and Th But capital ships-fighting ships of over 10,000 tons eachmay be wholly ineffective unless they are accompanied with a certain number of lighter vessels to act as auxiliaries. Without auxiliaries, as Secretary Wilbur puts it, the fleet is blind. The number of auxiliaries does not necessarily depend upon the number of capital ships in the fleet. A certain number of auxiliaries is needed for any fleet. We lack the needed number of auxiliaries. And because we have so few naval bases, we need auxiliaries of a certain kind with a large steaming radius. One of the serious mistakes which President Coolidge has made, we believe, was to oppose in the past the building of the needed auxiliaries year by year. No naval conference could have made the building of such auxiliaries unnecessary. So we have been piling up a deficit. In addition, we need a certain number of cruisers to act independently of any battle fleet as guardians of lanes of navigation and focal points. Now the Administration favors, not only building fleet auxiliaries and other needed vessels this year, but planning construction for years to come. Consequently, the country has been confronted with what seems like a huge program of naval armament. At the same time the country is puzzled by the proposal of the Administration that the President be empowered, in the event of an international conference on the limitation of armaments, to suspend any part or all of the authorized construction. And yet no naval conference can change the fact that a battle fleet needs auxiliaries. And the Secretary of the Navy has said that the authorized tonnage of auxiliary ships would not bring us up to the 5-5-3 ratio with Great Britain and Japan in the tonnage of those types of vessels. Is it surprising that the people of this country have been puzzled? There has been a marked change in the Administration's naval program. But a naval program is supposed to be for the purpose of carrying out an international policy. A navy is but the arm of the civil power. Has there been, therefore, a change in the international policy of the Administration? On the contrary, it appears that the Administration has simply discovered that an ineffective navy is a wasteful luxury, and that we need these auxiliaries to make the Navy that we have effective. in his eye, "I'll tell you. Efficiency is the power to draw correct conclusions from incorrect and inadequate data." Not even the late Fred Taylor, of efficiency fame, could have bettered that! L The Hoover Landslide ET all favorite sons return to their kennels; Al Smith prepare to take out another four-year lease on his Albany home; the platform committees of both National parties hand in their resignations. The Nation's Presidential election is already in the bag. The Hoover Campaign Committee has dug up and spread broadcast a statement made by the Secretary before the Convention of the Izaak Walton League, which is good for at least ten million votes-a due proportion of which will be drawn inevitably from the strength of the Democratic Party. Here is what the Secretary said: Man and boy, the American is a fisherman. That comprehensive list of human rights, the Declaration of Independence, is firm that all men (and boys) are endowed with certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which obviously includes the pursuit of fish. The country has made stupendous progress in physical equipment to overcome the mysteries of fish. We have moved upward from the rude but social conditions of the willow pole with a butcher-string line, fixed with hooks ten for a dime, whose compelling lure is one segment of an angleworm and whose incantation is spitting on the bait. We have arrived at the high state of a tackle assembled from the steel of Damascus, the bamboo of Siam, the silk of Japan, the lacquer of China, the tin of Bangkok, the nickel of Canada, the feathers of Brazil, and the silver of Colorado-all compounded by mass production at Chicago and Akron. Notice, if you please, the subtle manner in which he pays tribute to the man who fishes with a steel rod and the man who fishes with a bamboo, and how carefully he avoids bringing up the moot questions of wet or dry fly fishing, of angling with barbed or barbless hooks, and how he avoids any reference to the relative gaminess of salmon, bass, and trout. But that is not all. He goes on to show that the average fisherman catches but four and five-tenths fish per annum, and then puts forward as a plank in his program the following epochmaking proposal: I submit that each fisherman ought to catch at least fifty fish during the season. I would like more than that myself, but that ought to be demanded as a minimum under the "rights" as implied in the Declaration of Independence, provided it included one big one for purposes of indelible memory, conversation, and historic record. This leads to a powerful statistic-that is, 50 fish times. ten million men and boys. This minimum ideal of a National catch of 500,000,000 fish is of the most fundamental importance if we as a Nation are to approach a beatific state for even two weeks