chivalry, and lifting his broken troops to superhuman heights of achievement. I would set beside that the picture of the old man in his last years in the seclusion of a college presidency, striving by every counsel of wisdom and toleration to heal the wounds of his land.

The other great figure is Lincoln. That rugged face has become one of the two or three best known in the world. He has already passed into legend, and a figure has been constructed in men's minds, a gentle, hu

morous, patient, sentimental figure, which scarcely does justice to the great original. What I want to impress upon you about Lincoln is his tremendous greatness. Alone he took decisions which have altered the course of the world. When I study his career, behind all the lovable, quaint, and often grotesque characteristics, what strikes me most is his immense and lonely sublimity. . . . He was a homely man, full of homely common. sense and homely humor, but in the great moment he could rise to a gran

deur which is forever denied to posturHe coning, self-conscious talent. ducted the ordinary business of life in phrases of a homespun simplicity, but when necessary he could attain to a nobility of speech and a profundity of thought which have rarely been equaled. He was a plain man, loving his fellows and happy among them, but when the crisis came he could stand alone. He could talk with crowds and keep his virtue; he could preserve the common touch and yet walk with God.

ERE in San Francisco "the

H

Islands," as the Hawaiian group is always termed, are not something afar off. Every hour of every day some ship is passing through the Golden Gate, outward bound to them or inward bound from them. We entertain the Islands with our radios of an evening, and are constantly meeting and talking with people who have but a few days. before been riding the surf on Waikiki beach or watching the boys diving for quarters through the clear waters of Honolulu roadstead.

And so on the afternoon of August 31, when the two giant navy seaplanes (PN-9 No. 1 and PN-9 No. 3) rose from the waters of San Pablo Bay and soared through the Golden Gate on their 2,000-mile trip to Hawaii, the San Franciscans who thronged every vantagepoint felt that they were but at one side of a great stadium, of which the field was the Pacific and "the other side" the Islands. The ten men cooped up in the speeding planes could have heard nothing of it above the roar of their 500horse-power motors, but all the way from Telegraph Hill to Sutro Heights, and away across the bay from the hillsides of Marin County a great cheer went up from the tens of thousands gathered there as the two planes, headed west, were sighted across the waters.

Meanwhile, at the other side of the stadium, nearly two thousand miles away, the radio was describing every feature of the scene. Shortly before two o'clock the powerful station KPO came on the air with a radio report of the flight, opening with a description of the scene as it spread out before the eyes of a skilled reporter stationed before a microphone on the top of the Palace of the Legion of Honor, overlooking the Golden Gate. And so the stage was all

International

set and the curtain up, and the vast farflung audience settled down "to watch. the show." For, literally, it was that. It seemed only a matter of a few minutes before the seaplanes had disappeared from sight towards a misty horizon, and as the great crowds flocked back to the city the spectators on both sides of the stadium were placed on terms of equality. They were watching by listening in.

It was an interesting experience, not least for the proof it afforded of the rapidity with which the world becomes accustomed to a new wonder and is impatient for further development. About the streets and in the hotel lounges of San Francisco, as the afternoon and evening wore on, the thing most noticeable was the impatience of everybody over the fact that news was "so slow" in coming through. Every two hundred miles from the Golden Gate to Pearl Harbor was stationed a destroyer, equipped and

ready to transmit every detail of the flight back to the coast and on to the Islands, yet the last editions of the evening papers only told of the planes three hundred miles on their journey, and it was next morning before we heard of the breakdown of the seaplane PN-9 No. 3. It was all, however, really a marvel of speed. The great audience gathered round the vast stadium of the Pacific, like the audience at every other show, was merely impatient.

Every hour of the day following the start brought its special thrill. Crowds gathered outside the newspaper offices, and every now and again radio programmes would be interrupted to broadcast the latest word. In the early part of the day all was well. The "giant conqueror of the air" was reported speeding on "in splendid shape," oil supply abundant, engines working p aided by a favorable trade wi

came the "four hours of unaccountable delay"-four hours of rumor and speculation and fears that the second plane, within hail of victory, had been forced to abandon the flight. Gloom was at its height, when at last a cheering word came out of the air, this time from Hono

lulu, to the effect that the PN-9 No. 1 was reported "safe and sound and going strong" from the destroyer Farragut, 1,600 miles from the Pacific coast, that she was expected to reach Pearl Harbor in a few hours, and that all Honolulu was aflame with excitement.

Then came the tragedy, and an end to the hopes for a non-stop flight-a message from Commander Rodgers to the Twelfth Naval District Headquarters: "Am running out of gas and will probably have to land at the Arostook or the Tamager. Please stand by."

TH

HE Nation stands aghast and grieving over the loss, on September 3, of our beautiful Shenandoah and fourteen of her gallant crew.

