M

ETAL that will not fuse in the pot spoils the blast. This is the trouble with Jews and Catholics in America. In habit, custom, and social life they choose to remain apart from the mass, and then complain that they are unwelcome, forgetting that the exclusiveness is all their own.

With fifty-seven varieties of sects in the United States, the Jew and Catholic alone insist that the unborn shall belong to them. In this lies the seat of American resentment. No one objects to Jews per se, or to Catholics. Americans do not like the notion of perpetuality. As a very eminent Jew said to me not long since, "If we consented to let our children become Christians, soon there would be no more Jews." Yet in the same breath he insisted that there was no such thing as a "racial Jew." He himself had taken up much room in National and international politics as a professional Jew, both parties having honored him in an effort to capture Semitic support.

It is thus that the Jew gets into prominence. He represents a mass, and the politicians angle for it. The Catholic won prominence in the same way. Rival parties in the past-and present-bid for the Jewish and Catholic vote by baiting their tickets. Thus Jews and Catholics become leaders in centers of population, and the "rural deestricks" organize Ku Klux Klans to protect themselves, though they are not in the least danger. Neither Jew nor Catholic would be potent in America but for the. desire of parties to annex their votes. As it is, their influence is nil outside of a few cities. By keeping themselves apart from others they increase their political value, but not their potency.

To raise the cry of bigotry under such circumstances is silly, but it is done with much effect. The canny Coolidge, looking ahead to 1928, voiced it in his Omaha speech, and was acclaimed for his courage. He should, instead, have been complimented upon his skill.

It is funny, when you come to think of it, to talk about "persecution" and "bigotry" as applied to Jews and Catholics. Where in all the world are they so well off? The Jews are without a country, like the gypsies, by choice; the bulk of Catholics came here from necessity, most of them starved out of Ireland. They were not political exiles, like the Germans of '48, who speedily became Americans. (Most of the Irish martyrs for freedom were Protestants.) They

By DON C. SEITZ

Back

in the days of editorial vigor

Don C. Seitz wrote some leaders for the "Evening World." They made short work of some important citizens of the time. Mr. Pulitzer stopped the series, on the ground that they "were set in the wrong kind of type." A word to the wise was enough, and the then Business Manager ceased to be an editorial writer. Some years later Mr. Pulitzer suggested that he resume. "You wrote some good ones once, I recall," he said.

"Yes," was the reply; "and you killed them because you did not like the type."

He laughed. The Business Manager continued, "I'm pretty good at throwing a brick."

"Meaning," said Mr. Pulitzer, "you might hit me? Perhaps we had better let well enough alone."

Mr. Seitz told me this story as we sat, not long ago, discussing trends of American life before a club-room fire. "Mr. Seitz," I

said, "you can write for The Outlook, and your stuff won't be killed because it is set in the wrong type."

The first article resulting from that conversation is published in this issue. It is an article which will arouse bitter comment and condemnation. Whether people agree with it or not, it will certainly make them think.

I am glad to announce that this article will be followed later by a series from Mr. Seitz's pen on the American press. It will handle the developments of American journalism as fearlessly and as trenchantly as Mr. Seitz handles the problems of religious and social relationship in this current article. I believe that the publication of this series will be one of the outstanding events of the publishing world in 1926.

Harold T Pulsfor

were welcomed, however, and given work and food, while the kindly country sent ship-loads of the latter to relieve the Green Isle's distress.

Congregated in the cities whose development required much labor, they soon became political marks. Whig and Democrat alike vied in making them important. The careful hierarchy followed them up with priests and churches. They remain solid and impregnable.

Of this I do not complain. My grievance, if any, is against the American politician, who has made it worth their while to remain solid, to their real disadvantage and that of the country. I am a Democrat, but I believe that nothing has been so unfortunate for the vitality of true democracy as the solidity of the South. In this form it is not democratic, but a menace, the effect of which has been to keep alive and in power a corrupt and privilege-selling Republicanism that has systematically overtaxed the country in the interest of contributors to its campaign fund, flooded the land with cheap labor in peonage to trusts, behind a tariff to protect the wages of workmen. This and much other villainy we would have been spared but for the fear of the solid South that came into the blood of the North with the Civil War.

IN

N the cities the Democrats are usually the successful bidders for both Catholics and Jews. In Greater New York the majority of judgeships and public offices are held by them, as the price of power, as well as most civil jobs, including schoolteaching. Jews and Catholics are in the great majority there. So with their pupils. Quite naturally, they step in where Protestants abdicate. There is nothing in this to marvel at or get mad about.

The kick comes, and continues, because of their solidarity. Invited in, they do not melt, but mass.

