ideals and aims, where before there had seemed to be common and indistinguishable tendencies of action.

Philosophy in consequence cannot pretend to offer men a single body of knowledge, like science; for in interpreting the significance of science it emphasizes differences in method and [Page 41]

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ideals. There are thus today three main philosophies of Western science, quarreling among themselves, three major interpretations of the meaning and procedure of the scientific enterprise. Nor can philosophy offer men a single common aspiration, for it expresses their aspirations in terms of particular intellectual languages, and accentuates the differences between these languages. Thus men who call themselves philosophic Idealists can today cooperate in practice with men calling themselves philosophic Naturalists—like Felix Adler and John Dewey, for example—while all the time they insist on the superiority of their own set of terms and categories.

The philosophizing of the Western world, to be sure, possesses as a common heritage the great achievements of Greek thought, broadened and diluted during the Hellenistic Age, and worked into the Christian synthesis in which the intellectual activity of the ancient world concluded. During the Middle Ages this body of ideas exercised a profoundly unifying function, and brought the peoples of Western Europe together into a common intellectual life. It proved able to assimilate the knowledge preserved by the Arabs, the source of most modern thinking; and by means of the thought of Aristotle, the chief Greek achievement left out of the earlier Christian synthesis, it created, within Christendom at least, that harmony of knowledge and aspiration which the 13th century expressed in its cultural life, from summae and Divine Comedy to cathedrals.

With the break-up of Christendom at the Reformation, particular religious beliefs and values were emphasized. Philosophy became either Catholic or Protestant. National differences emerged and made themselves felt in countless subtle ways. Philosophizing became definitely French, or English, or German, and these national traditions had by the end of the 18th century become fairly self-contained and contemptuous of each other.

For a hundred years, with few exceptions, philosophic thinking has retained these national traits of rationalism, empiricism, and a mystic and voluntaristic idealism, respectively. It might have been expected that European philosophy, starting from its [Page 42]common Greek origin, would have been unified by the great system of beliefs of natural science, with which it has been, since the 17th century, so largely concerned. Yet these national differences have extended, not only to the philosophic interpretations of science, but to the characteristic temper in which science itself has been developed. As Bertrand Russell slyly points out, even rats have been affected by their intellectual environment: confronted by the psychologists’ mazes, in America they have proceeded to find the goal by a process of hectic trial and error, while in Germany they have calmly sat down and thought out a solution.

Yet when all this divisive function of philosophizing has been recognized and indeed insisted upon, it remains true that such critical thought at its best has destroyed crude provincialism. A little philosophy is indeed a dangerous thing, especially when it goes no further than to rationalize men’s prejudices. But if analytic thinking leads men to formulate more clearly those points on which they differ, to set off what they mean and what they desire from other meanings and desires, it also reveals the bias and prejudice and sheer accident that determine the choices of men. Philosophizing is critical of all complacent dogmatisms; it extends a man’s system of beliefs and values to the horizon. The very organization and defense of what he has chosen as his own beliefs compels an understanding of alternatives. The philosopher may ultimately believe as does his group, and may cherish those goods which his group has cherished; but he at least understands why he believes as he does, why he chooses the values he does choose. In this process of self-knowledge he must come to terms with the beliefs of other men. He will indeed survey the world from his own point of view—but it is the world which he must survey. He will make a choice of assumptions, but just in so far as he is philosophically minded he must include the essential values of all other positions. No significant philosophy which hopes to win wide allegiance can afford to leave ignored any real aspect of human experience, though each will weight the various aspects somewhat differently. [Page 43]Hence within its own intellectual realm philosophy typifies and illustrates what any genuine world unity must be: not a monotonous uniformity of standardized life, but a series of variations upon the universal themes of human living. With his feet firmly planted upon the ground of his own beliefs and values. the philosopher surveys the world, understands and enters sympathetically into all human problems. This attitude has been fostered in Western philosophy by the historical sense of the 19th century, which saw all previous systems of thought as parts of a process of human history, each serving men well under the special conditions in which it came into being. It has been broadened by the social science of the 20th century, which by taking over the anthropologist's concepts of group culture and social heritage has come to look upon mankind as a society of social groups, each with a cultural tradition of its own in which has been worked out a complete round of activities and a pattern of living and thinking suited to the needs of that people. The Eskimos and the Samoans, the Chinese and the Americans, each possess a civilization of their own in which channels are provided for the functioning of their intellectual, emotional, and practical energies. With increasing contacts, fresh invention and borrowing are rapidly creating a world-culture to which each people has a contribution to make. If the West has carried natural science to its present achievements, it might well learn from the Samoans how to develop sane attitudes about sex. Yet in this emerging world-culture of the twentieth century each civilization will create a characteristic version of its own, in the light of its own traditional ideas and values.

Thus Western philosophy, even when religious and national divisions have stamped themselves upon it most deeply, has always been able to transcend these limitations and raise itself to a more universal vision. Unifying factors were present at its birth, in the common body of Greek thought upon which all subsequent intellectual life has drawn; and today contemporary philosophical thinking is returning to that eternal source of inspiration. The presence of natural science, and more recently [Page 44]of social science, while it has generated countless problems, and diverse ways of meeting them, has none the less provided a unifying stock of ideas and methods for philosophers to draw upon. And now that philosophy is relinquishing its 19th century role as a religious apologetic, and turning more and more to the facing of the problems arising from our common intellectual and social experience, the differences that once seemed so important are fading into the background. The question of what are the real implications of the revolution in physics, or how man shall manage to live under industrialism, are questions that concern Germans and Englishmen and Americans alike. With common traditions, and today with common problems, common concepts, and common methods, philosophers in every land are beginning to face the intellectual and practical difficulties of contemporary living with a sense of participating in a cooperative enterprise.

Indeed, the ultimate problems of the present, those problems which demand and inspire the most profound thought, and hence generate philosophizing, are world problems which confront every civilization with equal insistence. In Western society there has emerged a radically new civilization, based on science and on machine technology, and involving an unprecedented pattern of living, thinking, and feeling. Men are just realizing how sharply it conflicts with the old familiar Christian and agricultural civilization in whose midst it grew up. The conflict is observable today on every hand. It is usually seen as the disintegration of the old order, and for the most part thoughtful men are still bewailing the passing of what to them was accustomed and dear. A disintegration it surely is; but it is also the construction of something new. In the West the effect of this conflict is at present divisive. It has dug a gulf between grandfathers and grandsons, and has left the fathers torn in bewilderment. It is also provoking a rising tide of hostility in every Eastern land to the novel forces of Western civilization. So long as Western society was essentially agricultural and commercial, and was organized in terms of the traditional religious ideals of Christianity, East and West [Page 45]

PHILOSOPHY

could live together without much clash and with meager contacts, as friendly rivals. After all, the patterns of living worked out in India, in China, and in the older Europe were essentially similar. But the new civilization of the West is radically different from anything the East ever knew, and it is endowed with an irresistible force of expansion. Machine production has invaded the Orient, to break down its immemorial social structure; Western science has undermined its age-old beliefs. A careful observer like Nathaniel Peffer can actually speak of present-day China as the scene of the death of a civilization; a thoughtful Chinese scholar like Hu Shih can counsel his fellow-countrymen to wipe the slate clean and build afresh on Western lines! In a desperate attempt to preserve their cultural individuality, Oriental leaders are calling for a firm stand against Western ideas and Western economic penetration. The Nationalist movements—themselves reactions to a Western ideal—are divided in India and China between loyalty to the past and the acceptance of Western instruments, intellectual and material, to withstand Western political and economic aggression. In Japan and now in Turkey the efficacy of these new weapons seems to have won out over the appeal of tradition.