in the year. Exit the full dinner-pail as a campaign argument. Enter the overflowing creel. We move that the Secretary of the Electoral College be instructed to cast one vote for Herbert Hoover as President of the United States. No objections are heard or will be entertained. G The Catholic Here and Now OETHE thought it very remarkable that ninety-odd religious denominations could exist side by side in the New York of his time without coming to blows. There are now considerably more than ninety, and the likelihood of mutual massacre has grown even more remote. Indeed, only one among them all is viewed with suspicion or regarded with any ire. This solitary exception is is the Catholic Church. The uneasiness it causes is not the result of numerical strength or solidarity alone. When it was weak and quite insignificant, it was the source of still more annoyance to its neighbors. Besides, whatever power it possesses in our time can be, and is, triumphantly ignored. It constitutes a static fifth of the population, and a constantly beleaguered fifth at that. The explanation for the anti-Catholic state of mind must, I think, be sought in a state of mind. It is something that has been acquired, like the New England accent. It is also something that cannot be shaken off, even as the shadow of Nordic ancestry cannot be shaken off. One can analyze it best, possibly, by way of an analogy. Suppose a young man, having made the acquaintance of a neighbor girl, were to judge her by her more or less antiquated grandmother. Assume that he was so amazed by grandmother's unfamiliar diction, manners, and bent of character as to be unable to dissociate her from her-shall we say? charming descendant. The outcome might be any number of interesting things, but it would probably not be love or marriage. Even so the culture of the United States, quite definitely Anglo-Saxon and Protestant, seems to have pursued a policy of mistaken identity in so far as the Catholic Church is concerned. It has been so obsessed by a historical impression of what Catholicism is supposed to have been in Europe that it is unable to get a clear view of what Catholicism is now in America. Naturally, I believe that the prevailing, more or less unconscious bias towards the historic Church is to a great extent wrong. I am not going to discuss the point, however, for the reason that the time is not yet ripe. Some day all By GEORGE N. SHUSTER thinking Americans will realize that the era of colonization was also a period in which England and Spain were engaged in a vast and bitter struggle; that as a consequence religious differences, created for the most part by nationalistic feeling, were fanned into a furious flame; and that the whole mentality of such an era belongs to an outgrown past-to the story of that "modern" feud between rival national ambitions which caused an almost infinite amount of human harm. Meanwhile I merely suggest that the hour has come to correct the astigmatism which, to return to our analogy, has confused grandmother and granddaughter. Is it impossible to accept the Catholic Church in the United States as a given fact and to judge it on its own merits? Several hundred years of institutional living must have produced something, either vicious or virtuous, worth looking at. I have a feeling that a glance will harm nobody. Indeed, it may even enable some people (the indefatigable John Jay Chapman, for instance) to spend a more comfortable night. of the Nation from timid beginnings to a position of unparalleled influence; and which laid the foundation for a new expression of the American essence, a new art, literature, culture. We may not like immigration, but we should be vastly more disturbed by the absence of immigration. It is already as plain as day that the two great saving instruments of American civilization in its early stages were slaves in the South. and Irish laborers in New England. Had these not been forthcoming, the Indian would have taken his children to stare at the curious ruins of Boston and Richmond. The real social meaning of immigration lies, however, in the fact that the servants and workers in New England were not savages, but Irishmen -that is, Europeans, inheritors of a civ ilization which, regardless of the damage done by centuries of malnutrition, had once profoundly modified and enriched the world of England. This essential, basic meaning the later immigration years merely diversified. The Germans came (though, of course, at a much higher level of culture) in quite the same way as the Saxons had gone to Britain. The French were absorbed in a manner similar to the assimilation of William the Conqueror and his Normans after 1066. Obviously, no modern Englishman goes about deploring the fact that his country was the confluence of so many racial streams. On the contrary, once the fusion was accomplished (say by the time of Chaucer), people became almost inordinately proud of it. Some day Americans will adopt a similar point of view. We are a commingling of racial and social rivers. If we were not that, we should be nothing more than a tepid lit tle