So it is there are more Jews in America than there ever were in Palestine, and more Irish Catholics than Ireland ever contained in its best days. Curiously, the complaint lies mostly against Irish Catholics; German, Polish, and Italian Catholics are plenty, but unaccused of undesirability as such. Probably this is because most of the Irish brand are Democrats much of the time. Yet no one finds fault with the Republicanism of Methodism.

One of the odd objections raised to the Catholic Church is that it is ruled from

Rome and that its believers take an oath above that of the citizen of the United States. The members of the International Typographical Union do likewise, but this scares nobody. I doubt if the Papal power has any influence at all in the United States. It certainly has none in Italy. Water cannot rise higher than its source. If it has any authority here, it is of the supernatural. How many Americans believe in that?

THE

HE truth is fear of the Papist is an inheritance from our Puritan ancestors, who fled England when that dread was at its height. We have not shaken it off, although England has. The Jew was also regarded as anti-Christ at the time of the Puritan migration. So he shares in this early prejudice. British politics being governed more by class than creed, the bidding for votes is not on American lines in England, so the Jew and the Catholic fit in their proper places, gaining their positions by brains, not solidarity, as here. This inherited prejudice is not an anomaly. The Canadian French still think in terms of Louis XIV's day. From the standpoint of religion there is no ground for affright. The Jew is a Unitarian, and has done no persecuting since the year One. Protestants began the attacks on Catholics in the new-found zeal of the Reformation. How cheerfully these retaliated does not

Moreover, both priest and rabbi are apt to be men of the world. They know how to deal with men. They have seldom failed at some other occupation before putting on the cloth. The usual Protestant parson is ill trained in worldly affairs, oppressed by poverty, and compelled often to change pulpits. He is the victim of the whims of church committees, than whom none can be more heartless or inconsiderate. I have one bunch in mind who were a choice collection of scoundrels. Yet the fate of the best minister I ever knew was in their hands, and they ruined him.

From one cause or another, Protestant churches come and go in all communities. The Catholic churches come and stay. So do the synagogues. It is clear, therefore, as before stated, that solidarity, not religious differences, lies behind "bigots," so-called, and Ku-KluxKlanism. Yet the select seat of "bigotry" is among Jews and Catholics. Hotels excluded the former because when they came they drove away other guests. The same thing is true of neighborhoods. Ghettos are self-created. Christian neighbors soon disappear. I recall one Jewish lady's reply to another, when asked if there were many Gentiles in Bensonhurst, a Jewish suburb of Brooklyn. "Not enough to be annoying," was the happy reply.

need to be recited. But, logically, the L

Catholic religion is the most perfect of faiths, mechanically speaking. On the correct theory that the body will be a long time dead, the Church's concern is for the soul. This it undertakes to save, and without equivocation promises to do so. The Jewish soul, not requiring salvation, is free from this worry.

Rabbis and priests are much better guardians of their flocks than the Protestant clergy. In the first place, they have authority. The Protestant minister must be a cross between a diplomat, a showman, and a hypocrite to get along with the average congregation. I say this as the son of a clergyman, with ample inside experience. The priest, in particular, has no such humiliating position. He needs only to stand in with the bishop. The congregation is the least of his troubles. He does not have to earn his salary by lectures, fill his pews by stunts, or depend upon the church fair grab-bag to buy coal for the winter. The collection is taken at the door, and every admission is paid for. Catholic finances are on a sound basis, and are carefully cared for. The same may be said of the synagogue. Against this the average Protestant church must compete, with uncertain revenues and a congregation that insists on more entertainment than Gospel.

EGISLATION has made exclusion from hotels a misdemeanor, but no one protects the Gentile from mass invasions. There is much Hebrew complaint of exclusion from social organizations. In

this grievance the Catholics share. They are kept out, but only to a very moderate extent. Catholics are forbidden to join Masonic lodges, not by the lodges, but by the Church. What Protestant could join the Knights of Columbus? Could any Gentile get into a Jewish club? Not on his life! Observe the skill with which Jewish and Catholic office-holders fill up their departments with their kind. When did a Protestant official ever go by churches in selecting his staff?

These are the things that irk, and justly irk, the one hundred per cent American mind. Add to it the tragedy of Jewish or Catholic intermarriage, when permitted at all, by which the Protestant must forswear his faith for his children, and you have a deep and definite reason for all anti-Catholic and antiHebrew manifestations.