Whether this conflict be viewed as a civil war within Western civilization itself, or as a struggle between Western and Eastern civilizations as a whole, the forces which are at present bringing nations closer together can hardly be counted upon to lessen it. Economic and industrial growth can hardly ameliorate the warfare, for it is the continuing "industrial revolution" which is in itself the most subversive factor the world over. Science cannot well bridge the gulf, for it is science which is in bitterest intellectual conflict with traditional wisdom in West and East alike. Only philosophic understanding is capable of rising above the battle and bringing a spirit of genuine cooperation, through understanding of the enduring and permanent values of our older Christian and agricultural life and of the new possibilities of our emerging scientific industrialism, of the values of Occidental and Oriental cultures as a whole. [Page 46]For philosophic thinking is critical: it aims to penetrate to essential values wherever they may be found. It is also synthetic it sets itself the task of embracing all genuine values in one harmonious whole. It can alone achieve a critical understanding of alien intellectual languages and alien ideals of life, and translate them into terms in which a give and take is possible, in which uncomprehending hostility is replaced by mutual enlightenment and shared experience.

Such understanding can bring with it a sense of the relativity of all systems of belief, of our own proud science as well as of the wisdom of the Middle Ages or of the Oriental cultures. It can teach us that neither natural science, nor Christian, nor Hindu, nor Chinese religious and ethical systems, represent the one ultimate truth about the universe and man's place in it, or about human society and its organization. All alike are human interpretations of the same life of man, the same human experience of a natural world, beset now with one set of limitations, now with another; confronted now with one group of possibilities, now with another. The philosophical understanding of science achieved in this generation has made clear the setting of scientific beliefs and methods in the broader enterprise of human living. In illuminating the nature and function of all human thinking, whether dominated by the desire to control, or to worship and celebrate, or to organize and direct, it has clarified the values resident in every great intellectual system, scientific, religious, or ethical. It has transformed the apparent conflict between the medieval science that aimed at intelligibility and the modern science that aimed at practical control into a mutual enrichment and enlarging of scope. It has provided the means for purging religion of superstition, and moral idealism of fanaticism.

Philosophy can likewise bring an understanding of the essential values of the older ways of life, and the means by which men can labor to incorporate them in the rich new life possible in our modern world. The naturalistic philosophy achieved in various forms in this generation provides for the first [Page 47]time in modern history the terms whereby the enduring truths of all systems of thought, scientific, religious, and humane, may be translated into one common tongue. It shows how human life, as a natural occurrence within a natural setting, generates and sustains all the human values for which men have in the past so variously struggled. It leads to a critical appreciation of the human worth of all the great ways of life in which men have found enduring satisfaction, the mystic's search for Divinity, the prophet's crusade for righteousness and love, the sage's thirst for truth, the artist's creation of beauty. It offers critical guidance in the creation of one great Western culture within which may be blended the best that men have envisaged in the past, made possible of attainment and extended to all men by the instruments our science is constructing.

Finally, philosophy affords an understanding and appreciation of the great Oriental cultures. It reveals how human life, wherever the thoughtful mind has reflected upon the opportunities and limitations of its natural setting, has generated the same fundamental problems and the same typical responses. Paul Masson-Oursel, in his suggestive Comparative Philosophy, shows the essential parallelism of problem and solution in the thought of the three great civilizations, Western, Hindu, and Chinese. Though the language be different, the questions and the answers are clearly comparable. A. E. Haydon, in his Quest of the Ages, has made clear how all peoples and all religions have by varying paths sought for a good life in a good world. Such understanding can help Westerners to appreciate the wisdom of life elaborated in Eastern thought, and Orientals to appreciate the techniques for the control of nature and society offered by Western science. Philosophy also provides a method for the critical reconstruction of values, whereby the genuine ideals and insights of all the great traditions of the past, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and the rest can be disentangled from their husks of superstition, adjusted to each other, and combined with the values potential in an industrialized society. It is significant that it has been philosophers like Bertrand Russell and [Page 48]John Dewey in the West, like Tagore and Hu Shih in the East. who have been the greatest apostles of a better understanding between those contrasting civilizations.

Through all the major cultures of mankind there runs the same life of the mind, seeking understanding and wisdom, and the same quest for the good life, seeking enduring satisfactions in which the spirit can find peace and power. This life and quest have expressed themselves in a multitude of languages, amids bewilderingly varied conditions. The experiences of men have varied from age to age and clime to clime, and even in the face of the universal crises of all living men have felt with subtle but inescapable shades of difference. This experience has been embodied in a wealth of metaphor and poetry. It is of the very nature of metaphor and poetry to be literally untranslatable into another tongue, and the endeavor to find a single core of truth in the experience and thought of all the great traditions of men cannot but seem vain. To attempt to reduce to a common pros: all this imaginative symbol must lead to the blurring of what should be kept distinct, the loss of the rich overtones so fraught with feeling. It is just because every form of human living enshrines something uniquely precious, something that could be expressed in no other pattern of thought or action, that it is the part of wisdom to strive so far as possible to enter into the insights that other men and other peoples have attained. Philosophic understanding thus makes possible sympathy and cooperation without sentimentality and intellectual flabbiness, and points to shared unity in friendly and respectful difference

Unquestionably there is emerging today a common world civilization, based on science, technology, and some form of social democracy. But this world civilization will surely take different forms in each of the great cultures of the earth, as it is organized about the enduring deposit of traditional insight into the ends of human life, and the characteristic pattern of living, thinking. and feeling which each culture has inherited from its past. Such a reorganization we in the West are striving to effect for our- selves; perhaps the Japanese of all other peoples have already [Page 49]carried their reconstruction farthest. There must be, and will be, much give and take between the various groups that each, in its own way, is working at this common enterprise; each can learn from the successes and failures of its fellows. Philosophic thinking alone can penetrate below these ultimate differences in ways of life, below even the strife of scientific and religious attitudes, and generate a spirit of sympathy and intellectual cooperation. It can enrich each of the instruments of the symphony of mankind, the divers human cultures with their traditional wealth, and enable each to play all the better its indispensable part in the great harmony of world civilization. [Page 50]LEAVES OF THE GREATER BIBLE Compiled and Edited by WILLIAM NORMAN GUTHRIE Rector, St. Mark's in-the-Bouwerie, New York

MUHAMMAD'S PRAYER

In the name of the Merciful and Compassionate! All praise belongeth unto God, Who is Lord of all the world. The Merciful, the Compassionate, Decreer of doom on the day of judgment! Thee we would serve, And Thee, therefore, we implore for help. Guide Thou us in the right path, The path of them to whom Thou showest grace; And not the path of them with whom Thou art displeased, Nor that of them who have gone astray.