creek. One may admit that the Church of 1928 is, at first sight, a comparatively unprepossessing spectacle. Charm is not its most conspicuous virtue, despite the colorfulness of New Orleans and Santa Fé. In numerous respects it seems to be, and is, an organization of foreigners. Often as not the Catholic steeple is a trustworthy guide to the lowliest part of town. The run of the faithful are not tempted to spend $250 on a family tree; as a matter of fact, the majority of them consider $250 a good deal of money. But, though all this may rouse one's innate sense of social superiority, it oughtHAT is the relation between all also to stir one's admiration for a great American achievement. The Catholic Church is, more dynamically than any other institution, the spiritual nerve, not of the America that has been, but of the America that is. The great immigration epoch now ended brought to this country the man-power which since 1800 populated and developed the vast regions acquired from Napoleon and Mexico; which built up the industrial vigor this and the Catholic Church? The reply is to be sought in something less obvious but more vital than statistics. On the one hand, the trend of the American stream-however swollen by immigration tributaries-was fixed by the English colonist. He determined the character of almost everything that h`s survived into the present as truly National: language, methods of thought. business habits, political and educational institutions. Most of us believe that his achievement was fundamentally very fine, and that it possessed sufficient vitality to permit of modifications. The immigrant added to but did not supplant the existing organism. On the other hand, this dominant English trend resented and resisted the encroachments of the immigrant mind. A hard and fast line was drawn, across which the newcomer was, indeed, theoretically invited to come, but at which he was confidently expected to halt. When he had jumped over almost every other barrier, his critics hastened to call attention to the insurmountable obstacle of race. Even now a man is "Americanized" in the eyes of some people only after he has surrendered all individuality and tattooed himself with a rubber stamp. the subject to George Washington, the It is, one may say quite frankly, diffi- Right at this point we encounter the great civic accomplishment of the Catholic Church in the United States. With this Church the life of multitudes of immigrants was in some manner identified. They respected its authority as they respected nothing else excepting the rule of the Government. And so it came to pass that this Church, popularly regarded as a European institution presided over by a foreign potentate, impressed upon the immigrant the preciousness of his American citizenship and the inviolability of his duty here. Decade after decade, as the American bishops assembled, their words on this subject were eloquent and uncompromising. They demanded no less than a pledge to the Nation of life, fortune, and sacred honor; they reaffirmed gratitude for a constitutional system which permitted the development of religious life under the aura of freedom of conscience; and they often focused attention upon ways in which their followers could endeavor concretely to aid in the solution of the country's problems. Never once, however, did they attempt to use Catholic strength as a political wedge to put into law their own especial convictions or to impose a burden upon others. What they said was repeated constantly in numberless places-in printed literature, in the homilies to which one after another run their course. which thousands of congregations lisMeanwhile it was no easy task to induce tened, and, finally, in the daily instructhe newcomer to adjust his conduct to tion given through an extensive school the American scheme. Nationalisms are system maintained without deflecting a just as explosive in this domain of husingle cent from the public treasury. The result is obvious in the average conman activity as in any other. A great temporary Catholic's conception of citimany customs, imported from the Old World, had to be dropped, not because zenship. He restates, even more firmly they were wrong in themselves, but than did his predecessors of the Revolutionary period who addressed a letter on ish. To date it has been impossible to develop new customs in their stead. The tendency of Americanization has been to strip the individual and the group to which he adhered, rather than to bedeck him further. The result is a definite, omnipresent bleakness and baldness, often commented upon but difficult to remedy. To the extent that improvement could be hoped for through cultural or artistic effort some eager attempts were made almost immediately in behalf of the Catholic immigrant. The separate groups of Catholics each expressed something of their own individuality and experience. Round about such centers as Boston and New York the Irish began very soon to develop an interest in "things of the mind." A series of weekly journals dealt with doctrinal and apologetic aspects of the faith, encouraged