It cannot be claimed that the pressure is from without which keeps the two alien and against the rest of us. It does not exist. We have been broad and liberal in granting equal rights and more than equal opportunities. In politics

they have been at a premium and in religion unmolested. Yet they continue to cry out about intolerance. Such as there is of this exists in workable quantities only where there are neither Jews nor Catholics, and is therefore of no importance. Intolerance in New York might mean something disagreeable. As it is, the only riots we ever had in that town were of Irish origin. The draft disturbers in three days killed more Negroes than the South would ordinarily lynch in fifteen years. They also burned a colored orphan asylum. This was done in pleasant remonstrance against being drafted to free the black people from bondage. Their own chains were off.

J

UST now the cry of intolerance is being

raised to pave the way of a sensible and popular Governor of New York to the Presidency. We must not be intolerant to any man who calls himself an American, is the insidious intimation. We would not be if he declared himself an American first, and a Catholic second. This he will not do. Neither would a Jew similarly situated. No individual Jew or Catholic is strong enough to do such a thing. His fundamentals were too deeply grounded, for one thing; and, for the other, he would be persecuted as a renegade with merciless persistence. A Catholic, his soul would be tagged to Purgatory; a Jew, he would be boycotted in business-hell, in either instance-and his poor corpse could not lie in consecrated ground. There is a thoroughness about it all that defies the Goddess of Liberty. A shift from Methodism to Congregationalism frequently betters a man's place in the community, just as a jump from Calvin to the Episcopal fold elevates a family socially. There is no such primrose path away from Judaism or Catholicism.

Both sects are fearful of competition; hence their ironclad laws. Ostracism on earth and in heaven are their effective weapons. Why, then, should they complain if others not so armed put on sheets and masks in a ridiculous endeavor to protect Americanism with monkey-shines instead of common sense and square politics?

Large claims are made for Jewish and Catholic patriotism. They will not be believed, even in the face of frequent demonstrations, so long as their social solidarity exists. They will be wise Catholics and Jews who take heed of this situation and prepare to melt. Age-long traditions are hard to break; denial of salvation is a fearful threat to disregard. But it must come about in due season, for America can no more endure if divided on severe social and religious lines than it could half slave and half free.

By RUFUS STEELE

dore Roosevelt made his way to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado and in that gloriously scenic but inhospitable fastness engaged in a fruitful hunt for cougars, the great cats that were destroying the deer. In an interesting article in The Outlook of October 5 of that year Colonel Roose

treasure region. In the summer of 1925 the North Rim and the Kaibab Forest received and entertained, with the creature comforts customary in the longestablished National Parks, many hundreds of eager visitors, who came, a dozen years afterward, to follow in the unfading footprints of the Colonel.

velt, then The Outlook's Contributing R

Editor, shared with his readers his findings in a region into which none but a trail-breaker like himself might care or dare to venture. He told of the extraordinary and somewhat different grandeur of the Grand Canyon from its almost unknown North Rim and praised the beauty of the Kaibab Forest, which stretches magnificently back from the Canyon's sheer brink. As always, he As always, he preached preservation and the salvaging of irreplaceable things for the future generations of Americans. Roosevelt foresaw the eventual coming of many men and women, heart-hungry for this majesty and beauty of nature; but it is doubtful if even his prescience registered the swiftness with which railroad enterprise, an era of highway building, and the universal use of the automobile would throw wide open his primitive

OOSEVELT entered the wonderland by what is now its less-inviting back door. Leaving El Tovar, on the South Rim, with stout horses and eight or nine male companions, including his two elder sons and a nephew, he went down the Bright Angel Trail to the Canyon's bottom, crossed the Colorado River on a trolley ferry, spent the night at Phantom trolley ferry, spent the night at Phantom Ranch, and, after eight hours actively devoted to negotiating the trail up Bright Angel Canyon, he topped out on the North Rim at Bright Angel Point. There are now better trails than the Bright Angel Trail leading down from the South Rim, the river ferry has been replaced by a bridge, and the trail mounting to the northern brink is much improved, but the trip from rim to rim through the abyss's bottom still holds even for the saddlehardened a fully occupied two days.

The better and happier way of ap

proach is through the recently opened front door at Cedar City, Utah, two hundred miles north of the Canyon. There one leaves his Pullman on the new railroad and enters a comfortable motor stage. As he journeys he has the richest possible preparation for what lies ahead; in fact, the scenic show begins immediately. In sixty-five miles he reaches the new Zion National Park, with its highly colored and already famous Canyon; and after that come the Prismatic Plains, which are accurately, if faintly, described by their name. Out of the desert, with its sage-brush and no better examples of tree life than greasewood and stunted cedar, he rises quite suddenly onto the slope of Buckskin Mountain and is swallowed in the quiet depths of the Kaibab Forest. The Kaibab, reaching unbrokenly on to the North Rim, is a fit, cathedral-like vestibule to the Grand Canyon; yet it is an altogether sufficient wonder in itself.