PRAYER OF AL-GHAZZALI

I pray God the Omnipotent To place us in the ranks of His chosen, Among the number of those whom He directeth Into the path of safety; [Page 51]

LEAVES OF THE GREATER BIBLE

In whom He inspireth fervour Lest they should forget Him; Whom He cleanseth from all defilement, That nothing remain in them but Himself only; Yea, and that they be of them In whom He wholly dwelleth, So that they may adore Him alone and none beside.

DEPENDENCE ON GOD

Thee I choose, of all the world alone; Wilt Thou suffer me to sit longer desolate in grief? My heart is as a pen of the ready writer in Thy hand, Thou art the cause if I be of good cheer or full of sorrow. Save what Thou willest, what other will have I? Save what Thou showest me plainly, what else do I behold?

Thou makest to grow out of my substance, now a thorn and then a rose, So that I now smell roses, and then I catch at thorns. It Thou keep me one thing, lo it is what I am; It Thou wouldest rather have me be another-that it is I am. In the vat wherein thou dyest with gay hues the soul What am I? What are my love and my hate? Thou art the first, and the last shalt Thou most surely be; O make Thou my last to be better than my first! When Thou art hidden-I am counted among the unbelievers, When Thou makest Thyself manifest-I belong unto the faithful. I have nothing except what Thou hast bestowed on me, What then dost Thou seek, concealed in my bosom from Thee? [Page 52]

PRAYER OF RABI’A

O God, whatever share of this world Thou hast allotted unto me Bestow it on Thine enemies; And whatever share of the next world Thou hast allotted unto me Bestow it on Thy friends; Thou art enough for me! O God, if I worship Thee In fear of hell, Burn me in hell; And if I worship Thee, In hope of Paradise, Shut me out from Paradise; But if I worship Thee For Thine own sake,- Withhold not then from me Thine everlasting Beauty!

ECSTASY

O Lord, whose secrets are for ever veiled, And whose perfection knoweth no beginning! End, and beginning, both are lost in Thee; No trace of them is found in thine eternal realm. My words are lame; my tongue, a stony tract; Slow wings my feet, and wide is the expanse. Confused my thoughts; but this is thy best praise:- In ecstasy alone I see Thee face to face! [Page 53]

THE QUEST OF WORLD PEACE

by DEXTER PERKINS Department of History and Government, University of Rochester

THE PROBLEM OF ARMAMENTS. II.

THE winter of 1929 saw the passage by the Congress of the United States of the so-called fifteen-cruiser bill. Deplorable as this measure seemed to many persons, there can be little doubt that, as a practical matter of fact, it contributed to the solution of the general problem of naval armaments. It emphasized the danger that might lie in competitive armaments; both in the United States and Great Britain it gave added weight to the arguments of those who wished to see a general naval understanding. In this country President Hoover from the beginning of his term of office was committed to such a program; and in Great Britain the spring elections ousted the Conservatives from power in an election in which the British desire for better relations with America played a not unimportant part. The advent of Mr. Ramsay Macdonald to power paved the way for a general naval conference and the visit which the new British premier paid to the United States in the fall of 1929 advanced still farther the cause of Anglo-American understanding.

Insofar as the relations of the United States and Great Britain were concerned, therefore, the conference which met at London in the winter of 1930 convened under the happiest auspices. In the course of his visit to America Mr. Macdonald had freely admitted the claim of the American government to parity with Great Britain; and while the question of fixing total tonnage, and of distributing such tonnage when fixed, was sure to be a difficult one, the very circumstance that agreement had been reached on a great essential at the very outset made success [Page 54]highly likely. The conference once convened, in fact, the prestige of both the Hoover and the Macdonald administrations was deeply involved in its success, and while the questions of detail were both numerous and important, they did not prevent a complete accord from being attained.

Nor was the position of Japan one which threatened seriously to disturb the work of the conference. The Japanese, it is true, were not ready to recognize for all types of ships the ratios already established at Washington for capital ships; they demanded a relationship of 5-5-3.5, rather than of 5-5-3; but here again the difficulties that were met with were not of a very embarrassing order, and did not prevent a final agreement.

The real embarrassments to the complete success of the conference lay in the attitude of France and of Italy. At the Washington conference, these powers, it will be remembered, had both been put upon the same footing, with a ratio of 1.75. To France, parity with Italy had been from the beginning most distasteful; and moreover, the naval position assigned to France by the Washington treaties was one which she was by no means willing to accept for all classes of ships. The French ministers came to London, therefore, not only determined to secure a total tonnage which would extend far beyond the Washington ratios, but equally determined to maintain a very distinct superiority to their Italian neighbors. In support of their claims to a considerable naval force, and to one larger than that of Italy, they called attention to the fact that France has a coast-line both on the Atlantic and the Mediterranean to be protected, and that her extensive colonial possessions in North Africa still further justify the maintenance of a navy of substantial size. To the Italians, on the other hand, the question of parity with France was in no small measure a question of prestige. The Fascist government owes no small part of its power to its appeal to the sentiment of Italian nationality; and its foreign policy has often been shaped by this fact. Not that other governments, indeed, do not feel something of the same compulsion; but it may, perhaps, be reasonably contended that the feeling of national pride, of a certain [Page 55]

THE PROBLEM OF ARMAMENTS

militant nationalism, has been particularly strong amongst the partisans of Mussolini.

There was never any chance at London, it now appears quite clear, to settle the questions raised by French and Italian naval pretensions on a practicable basis. Neither government was in a genuinely conciliatory mood. The French had been made a little jealous and suspicious by Mr. Macdonald’s visit to the United States; and while they were ready to scale down their naval demands somewhat on the basis of the familiar formula of naval reduction against guarantees of security, the Anglo-Saxon governments were in no position to furnish such guarantees. There was some talk, it is true, of what was described as a consultative treaty, a treaty, that is, by which the signatory powers would agree to consult together in case of the outbreak of war; after a good deal of hesitation, the American delegation expressed its willingness to consider some such expedient if it were not directly related to the security question; but the French do not seem to have estimated the worth of such a treaty as very high, and the project was, apparently, never very near realization.