ventures in historical and poetic writing, and, above all, kept the ideal of Erin vigorously aglow. This journalism was virile enough to overflow into really notable books and to foster the development of several significant literary personalities. Thomas D'Arcy Magee and John Gilmary Shea made valuable contributions to the chronicle of their adopted country; and later on the children of the Irish evinced creative power of a very rare and precious kind in Louise Imogen Guiney, of a more commonplace but nevertheless urbane variety in Maurice Francis Egan. Similarly the Germans maintained a deep, though for the most part scholarly and quite self-sufficient, interest in their own ancestral cultural tradition. I think the history of the German Catholic press in the United States would reveal the best intellectual effort of immigration groups identified with the Church. Unfortunately, it was, of necessity, a transitory and somewhat esoteric effort, which lingers on in St. Louis, Milwaukee, and even New York, but is anxiously casting an eye about for something in the way of descendants. In the United States this moral code did not remain altogether uninfluenced by puritanical standards, on the one hand, and fashionable laxities, on the other; but normally it did restrain a vast new population from being victimized by either positive or negative crusading rampages. On important matters, such as the integrity of the family or the probable rightness of private property, it did not give way; but it remained aloof from such miasmas as prohibition, however, a good deal more than an simply because they happened to be-in T HE Church in America has been, immigrant phenomenon. Being a historic institution identified with rich harvests in art, scholarship, philosophy, and saintliness, the Church exercised an influence upon that central movement in American civilization which, beginning, roughly speaking, with the opening of the nineteenth century and lasting until some years after the close of the Civil War, has been termed "romantic." This movement involved, on the one hand, the same kind of contact with Catholi cism as European romanticism, in the work of Scott, Chateaubriand, Fichte, and others, had experienced. At this point the thought-worlds of Emerson, Longfellow, Hawthorne, Lowell, Norton, Parkman, and many more came directly in touch with Catholic Christendom. The effect here was, as might obviously have been expected, humanistic rather than religious, but it was great and goodly. In another way the Church was destined to influence consciences and souls more spiritually during the afterglow of the English Oxford Movement, in which Cardinal Newman had taken so prominent a part. From one end of the United States to the other, gifted representatives of the prevailing AngloSaxon concept of American life were impelled to combine it with the noble view of human destiny proposed by the Church. In New England there were Orestes Brownson and Father Isaac Hecker, the first an omnivorous philosopher and dogged pamphleteer, the second one of those singular men whose entire lives merge in a poetic vision of good to all mankind. In the South there were such men as Father John Banister Tabb, a poet strangely concrete and luminous alike, and Joel Chandler Harris, creator of Uncle Remus. Among those whom California brought to the gateway of Catholicism, Charles Warren Stoddard, restless traveler and fastidious prosepoet, was perhaps the most significant and consistent. These names are mentioned not because I wish to draw up a list-that would be frighteningly longbut because they will give a fairly effective idea of the magnitude and diversity of the trend. Unfortunately, once this "Oxford" current as well as the inherited nationalistic enthusiasms had subsided, definitely Catholic effort to influence or foster cultural life in this country came to a halt. It is curious to note how clearly one can discern the ebb. The "Ave Maria," published at Notre Dame, Indiana, during more than half a century and edited all that while by a convert priest of Boston Brahmin ancestry, shows a curve of excellence that rises steadily from the wake of the Civil War to the opening of the new century. After that the descent is almost catastrophically rapid. It is not merely the removal of names through death and other contingencies. It is rather the failure of new names to appear. A similar process of deterioration can I think, be fol lowed through almost the whole of American Catholic literary and artistic production. Today there is a genuine improvement in ecclesiastical architecture; but every other art is simply simmering. The same conclusion must be reached concerning philosophy and scholarship. A Catholic who reflects at all on these things cannot but be struck with grave misgivings when he compares contemporary historical writing with the work of Shea, or contrasts the urbane wisdom of Archbishop John Lancaster Spalding with what has taken its place. There are signs, as yet not fully revealed, of an awakening. Meanwhile it is only too natural that some groups of Catholics, grown