Lulled into the belief that helium gas provided full safety to lighter-than-air ships, convinced that the Shenandoah, after her numerous tests, was stanch enough to weather any storm that blows, we have awakened to find that it is very easy to be mistaken.

The "Daughter of the Stars," which is the Indian meaning of the name Shenandoah, met her fate, tragic and sudden, in a manner new to the annals of aviation. It is safe to say that no experienced airman would have believed such manner of destruction possible.

The huge buoyant gas bag floated in and with the air. It was surrounded by air, carried along with the current of air in which it found itself. How could local pressure be brought to bear upon one segment of the airship-pressure enough to snap the duralumin framework into two or three parts-when the airship itself was not tied down, was not stationary, but was floating freely seven thousand feet up in its element?

Suppose a vertical gust of air from below struck her suddenly amidships with terrific force. The airship would naturally yield and be carried upward as she was. Suppose at this instant she had been moored to the earth at both ends. Then this sudden upward pressure of an air current against her center might indeed force up her center until her back broke-which it did.

But the Shenandoah was not fastened stem and stern to the earth. The whole length of her was carried up to seven thousand feet, and there she broke in two like a brittle cigar bent up in the middle. There the shattered girders of duralumin punctured the ballonets of helium, and the airship fell.

The law of cause and effect is here if we can but find it. Rejecting the explanation of a lightning stroke, for which there is no substantiation, there remains

P. & A. Photos

Lieutenant-Commander Zachary Lansdowne

another cause for this disaster, and this cause is sufficiently extraordinary.

The currents of ascending and descending air must have exerted terrific force and velocity. They must have been confined to narrow channels. They must have been alternately speeding up and then down these invisible narrow channels. And at one crucial moment the stem and the stern of the Shenandoah, two city blocks apart, must have been held in the grip of a downward blast of air, while at the same instant an upward pressure of air struck her irresistibly in her center. The huge bulk of the airship was at this moment her own undoing. Even the attempt to keep her on an even keel offered a larger surface to the pressure of the ascending current than though she had up-ended and let the blast of air step by. She broke in two across her top two-fifths of the distance back from her bow.

In the month of March, 1920, the author flew from Boston to New York

early one morning in a gale blowing offshore at 77 miles per hour. Colonel Gerald C. Brant was flying another De Haviland machine wing-and-wing alongside. We maintained an altitude of 4,000 feet and nosed into the westerly gale at 110 miles per hour.

Time and again during that stormy flight my machine was sucked downward with such sudden velocity that my knees struck violently the overhanging cowling, beneath which my legs were stretched to the rudder bar. Only the safety-belt about my waist held my body to the seat. The machine was pulled down by an invisible clutch two hundred feet before it was met by an uprising current which forced it back. While descending and rising thus unwillingly I glanced up and found that Colonel Brant's machine was unaffected by the current of air which held me. At times his machine, fifty feet to the left, would be descending while mine rose. Two contrary currents of air were in violent operation not fifty feet apart. To avoid collisions we increased the distance between us, for these up-and-down movements continued over the coast-line of Massachusetts and across the Sound to Long Island.

Upon landing at Mitchel Field and discussing this phenomenon, we came to the conclusion that these mighty rushes of air horizontally across the landscape, attaining a velocity of 77 miles per hour, were followed periodically by a vacuum behind each blast. These vacuums would be filled instantly, sometimes by air pouring up from the bottom, sometimes pouring down from the top. That they were tubular and small in diameter was evident, for one machine would be sucked downward while the other machine, fifty or one hundred feet away, remained upon its course or perhaps was lifted heavenward in the grasp of a contrary current.

The wind over Ava, Ohio, was blowing 70 miles per hour at the time of the disaster to the Shenandoah. Unfortunately, her length was too great to accommodate

herself to these invisible currents of air which rushed up and down these vertical channels that follow in the wake of wind blasts.

Strong as the Shenandoah was the "strongest dirigible ever built"-unquestionably she was not strong enough. She was too bulky to cope with "weather." She was not airworthy.

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ITHOUT airworthiness the airship is a toy-not a useful vehicle. The Nation again is asking itself questions. Are these huge expensive airships of value to us? Of what use are they in commerce or in war? Should we sacrifice more men and money in experimentation with them? If we construct another airship, what will we do with it?

At the beginning of the World War the airship was believed to be a mighty bombing craft. By the end of 1917 it was found that it could not defend itself against the swifter airplane. It was then abandoned as a military weapon and will never again be used in war when opposed by airplanes. Small airships, or "blimps," can be used for scouting with the fleet only when they can retire to a place of safety before airplane attack.

As a commercial vehicle the Shenandoah type of airship has one indisputable superiority-and only one. It is the only vehicle known which can carry ten tons of burden across the Atlantic Ocean in three days!