Such a treaty would, in any case, have done nothing to compose the Franco-Italian dispute as to parity; and on this question Signor Grandi and his colleagues maintained their point of view with great tenacity. The idea of a five-power naval treaty had, therefore, to be abandoned.

This abandonment was not without influence upon the pact which was to be signed between the United States, Great Britain and Japan. For the British have maintained, and do maintain, that their naval strength must be related to that of the great Continental naval powers; they still seek, in relation to these powers, to maintain the familiar two-power standard, that is, to have a navy as large as that of the two largest Continental powers combined; and it was obvious that Franco-Italian naval rivalry (and such rivalry had to be envisaged, in view of the failure to reach an agreement), might force Great Britain to build beyond the limits which she was ready to fix so far as the United States and Japan were concerned. A clause was therefore [Page 56]inserted in the agreement signed at London by which the powers which had agreed to limitation, might build beyond the figures fixed in the treaty where the naval construction of another power seemed to threaten their national security. With this important qualification, the treaty was finally signed.

The treaty signed at London seemed to the most ardent optimists somewhat disappointing. It was certainly not a treaty which provided for naval reduction; it left the American building program a very large one, and the scale of expenditures involved was greater than it had ever been in peace-time in the history of the United States. It rested, on account of Franco-Italian disagreement, upon a precarious basis; and its terms, it should be added, extended only to the end of 1935, in the expectation that a new naval conference would then be necessary. But, despite these very obvious drawbacks, the treaty had striking and too little-noticed merits. For the first time in modern history, three great nations had agreed upon the limitation of their complete naval armaments, not upon limitation of any single class of vessels, but upon limitation of their navies as a whole. Such an achievement, in true historical perspective, must be regarded as of the very highest historical importance; and not only is it intrinsically significant, but it sets a precedent that is bound to be of value. It is also to be noticed that one of the features of the treaty was a naval holiday in the field of capital ships; and the existence of this holiday induces the hope that by the time the treaty expires, these highly expensive engines of war will have become obsolete, and that no nation will wish to start re-building them. It would be foolish, therefore, not to estimate at a high value the accord that was reached at London.

The value of the London accord has been greatly increased, of course. by the change in Italian and French policy which, aided by the patient yet vigorous diplomacy of Mr. Arthur Henderson, has brought about an accord between the two great naval nations of the Continent. The terms of this accord have not been published, as I write; but they make it seem highly probable that the London agreement will now become a five- [Page 57]

THE PROBLEM OF ARMAMENTS

power instead of a three-power agreement, and that the danger of a new naval competition has been, at any rate until 1935, definitely averted. This was one of the salutary results of the world-wide depression; economic interest and a change in the views of French naval men in some particulars, has made it possible for the French to accept a lower figure for their total tonnage than that for which they contended at London; while the need of a loan, part of which will come from the French, has made the Italians more amenable to the voice of reason. We are on the verge, therefore, of a still wider agreement with regard to naval power, an agreement which will carry still farther the salutary principle of the fixation of naval power in international conference, rather than by the arbitrary and jealous processes of national legislation.

Before closing this article, I wish to call attention to one other matter in connection with the naval treaty of London. It was ratified by the Senate in a special session called by the President last July. The Senate convened on July 7. It approved the London pact on July 24, in the short space of seventeen days. This prompt yet unhurried action is suggestive in the extreme as to the course which might be followed with regard to other treaties in the future. They might well be submitted in the same way, to an extraordinary session. In this manner the attention of the whole nation is focussed upon the task in hand; the Senate itself. freed from the pressure of its legislative activities (the House not being in session), can devote its full attention to the international engagement before it; and the kind of obstructionist tactics which have frequently been employed in the past by small minorities becomes practically impossible. I venture to suggest that, at this very moment, if President Hoover should call upon the Senate to convene and ratify the World Court protocol, he would be rewarded by the prompt and favorable consideration of this important matter which has hung fire so long. The ratification of the London treaty has revealed an important new technique which can be applied to the solution of international questions by the United States. [Page 58]

WHITE AND YELLOW-WHITE AND RED

'Round the World Log of a Sociologist-VI by HERBERT A. MILLER Department of Sociology, Ohio State University

Is an unblended color scheme of roses and of ideas that had focused the attention of the world during the summer of 1929 on Harbin, Manchuria, and the Chinese Eastern Railway. Back of this summer is a long story which is still far from being all told.

It was from Manchuria that the Manchus went in 1644. conquered China, and set up the dynasty which lasted until 1911. They were a different people from the Chinese and retained their identity and closed their own rich and unpopulated territory to the latter until very near the end of their dominion. Now the dynasty has gone and the Chinese have not only overrun Manchuria but have assimilated the remaining Manchus who, though retaining some of their customs, proclaim themselves as being Chinese and resent being differentiated as Manchus.

It surprises one to find so near China's overcrowded territory land so sparsely populated as Manchuria, yet so rich as to remind one of lowa or Illinois. On both sides of the Chinese Eastern Railway large and highly cultivated fields stretch as far as the eye can see. The soldiers who guard the stations in large numbers are all Chinese, but the train crews are Russian. The station names are in Chinese and Russian. The groups of buildings at the stations are fortified by strong walls with slits through which to shoot, and occasional forts guard bridges and strategic places, reminding the traveler that bandits flourish here as well as in Chicago, and make him lose the illusion of being in Iowa. [Page 59]

WHITE AND YELLOW-WHITE AND RED

The population of Manchuria has increased in thirty years from three to thirty millions and the immigration is still going on. This makes the rate of settlement of our middle west a relative snail's pace by comparison. Harbin, the administrative center of the railway, which has often been in the papers since before the beginning of the Russo-Japanese War, has grown in this period from nothing to a city of three hundred thousand, of which nearly a third are Russian. It is a boom town in the American sense. The branch of the National City Bank of New York has had to enlarge several times in the past five years.

The Japanese have long realized the importance of Manchuria, and much of their trouble with China has come from their effort to gain control of this rich and empty country; but while their efforts were going on the Chinese immigrants possessed themselves of the land, and Japan is reluctantly and inevitably yielding.

It was over Manchuria that the Japanese and Russians fought in 1905, and this same railroad was one of the issues. Only persistent vestiges of either nation now remain, and the country is ruled by a War Lord, Marshal Chang Hsueh Liang, son of the powerful and notorious Chang So Lin who was killed last year by forces in which the Japanese were implicated so much that it caused the fall of the late cabinet in Japan. The Central Government of China now has a paper control over Manchuria, and the national flag is conspicuously displayed. Manchuria considers itself definitely a part of China, but local autonomy prevails in most matters and will not soon be yielded.