negative through the mere absence of positive force, should try to slam the door in the face of current paganism. The censorship which prevails in Boston is not an ideal attitude toward the world that is. It is probably not even a properly Catholic attitude. But it is as natural as any other effort to establish a quarantine. The explanation for this state of affairs must be sought, it seems to me, in the passing from power of social forces with which Catholicism could be effectively combined. From romantic America to the Catholic Church was only a step, though it may well have been a very grave step. From contemporary Rotarianism or its opposite, sardonic naturalism in literary or artistic guise, there is no pathway to the City of God, no matter how much smiling may be done on both sides. Moreover, the America of today is given over body and soul to the business of mass education an investment in energy which necessarily imposed a tremendous burden upon Catholics. Schools and colleges now constitute so serious a drain upon the Nation that they may be considered its most expensive luxuries, costing more, as they do, than automobiles and radios combined, with the movies thrown into the bargain. Meanwhile the Church has necessarily been obliged to foster religious education through a system of privately maintained elementary and higher schools. The result of secular training may be anything you like, but it is not religious habits. In 1800 one might have defended this statement with fairly cogent theoretical arguments. Today its correctness has been proved to the hilt by experience. But the work of teaching has absorbed the class of Catholics who under other circumstances might grow into cultural or creative activity. It has likewise deprived the Catholic body of cultural leadership. These things could, however, have been avoided, so far as I can see, only through some careful plan for the conservation of energy-a plan exceedingly difficult to draw up, and probably not workable after completion. One does merely feel that Catholics are entitled to a modicum of thanks for having borne, at great cost, their share of the country's educational burden. Manifestly, they ought not to be criticised venomously and ignorantly for their pains. After all, the ideal which contemporary education proposes as the humanistic standard to be accepted in the future. is likely to prove more important than immediate practical achievement. It may be said that the American Catholic is only now becoming fully aware of how much of the traditional past, and therefore also of the visioned future, is peculiarly his own. We shall always be guided, in our better moments, by the memory of good things done by those who have preceded us on this soil. We may sometimes try dragging George Washington a little nearer to our own level, but it will always be more important, and more popular, to push ourselves up to his level. That being true, the Catholic's realization of the story of his Church in the New World is an abiding source of pride and illumination. It is never a story of wealth, numbers. dominion. It begins with the dream of Christian service which led the missionaries of Spain and France to identify themselves with the Indian. The lifework of Junipero Serra, friend of the poor in the valley of San Diego, blends with the effort of Père Allouez, Jesuit apostle whose bones were lowered into our earth by redskin hands. Today, looking back over the whole of their adventure in charity, it may be impossible to discern anything more solid than ruins. But when the American Catholic has incorporated them as firmly in his conception of the National ideal as he now incorporates Lincoln and Robert Lee, it will become impossible for him to continue for very long on any dark road. The shades of these immortals will hover about and over him; and in his eyes dust from the sod upon which their shields have lain will drive him toward the day. From the missionary vision to the dream of American government is not very far. Here, too, there was question of a desire to bend civilization to the well-being of all, to create a world new, (Please turn to continuation, page 360) A Opulent Country Newspapers ROUND the two-story brick building of a country newspaper in a town of perhaps five thousand population were parked the other morning seven motor cars. "All of them," the editor explained, "belong to the 'force.' One is mine, the next belongs to the business manager, one to the city editor, two to the linotype operators, one to the foreman, and one to his assistant." "Why not one for the 'devil'?" "He had a little bad luck last night going to a dance, and his car is in the garage." "So every employee has a motor car?" "No; one printer is an itinerant and came only last week, and the society editor drives her mother's car." Looking over the plant, I found that it uses two linotypes. These machines cost around $4,500 each. The paper is printed on a $10,000 press that prints, cuts, and folds 6,000 papers hourly as completely as does a city journal's equipment. Every machine that enters into the multifarious