Against the railroad or against the

The stricken giant

motor car on land she has no superiority, for she cannot compete with these rivals in speed or in cost of operation. But on the sea she has only the slower-moving sea vessels in competition. Provided she can be made airworthy, the airship has a possible future here.

Fast steamers make the voyage from New York to Liverpool in five days. They carry many times as much freight. Whether or not it will pay to build and insure airships to save two days in transatlantic shipments is extremely doubtful. Reliability of common carriers is a requisite to their success. Against a thirtymile-an-hour wind the airship would need five days to cross the Atlantic! The Aquitania can do as well.

The swiftest speed ever made by an airship is 60 miles per hour. The airship must have tremendous bulk to contain enough lighter-than-air gas to lift her cargo. This very bulk prohibits speed and invites disaster from dangerous wind currents.

The ZR-2, built in England for the United States, was "designed" for 85 miles per hour. She took the air, and made 60 miles per hour without disaster. But on August 24, 1921, when the test was made to produce a speed of more than 60 miles per hour, before delivery to the United States, the ZR-2 buckled up and burst into flames over Hull, England, with the loss of forty-four men on board. She was not built strong enough to withstand the pressure of her own engines.

While it is entirely possible that skill and experimentation may increase the speed of the dirigible balloon to 85 miles per hour, a calculation of the cost and attending risks of operation must convince the sober man that such an achievement is scarcely worth while. If you must reach San Francisco from New York in one day or two days, you will take the airplane-not the airship. If you have ten tons of valuable express, you will intrust it to ten airplanes rather than to one airship; and it will be delivered with more assurance of speed and safety, and at less expense.

The Shenandoah cost $2,000,000. The hangar to house her in cost as much again. When heavy winds blew, she could neither leave nor enter her hangar. When ordinary storms broke about her, she was in peril. When no mooring mast was handy, she required 500 men to catch her and hold her to earth. When rain drops clung to her envelope, she feared to attempt landing under their weight until they evaporated. When every condition was favorable, she sailed through the skies majestically-but to what purpose?

We have suffered a grievous loss of faithful officers and men. True devotees of the airship will inevitably urge further experimentation. But, in cold common sense, hadn't we better discover a purpose before we send another huge airship and crew to share the fate late Daughter of the Stars?

W

ILLIAM JENNINGS BRY

AN, a sincere man, stood for the closed mind in religious advance. His fight before his death was for the exclusion from the minds of the children of Tennessee of thoughts and theories which he considered dangerous. He was not willing to attempt by truthseeking education wholesomely to control the conclusions which might follow the study of evolution in nature.

The parallel is awkward, but may serve to point a situation now existing in the Federal Department of Agriculture in respect of the continuance in the United States of that evolution and development in plant life by the introduction of new things from abroad which has in the past two centuries brought us many, if not most, of our desirable fruits, vegetables, and grains, as well as much of the bloom and beauty of our public and private gardens.

Reference is made to what is painfully known to amateur, scientific, and educational plant lovers as "Quarantine 37," under the numerous and perplexing regulations of which many desirable and important plants and bulbs heretofore imported are virtually and effectively, even if not in so many words, placed under

embargo, upon the assumption that such action will protect the Nation from new plant pests.

On August 20, 1912, there was approved the "Plant Quarantine Act," empowering the Secretary of Agriculture to attempt to protect the Nation against the admission from abroad of plant pests "new to or not theretofore widely prevalent" therein. It was, and is, a wise and potentially beneficent law, but as now administered is operating on the Bryan basis. It has checked horticultural advance, if one may believe the statements of the Nation's plant authorities.

Dr. N. L. Britton, of the New York Botanical Garden, mentions "widespread dissatisfaction" with its administration. Dr. C. Stuart Gager, of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, says, "At first I was heartily in favor of it, but I believe now that its administration is serving more to discourage horticulture in America than to keep out plant diseases." Dr. George T. Moore, of the famous "Shaw Gardens" (the Missouri Botanical Garden officially) in St. Louis, doubts "whether officially) in St. Louis, doubts "whether a quarantine has ever accomplished any thing which in the smallest way would offset the loss in the administration of such an act."

The chief scientific student of and authority on American fruits, Dr. U. P. Hedrick, author of "The Cyclopedia of American Fruits," in referring to the famous or infamous-"Quarantine 37" (one of more than fifty complicated and intricate quarantines set up under a strained interpretation of the law), writes, "It is doing more harm to American horticulture than good. There are advantages, but they are far outweighed by disadvantages."

Professor Charles Sprague Sargent, the venerable head of the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University, and undoubtedly the world's most eminent authority on trees and shrubs, has found this exclusion policy so dangerous and the scanty admissions under it so destructive to plant life through "precautionary fumigations," that he is disposed to divert to England the important results of a threeyear expedition to portions of Tibet never before explored for plants.