The old Russian Government was ignorant of, and indifferent to, the great natural wealth of Manchuria, but wanted primarily to build the trans-Siberian railroad to Vladivostock, harboring, however, imperialistic ambitions towards Manchuria. Going across Manchuria saved over four hundred miles of distance and very difficult construction problems; after considerable negotiation, permission was given them to build the road, though there were certain provisions for China's interests. The road was opened in 1903, having been built at a cost [Page 60]of about three hundred million dollars. This money was largely borrowed from the French; the bonds are now repudiated. Immediately after the completion came the war with Japan, with the result that, as part of the right of conquest, Japan took the southern part of the road running from north of Mukden to Port Arthur. This is now the South Manchurian Railway whose right of way is a Japanese concession guarded by Japanese soldiers, and the Chinese soldiers are prohibited from coming within five miles of the line.

As soon as the Soviets got on their feet they made a new treaty agreement with China in 1924 by which the original ownership is recognized, and joint rights are given to China both in administration and profits. There was justice in this arrangement, because the surprising growth of population and business were Chinese contributions; both will continue to grow indefinitely.

Here is where the color of ideas enters the story. Before the War there were many Russians of the old type living in Harbin and running the railroad. After the revolution in Russia many more of the old type came as refugees. They are called White Russians and they hate the Red Russians of the Soviets. The railroad, however, now belongs to the Reds, and according to the agreement of 1924 there were to be an equal number of Soviet and Chinese citizens employed. This gave the Reds a strong standing, for the total number of people in Harbin connected with the railroad is seventy thousand and the existence of the city depends on the railroad. During this time the nationalist feeling among the Chinese has been rapidly growing.

At the time of the agreement, five years ago, China was very sympathetic with Russian ideas. Sun Yat-Sen, whose social and political principles now constitute the religion of the nationalist movement, learned much from the Bolsheviks, and was so sympathetic towards them that he invited many to give their help. When the reaction came, it was both anti-Red and anti-foreign; both Red and White Russians thus became equally objectionable. [Page 61]

WHITE AND YELLOW-WHITE AND RED

The outbreak that summer, which was attributed to hostility to communist propaganda, has been brewing for five years. The trouble is that the situation is inherently impossible of solution. There is the strong nationalist feeling of the Chinese who know that they furnish all the business out of which the railroad makes its money, and who are at the same time aware that the railroad is absolutely essential for the development of Manchuria. On the other hand the Russians own the road. Under the present arrangement there are five Chinese and five Russians on the board of directors, with a Chinese figurehead as President, but the General Manager and Assistant Manager are Russians. Neither group can hire or discharge any of the other group, and the board is often deadlocked. Even if the peace, which was declared while I was in Harbin, eventually becomes actual, I do not see how it can long be successful.

I went to the Administration Building to see a Chinese engineer who is an American graduate. The corridors and offices were as full of Russians as though it had been in Moscow. It is difficult to find out just how the Chinese feel, but I could see that they are not happy. For the present, they are helpless because the road is so important for their existence and they do not have the technical experience to enable them to run it without the Russians even if they owned it.

As I have said, according to the agreement half of the employees must be Chinese citizens. No one dreamed that this would mean anything but Chinese people; but many White Russians have become Chinese citizens in order to be included in the Chinese quota and now constitute about twenty per cent. of the employees. This puts some Red and White Russians on the same job, powerless with regard to each other. The President is an anti-Red Chinese and the General Manager is a Red Russian. The only thing they have in common is the commission to run the railroad. If they want it enough the road will run, but if there is a lapse in their desire, trouble is inevitable. This is complicated by the fact that Red and White policies are formulated at a great distance from the local interests. [Page 62]The road is Russian broad gauge. We had expected the trains to grow worse the farther we went toward Harbin, but they became more luxurious. The Wagon Lits compartment was large than on European trains and perfectly clean. We paid excess fate for an express and traveled at an average speed of fifteen miles an hour.

The Chinese have a good case against the Russians. For instance, there is the hangover of feeling from the old days of the imperialist designs on the part of the Czarist Government, and the overbearing attitude of the Russian employees. The fact that the present feeling is specifically anti-Russian, rather than anti-foreign, is illustrated by many cases of which I heard. A non-Russian white is arrested by the police. When the question of nationality is cleared up the police apologize on the ground that they thought the man was a Russian.

In spite of all this discrimination, several intelligent Russians have told me that Harbin is the best place in all the world for exiled Russians. It is the only place open to them that was really Russian before the revolution.

Harbin is an interesting and unique city entirely apart from the special world attention which it has attracted since that summer. First, it is a frontier town; second, it is a modern city in which large numbers of the white race are living normally under the rule of the yellow race—a situation new in history. There are millions of Russian refugees in western Europe, some tens of thousands in America, and many in other parts of China, but nowhere except in Harbin was there a nucleus of old Russia.

Stories have been circulated about the unconventional and immoral life of these Russians in Harbin. I think they are exaggerated. It is a frontier town, and Russians were never puritanical in the western sense. I saw considerable of their life and talked to many people, and concluded that the general life is very little different from that of old Russia. We went to the most popular cabaret and stayed until two o'clock. It was Monday and an off night, to be sure, but even if it had been full it would [Page 63]

WHITE AND YELLOW-WHITE AND RED

not have held many people; even if all those in Harbin had been full the numbers would have been insignificant compared to the whole population. The dancing was modest compared to our own vaudeville shows, and the hilarity was much less than in New York night clubs.

The Russians who fill the streets are going about their business as in any community; many looked happy and many looked strained, as in any city. Their divorce rate is no higher than in old Russia. Some Chinese men are marrying Russian women, though the number is very small, but I could not learn of a single case of a Russian man marrying a Chinese woman.

I visited one high school and talked to the principal of another. The children are studying seriously and trying to solve for themselves the problems of modern life. They can become Chinese citizens, but few of them do so. One girl student came to talk to me about going to America to college. One of her problems is that, though she was born in Harbin, she is counted as an immigrant and, consequently, has no citizenship in any country.

By contrast with the Chinese, Russians look just like Americans; it was a shock to discover that they did not speak English. When they are talking at a distance, the intonations sound exactly like English, which is very different from the sound of Japanese and Chinese.

Beginning this year there is a requirement that in all the Russian schools the Chinese language shall be taught, and in the Chinese schools, Russian. I found approval of this plan on both sides. The Chinese Minister of Education for North Manchuria was educated in a Russian school, and my interpreter spoke Russian with him. The interpreter, by the way, was a Korean girl from Harbin who had spent two years in Columbus.