duties of printing and newspaper-making receives its power from a motor, the current coming from a power station twenty-eight miles away. Pushing buttons, pressing keys, and throwing switches set in motion a dozen modern fixtures that carry on a bewildering array of operations all with automatic precision and with a minimum of manual labor. ACK in the gay 'nineties every ma BACK chine in a country printing-office was set in motion by the foot power of the printer-except the press on which the paper itself was "run off." At four o'clock in the afternoon a husky toiler appeared, and by main strength turned a wheel whose connections produced at the marvelous rate of four hundred copies an hour the town's palladium of liberty. At five o'clock in this modern office an electric bell sounded and the employees leisurely washed, changed to street clothes, climbed into seven motor cars, and drove away for the day. Two hours of daylight remained for work in the garden or for a ride with the family over Country highways. The city editor and business manager, however, were deep in a golf tournament at the country club and headed for the fairways. By CHARLES M. HARGER The lowest-paid worker on the paper whose plant I was visiting is the office boy-formerly known as the "devil," a term that has vanished with the rising importance of the craft. He, so the editor informed me, receives eighteen dollars a week and up. All employees are type operators receive thirty and forty dollars weekly; all the others, thirty dollars a week--and up. All employees are paid time and a half after five o'clock, and seldom a week ends without some substantial addition to their checks on that account. Maybe they can afford motor cars. When "editor" was a synonym 'HAT has happened since the days for shiny trousers, overdue notes at the bank, and skirmishing among advertisers to raise funds to pay off the help Saturday night? Why is it that when you seek to purchase a well-managed county seat newspaper the price, if purchase be possible at all, is set at $40,000 to $80,000? If the location be exceptionally favorable-such as the only paper in a city of ten to twenty thousand population-the figures go well higher. The owner of the only paper in a town of 15,000 refused recently an offer of $250,000 for his property; the sale of the paper in a city of 18,000 was for $190,000. The former plant was bought with $3,000, mostly borrowed, thirty years ago; the latter in those times would have been considered dear at $6,000. For one thing, there are fewer papers. When I was learning newspaperingjournalism seems a little too ornate a term for the country paper-the town in which I sought to mold public opinion had 4,000 population and four newspaper plants. Two published both a daily and weekly and two a weekly only -six papers striving for existence. Each represented a political party or factionRepublican, Democratic, Populist, Prohibition. The fact is that the political editorial column of early days was of interest to about twenty persons-office-holders, candidates planning for future elections, and political bosses. The remainder of the population was desperately wearied by the constant din about local statesmen and their doings. Gradually it dawned on the country editor that his function was to furnish the news, and that he would have more friends if he let the politicians fight their own battles or use his columns at advertising rates. Recognition of that principle marked the passing of the political organ, and today the country newspaper dabbles little in politics. The State chairman of any party twenty years ago could list up every paper in his State as to its political support. He cannot do it now; he is doing well to set forth with any definiteness ten per cent of the papers and be sure that the alignment with a political party is assured. Then there is a change in the content of the country paper. Take the local news, the doings of the city or county. Once it was intensely personal and often as prejudiced as the editorials. The professional formula that opinions should not be expressed in news items was violated as a matter of course. Often the families of political opponents felt the effect of this system, and the afternoon tea or the coming-out party of a political enemy's family was omitted from the society column for political reasons. The town without a good healthy feud, whose papers did not indulge in frequent belittling of neighbor cities, was considered a weakling. Libel suits and frequent personal encounters made a continuous procession of local events that furnished thrilling news. But it did not produce business, and in the end the paper that failed to change its way faded from the picture. Either a receiver took over its affairs or a saner publication absorbed it. T HE news columns of the country paper today are as matter of fact as a report of the Budget Director at Washington. Events are related as they happen, so far as the reporter can obtain the facts, with no reflection and with no prejudice. The wife of the bitterest political rival can be sure of the nicest |