Much the same view as to the propriety and effectiveness of exclusion is taken by eminent entomologists and pathologists, at least as sincere in the desire to protect the Nation as any Federal official can be. Dr. H. H. Whetzel, controlling the plant pathologic organization

in Cornell University, thinks that "quarantines in general may be more harmful to the public good than they are useful." Dr. C. R. Crosby, a noted entomologist of the same institution, suggests that "the danger from the importation of such material has been greatly exaggerated."

Only nominally does the Secretary of Agriculture control the administration of this good law, although he has power to change the complexion of the working authority, the Federal Horticultural Board, made up from three bureaus of his Department. In fact, it is the autocratic chairman of this Board who controls, and he is a sincere, astute, and able zealot who believes in exclusion for plant protection as heartily as Mr. Bryan believed in thought exclusion for protecting religion. But he has vast Federal power, and he has used it as ruthlessly as any member of Spain's "Holy Office" ever did his inquisitorial power.

Witness the illogical exclusion after December 31 of this year of all narcissus or daffodil bulbs, after specially encouraged importations for three years in defiance of the pests said to come in with the hundred million of these "posies" sent us annually by clean and careful Holland. Witness the boasts made as to the upbuilding of an important American industry, aside from any legal or tariff permission, with a consequent price increase to American gardeners of from one hundred to six hundred per cent. Witness the entire shutting out of azaleas and rhododendrons and many other desirable plants that must come in with soil on their roots if at all; witness the

intricate web of red tape necessary to be unraveled each time an American rose lover desires to possess and test the new roses of Europe, despite the admitted fact that the danger of getting plant pests this way is infinitesimal.

The control policy virtually scorned by the Federal Horticultural Board has certain definite beneficences which it minifies or ignores. For example, much is made of the cost of combating the San José scale, a foreign pest. Yet candid orchardists agree that the spraying which has completely controlled this pest has also controlled so many native pests that we have more and better fruit in consequence. The pest has forced us to make apple growing profitable.

The Japanese beetle, used effectively as a "scare-head," seems to be coming under control, for a visit to the alleged center of its dissemination in New Jersey right in the midst of its annual "flight" showed the marketing of a superb crop of perfect fruit.

culture only nominally administers the good law of 1912. He can, if he believes the scientists I have cited and many others, if he cares to listen to most of the great State horticultural organizations, to the amateur organizations of men and women who are pushing forward plant advance in the United States, to most of the great educational leaders in horticulture, change the personnel of the "F. H. B.," as it is called by its victims. He can set before it the ideals of control rather than exclusion, so that the Nation may resume its horticultural advance while more effectively guarding against the preventable spread of new bugs and bothers from abroad. He can end a horticultural despotism that is as un-American as it is unwise. He can, at probably less expense, promote the relations with the phytopathological authorities of England, Holland, France, Belgium, and Germany, which will assure that control and inspection abroad which is operating so well with our human im

interference the plant-exploration work of our great botanical gardens, to none of which the importation of a plant pest has ever been truthfully traced.

Another "scare-head" pest is the cot-migration. He can free from intolerable ton-boll weevil. Yet in the spring of 1924 there was dedicated to it as a benefactor by the "gratefully enlightened community" of Enterprise, Alabama, a public memorial fountain. The scientist who reports this astonishing occurrence, Professor Arthur H. Rosenfeld, a special cane technologist operating in Porto Rico, also writes upon the "beneficial aspect of the cane mosaic disease," convincingly proving that the necessary care, sanitation, and rotation enforced by the control method results in far greater eventual product and prosperity.

I have said that the Secretary of Agri

But Dr. Jardine, to whom as an educator and a scientist we plant lovers are looking for relief, cannot do these desirable things if he continues and upholds in power the zealots who sincerely believe in the Chinese wall policy of exclusion rather than in the intelligent policy of co-operation and control. Exclusion, never permanent or complete, or control, always sane and usually effective—which will he give us?

T

fashion for prettiness.

stitution. I have attended the latter function for some years, and I have never heard a speaker greeted with such applause. Why was this? We were interested in his memories of his three uncles -Edward Poynter, President of the Royal Academy; Burne-Jones; and John Lockwood Kipling, father of Rudyard Kipling and the gospel of work that he learned from them. But that would not have aroused his audience to excitement. What stirred them was the ancient magic of a good man speaking good things. He denounced the "cleverness" that has

swept over the painting world, as over other worlds, and he pleaded for a return to beauty. Well, there is nothing novel about that, you will say. True. But it came from the Prime Minister, and it was done with such sincerity and conviction that it fell upon our ears like a new evangel. And he said more-more than a condemnation of cleverness and a plea for beauty. In each of his speeches he counseled artists and others, implicitly if not explicitly, that it is through love only that we can remake the world.

Lest it may be thought that I see in the Prime Minister's speeches more than