In spite of the fact that Chinese and Russian are the local languages and will continue to be used, and that there are probably not a hundred and fifty English and Americans all together who live in Harbin, English is an accepted language. It is taught in the schools, the train boys all know a little, and in the hotels [Page 64]it is used freely. The American consul speaks both Chinese and Russian well, showing that those two impossible languages can be learned.

I went to the Cossack cathedral Sunday morning; it was crowded to the doors. It was about the size of the Russian church on Starkweather Avenue in Cleveland and looks not unlike it inside. I had to remind myself that I was not in Cleveland. The great power of ritual is the fact that it is widespread so that people feel at home when they find it even in the uttermost parts of the world. All Russians whom you find in church are Whites, because Red Russians are officially, though not always personally hostile to religion.

According to the Minister of Education there are three types of schools. They do not receive much public money but are subject to Chinese authority. The Red schools of the Soviet employees of the railroad submit their program, and the Minister approves it without modification except to see that the politica. education is limited. There was a difficult problem in starting these schools this fall because most of the teachers had been arrested as communists. According to the agreement in Berlin they were to be released immediately, which, for both Russians and Chinese, means at some indefinite time in the future. The curric ulum in these Soviet schools is toned down a little from that in Russia. The White Russians also have their own school system It has to be supported entirely by the patrons, but they have a good many excellent schools. These have a curriculum just like that which prevailed before the War and revolution. They claim that their children, who resented the old discipline when they saw how much freer the children of the Reds were in school, have now reacted and are very appreciative of discipline.

The third type of school is the Chinese school which aims to be thoroughly modern. They are not yet very numerous, but they are free from the particular biases which trouble the Russians I found that the Dalton Plan was known in Harbin and Miss Parkhust's name was recognized.

One of the great problems in China is that of extra-territo [Page 65]

WHITE AND YELLOW-WHITE AND RED

riality, or, as it is now used, extra 'lity. This was an arrangement made when the Chinese despised the foreigners so much that they wanted to leave all matters of foreign conduct to the foreigners themselves. Now the Chinese are jealous of their rights and are trying to get rid of extra'lity with every nationality. The Germans forfeited theirs by losing the war. The Russian refugees, of course, came as suppliants, or, at best, as guests, and could claim no special rights. The Soviets repudiated the treaties of the Czarist Government partly, in this case, because they could not help it, and partly because they hoped by special consideration to influence China in a communist direction. They did have a great influence, but China is now insisting on running her communistic program, so far as it goes, in her own way. The result is that Russians, both Red and White, are subject to the Chinese courts, and Chinese courts are still conducted on the Chinese system.

There may often be justice in the personal judgment of a Chinese judge, but there is as yet in all China no legal code, so that it is impossible to tell what to count on; corruption and personal prejudice and bias may leave the individual helpless. There is, however, an evolution taking place and Harbin is making a distinctive contribution to it. There are fifty Russian lawyers practising in the courts of Harbin. I talked to one fine old gentleman who is one of the leaders of the Russian bar. He had much to criticize, but in the ten years that he had been in China he had seen great improvement. The fact that in this place there are white people coming under Chinese jurisdiction, with western-trained lawyers to take their part, has been educative and suggestive. There is now a movement for the codification of the laws and the formulation of court procedure. My Russian friend felt that in twenty-five years more this problem would be pretty well solved in China. Considering the long history of China, this is a very brief time.

In the short period of allied control in Siberia there were many more Japanese soldiers than there were of the other allies. There was a good deal of fear that the Japanese would get a strangle hold in Siberia. There is no fear now. In my opinion, [Page 66]Siberia is bound to become populated by Chinese. In all Siberia there are only eight million people. The climate and land in Siberia are just like that of North Manchuria. The reason the Chinese had not gone into Siberia earlier was that they were not in Manchuria. Now nothing can stop them and the Japanese have certainly lost out for good in both places.

The only way to understand the government of China, and especially that of Manchuria, is to try to imagine yourself in the middle ages, in spite of certain signs of the present.

When I called on Marshal Chang Hsueh Liang, the War Lord of Manchuria, he was dressed to play golf and his Buick was waiting at the door to take him to the links. In the front seat, however, lay a big revolver.

The father of the present Marshal, Chang So Lin, got his power in the medieval manner, i.e., by collecting soldiers and taking possession of all he could. He seemed atrocious in our news, but had many commendable qualities. His son is only twenty-eight, is democratic and affable, and, now that some rivals have been killed and the Japanese defied, he is firmly in control for the present. His English-speaking secretary is a Yale graduate. When he telephoned me of my appointment he said, in good American, "Good-bye, see you later." I talked with the "Young Marshal," as he is called, about the railroad situation until I felt we were getting in too deeply, and then changed to the new National University in Mukden in which he is very much interested. We talked about academic questions in a most modern way.

Manchuria, now nominally part of China, has a great deal of sensitiveness to foreign public opinion and a desire to develop into a modern country. If we judge it from the point of view of China, great progress has been made.

The part that Manchuria will play in the relations of the white and yellow races is important. The question of whites and reds is much broader than Manchuria, and this conflict can only be solved by the slow process of time and experience. [Page 67]

THE MEETINGPLACE OF THE EAST AND WEST

Book Review by HORACE HOLLEY

THE failure of long-established political relations between Orient and Occident has greatly extended the boundaries of the social problem. It becomes increasingly evident that the adjustments of thought and action forced upon the West by the European War are to be regarded as local phases of the one general problem, understanding between the peoples of East and West.

An Orient that must be made an equal and voluntary partner in all programs of world stability is far different from that Orient of yesterday which could be pitied or detested because it was "pagan," despised because it was "backward" and exploited because it was helpless and weak. The collapse of our own civilization, along with the determined rise of China, India and Turkey following the success of Japan, has compelled us to appreciate a wider scale of human values than that played upon by the instruments of industrial science alone.

To realize that the fundamental problem of the age is the attainment of understanding between East and West, is but a short step to the perception that what the world today most needs to know is the truth about man. One by one the artificial concepts attempting to explain humanity in terms of any religious belief, any attribute of physical nature or any human reaction from external conditions, have been denied by life itself. Whatever may now be acceptable as truth must meet the whole gamut of life in history and in experience.

"The Soul and Its Mechanism" by Alice A. Bailey is a bold

The Soul and Its Mechanism, by Alice A. Bailey. Lucis Publishing Co., New York. [Page 68]and vigorous effort to present a psychology representing the meeting place of the Eastern and Western mind. As Harry A. Overstreet remarks in his Foreword, "If for no other reason, this book is significant as an attempt, not only to interpret East to West and West to East, but to bring the two trains of thinking into the harmony of a single point of view." Mrs. Bailey herself presents the book as prompted by three desires: "The desire to bring together the materialistic or external psychology and the introspective or internal psychology, and, secondly, looking past scientific psychology to the larger realm of race thought and race psychology, the desire to harmonize the materialistic West and the introspective East, and finally to show that all these conflicting aspects are but facets of the one truth and that, together, they constitute the one Reality."

A careful student of the culture and philosophy of the two great traditions, Mrs. Bailey points out that Western thought, directed outward, has mastered the problem of structure or mechanism, while failing to master the problem of purpose and use, while Eastern thought, introspective in character, has produced an imposing edifice of philosophy dealing with ultimate purpose but remains ignorant of the human mechanism. Thus the East has manifested "soul force" without basis in physiology, while the West has created science and industry without spiritual power. The fact itself has been remarked frequently before, but "The Soul and Its Mechanism" makes it serve as introduction to a profound and highly suggestive synthesis of the positive contribution each type of mind has made.

The eventuation of Western psychology in physiological knowledge, following its racial genius, has been to outline the new science based upon study of the glands. Tracing this knowledge to its limits, Mrs. Bailey then summarizes the Oriental teaching of the etheric body with its seven centers of force. By a brilliant act of insight, the author correlates the Western and Eastern psychology and identifies the seven glands as the physical equivalent of the seven "centers." Thus the door is opened for serious consideration of man’s reality under the twofold light [Page 69]thrown by Eastern introspection and Western physiology. "The rime has come when a fusion is, for the first time, generally pos- sible and, from the past conclusions of the philosophers and saints of both hemispheres, we should be able to work out a system and a method which will be for our day and generation the mode of spiritual achievement."

. Because the racial genius of the Orient has been fulfilled in the realm of abstract thought and sought, above all, a satisfying inner experience, its proofs and evidences possess none of the overwhelming obviousness of Occidental science and industry. Even in its religion, the West has tended to identify faith with a concrete social mechanism rather than with the guidance of con- scious insight into the mysteries of existence. It is consequently difficult for many of us to appreciate the fact that Eastern psy- chology is a creation as positive and as essential as our vast net- work of material communications and production equipment.

But we can estimate the value of the Eastern soul when we realize that its typical nature is manifested in Western men like Ralph Waldo Emerson. To the degree that Emerson's aims and ends are consciously needed by the West today, we can perhaps best appreciate what unused reserves of human aspiration ard knowledge await us in accepting a basis of perfect equality and mutual cooperation with the races of the other hemisphere.

A West divorced from spirit and an East become helpless under the burden of matter thus at last find a common meeting place in a concept of reality sacrificing no valid ideal of either tradition and promising to confirm the weakness of each with the strength of the other. At the least, "The Soul and Its Mechanism" may be regarded as a new and fertile direction for creative thought. [Page 70]

THE APPRECIATION OF RELIGIOUS TRUTH

by TARAKNATH DAS Author of "India in World Politics, etc.

RELIGIOUS antagonism among peoples, which has been fostered for centuries, is a serious obstacle on the road to world unity. Unless we can develop the spirit of appreciation of truth in all religions, there is no possibility of whole-hearted cooperation among peoples professing different faiths. Accurate knowledge of the true spirit of various religions may help to remove religious fanaticism and ignorance which checks the development of true appreciation. Here lies the great value of the study of comparative religion.

Through the popularization of the study of comparative religion, much has been accomplished in understanding tenets of various religions. However, on many occasions, teachers of comparative religion have devoted their energy and intellect in criticism of one religion and to prove superiority or excellence of another. Alfred W. Martin, who is known to be one of the foremost teachers of comparative religion, has devoted many years of his life not only to critical studies of various religions, but to appreciate the truth and beauty in them all. Mr. Martin’s work—Seven Great Bibles—is a serious and scholarly study of seven great religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Zoroastrianism, Muhammadanism, Judaism and Christianity. One of the great merits of this work is that the author has presented the kernel of the teachings of these religions by quoting copiously from various scriptures and explaining their true significance.

Martin has shown his real appreciation of the great relig-

Seven Great Bibles, by Alfred W. Martin. Sponsored by World Unity Magazine, New York. 177 pages, price, $2.00. [Page 71]ions, by making an attempt to remove some of the popular misconceptions about them. In this he has succeeded admirably, by quoting authoritative texts with simple explanations.

(a) In his study of Hinduism, he points out that according to the teachings of the Upanishads, "the human soul unites with, but is not absorbed by, the World-Soul. For union is not to be confused with absorption; that would be to misconceive the Hindu idea. Absorption has physical associations and implications; moreover, it suggests loss of identity on the part of what has been absorbed. But for the Hindu the real union is achieved not by the loss but by the illumination and expansion of consciousness. He holds that when the individual ego is united with the universal Ego it finds self and establishes its identity instead of losing it." (pp. 35-36)

(b) According to the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita, "No fatalism is bound up with Karma. Every soul is free to contend against the hinderances that lie in the path of release and ultimate attainment of bliss..." (p. 60)

(c) In the study of Buddhism, the author has made it clear that Buddhism is not a religion of pessimism. By quoting various texts from Buddhist scriptures, he shows that the ideal of Nirvana is not the so-called annihilation of individuality, on the contrary it means a state of deathlessness. (pp. 99-100)

(d) Zoroastrianism is popularly regarded as a religion of fire-worship. But the author by quoting texts from the Vendidad and other scriptures demonstrates that it advocates "dignity and sacred efficacy of work" (p. 111) and man must fight evil for the ultimate victory of the good. (p. 115)

(e) Although it is generally supposed that Confucianism is a form of atheism, yet it is not so (pp. 147-148). It is one of the highest forms of ethical religion (pp. 131-133) placing special stress on social harmony.

In the study of Muhammadanism, he applies the historical method of criticism and shows that the world owes a great debt for its invaluable service and civilizing influence (p. 190). In the study of Judaism the author presents a very clear exposition [Page 72]of the most complicated subject of the Old Testament in the light of modern higher criticism. He makes it clear that the teachers of the Old Testament "saw in righteousness the very core of religion and they held with increasing and unflagging zeal the mighty expectation of a Commonwealth of Man" (p. 215). In the discussion of the Bible of Christianity or the New Testament, he has admirably traced the historic evolution of Christianity in its various phases.

This work is possibly the best of its kind, because it is not only scholarly, but without any bias or prejudice; its style is simple and clear. It will be very helpful to those who are interested in promoting cultural cooperation among peoples of various religious faiths. This book can well be used as a reference book, if not one of the text books, in connection with the classes of History of Philosophy, Ethics and Comparative Religion in Universities; because it will enable young scholars to have a grasp of philosophical and ethical teachings, underlying the great religions of the world. It will help them to broaden their vision of other peoples' culture and religion. It is my conviction that a wide circulation of the book will aid the cause of human brotherhood. [Page 73]

ROUND TABLE

"Economic World Welfare" by Amos Stote, to appear in six consecutive issues, presents for the first time, we believe, an adequate and well documented study of the activities of the International Chamber of Commerce. Knowledge of these activities will be helpful not only to the business man, whose idealism grows no faster than the increase in the area of cause and effect in his own affairs, but also to the student of internationalism, whose attention is frequently concentrated too much upon governmental matters.

Much good doctrine can emanate from the Conference of the I. C. C. to be held in Washington next month. It will be of vital interest to note what proposals are offered making for an industrial system able to supply democracy with a form of industrial justice and social efficiency offsetting the Soviet Five Year Plan. An expert discussion on the economic effects of national tariff policies would also be enlightening.

Prof. Randall's article on Philosophy concludes the series "Elements of a World Culture" in which the new outlook of the students of Science, Economics, Education, Religion, Art and Philosophy has received such vigorous expression. The cumulative force of these articles has produced one more evidence of the fact that World Unity is not for the occasional or casual reader, but for those who seek fulfilment in a valid world ideal.

The brevity of "Man's Three-Fold World" by Grover Clark should not make any reader overlook the depth and range of its insight. In less than a thousand words the author takes us to the roots of the racial problem.

With "John Burns" by Walter Walsh we resume the series of "Apostles of World Unity." Five or six titles are still to appear. In them we see the peace movement taking form and substance in the experience of heroic lives. [Page 74]

BOOKS FOR WORLD UNITY READERS

A WORLD COMMUNITY, by John Herman Randall

THE book for those who seek to grasp the world movement as a whole with the inter-relations of economic, political, industrial and socia factors, and a careful analysis of the trends making for international organization.

It has been included in the reading list issued by the National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War.

NATIONALISM AND INTERNATIONALISM By Herbert Adams Gibbons

IN THIS book, Dr. Gibbons has infused his historical scholarship with a lifetime of personal experience and participation in international affairs. The result is a study accurate enough for the classroom and interesting enough for the average reader.

"Nationalism and Internationalism" traces the evolution of political force from its first expression in the movement toward modern nationalism through the nineteenth century, to its present expression in internationalism as the true outcome of national ideals.

SEVEN GREAT BIBLES, by Alfred W. Martin

HERE, at last, are the essential truths about Hinduism, Buddhism Zoroastrianism, Confucianism, Taoism, Muhammadanism, Judaism and Christianity that demonstrate the underlying unity and harmony in the texts from which these religions derive—a very history of the soul of man illumined from age to age by inspired teachers pointing the path to brotherhood and peace.

These three books have been published in the World Unity Library initiated and sponsored by this magazine. Per copy, $2.00. Any one title, with annual subscription to World Unity Magazine, $5.00; subscription and two books, $6.75; subscription and all three books, $8.50.

WORLD UNITY MAGAZINE 4 EAST 12TH STREET NEW YORK [Page 75]

THE COMING WORLD ORDER

A Symposium Published in World Unity Magazine

THE challenging character of the subject proposed for this symposium has called forth the best thought of a number of distinguished authors. Its vital interest in relation to the present condition of international affairs will be manifest on considering the following preliminary schedule.

Already Published

December, 1930. THE COMING WORLD ORDER, an introductory statement by Archie M. Palmer, Editor of the symposium.

December, 1930. EUROPE IN THE COMING WORLD ORDER, by F. S. Marvin.

January, 1931. PAN-AMERICA IN THE COMING WORLD ORDER, by Graham H. Stuart.

February, 1931. ECONOMIC IMPERIALISM AND WORLD ORDER, by Parker Thomas Moon.

March, 1931. EDUCATION FOR HUMAN BROTHERHOOD, by Rufus M. Jones.

April, 1931. THE OLD HOMESTEADS, Inc., by F. S. Ansley..

To Be Published

May, 1931. THE COLLEGES AND WORLD AFFAIRS, by Archie M. Palmer.

June, 1931. WORLD CITIZENSHIP AND GOVERNMENTS, by Carl A. Ross.

July, 1631. WORLD PEACE BY FORCE, by Charles Stowe.

August, 1931. AN ORIENTAL CONCEPTION OF WORLD ORDER, by Ramananda Chatterjee.

September, 1931. RELIGION AND THE MODERN AGE, by A. Eustace Haydon.

October, 1931. WOMEN AND THE COMING WORLD ORDER, by Aurelia H. Reinhardt.

November, 1931. THE CITIZENSHIP OF RIGHTEOUSNESS, by Abba Hillel Silver.

December, 1931. HOW ORIENT AND OCCIDENT CAN BE CORRELATED, by Taraknath Das.

Additional titles, including contributions by Brent Dow Allinson, Mary Hull, and John Herman Randall, will be announced at a later time.

Back numbers of the magazine are available in limited quantity at thirty-five cents per copy. The subscription rate is $3.50 per year, for libraries $2.50, postpaid to all countries.

WORLD UNITY MAGAZINE 4 East 12th Street New York City [Page 76]

THIRD ANNUAL INSTITUTE OF PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION

Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York July 6-August 14

THE Progressive Education Association will conduct its Third Annual Institute of Progressive Education under the auspices of Syracuse University, offering a wide range of courses and outstanding instructors.

Demonstration School

Plans have been made for a Demonstration School utilizing progressive education methods, with the cooperation of the Syracuse public schools. Classes at all levels will be arranged. The Primary School will be directed by Dr. Ruth Andrus, Expert in Childhood Education of the New York State Department of Education. The Secondary School will be directed by Burton P. Fowler, Head Master of the Tower Hill School, Wilmington, Delaware, and President of the Progressive Education Association.

The Courses

The Case Method of Studying Child Development—Dr. Andrus

The Methods and Materials of Primary Education—Dr. Andrus

The Methods and Materials of the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Grades—Adelaide M. Ayer, Director of Training, State Teachers College, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

The Principles and Practices of Modern Education—Dr. Ayer

The Methods and Materials of Secondary Education—Mr. Fowler

The Personality Adjustment of School Children—Mrs. Georgia Clarke Matthaei, Psychologist of the Bronxville, N. Y., Public Schools

Diagnostic Work in Reading, Spelling, and Arithmetic—Mrs. Matthaei

Industrial Arts as a Curricular Tool, a Laboratory Course—to be selected.

General Information

All of the above courses carry college credits.

All students of the Institute will reside in one dormitory.

There will be a Weekly Forum of distinguished lecturers.

Numerous other lectures, concerts, and plays will be given.

Syracuse University offers an exceptional climate, out-of-door sports and trips to places of interest.

The fees for the courses, and for room and board, are inexpensive.

For registration blank, application for room and board, copies of the Institute bulletin, and all information, write direct to Dr. Harry S. Ganders, Dean of the Teachers College, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York.