Should they be taxed? How are you going to have any trade in liquor without reviving the liquor trade? It is much easier to tear down the Volstead

Act and the Eighteenth Amendment than it is to design and erect any decent, durable structure in their place.

Apparently every now and then the

American people need to have somebody

ask them, even if it has to be a Tweed: "What are you going to do about it?" with the emphasis on the "do."

HE Federal Child Labor Law, lately declared unconstitutional, was passed to meet an alleged delinquency of the South in the protection of its children. It was passed by the votes of other sections over the protest of the South, and whatever rejoicing greeted the Supreme Court's decision came from the South.

The proposed Federal law against lynching is also-when one frankly faces the facts-aimed at the South, and at the lynching of Negroes in the South in particular. While it is opposed by representative citizens of all sections, the most vigorous and concerted opposition comes from the South. The fight against its enactment is largely a fight of Southern sentiment against the sentiment of other sections. Southern opposition has been intensified and strengthened by the decision against the Child Labor Law.

Because Southern votes in Congress and Southern newspaper utterances were strongly against the one measure when it was being debated and

are now

strongly against the other, it should not be inferred, therefore, that Southern sentiment is unanimous in either case. In the 1921 report of the Tennessee Bureau of Workshop and Factory Inspection I find this sentence, "The Federal Child Labor Tax Law has helped materially in the enforcement of the Child Labor Law." Most Southern people, I am persuaded, while naturally feeling that child labor should be regulated by the States rather than by the Federal Government, recognized that some States were not doing their duty, and would have been quite content to see the Federal law remain in force.

So an increasing number of Southerners are coming to look with tolerance on the idea of a Federal law against lynching. This does not mean that there is any acceptance of the provisions of the Dyer Bill. A few Southern Congressmen voted for that measure, but the ablest Southern Republicans opposed it. I have yet to hear any Southerner in private conversation approve its provis ions. So general is this condemnation, so strongly voiced has it been from all sections of the country, so manifestly unfair are some of the provisions of the bill, that one does not have to venture far into the realms of prophecy to say at it is not going to become a law hout being materially modified. Nor

does one have to assume much legal lore to doubt its constitutionality. Disregarding this particular bill, then-as one well may-there remain some important questions it has raised for the South to consider-the question of whether the prevention of lynchings should be left entirely to the States, even when they fail to take adequate steps of prevention, for one thing; for another, the question of whether a Federal law, even though undesirable, may not become necessary; the question of whether the public sentiment of the

South will be against a Federal law for all time and under all circumstances.

Having definite views of my own on the first two questions, I have lately been trying to find out just what representative Southerners who have studied the subject of lynchings think of the ultimate possibility and desirability of a Federal anti-lynching law.

Three men of Tennessee who have given much thought to racial relationships and have done much to create a sentiment against mob violence are Dr. Edward Mims of Vanderbilt University, former Governor A. H. Roberts, and Mr. Bolton Smith. These men are agreed that Federal action should come only as a last resort-that is, only when the States have made it clear that they will not take adequate measures to prevent lynchings and to punish the members of lynching mobs. Yet Dr. Mims says, "If local and State government cannot stop lynching, then the Nation must and will." Or, as Mr. Smith puts it, "If we

do not mend our ways very decidedly, Federal legislation will be had."

These men, because of their interest in the welfare of the colored race, might be expected to take the view that the protection of the individual in his rights as a citizen and the promotion of racial harmony could become of more importance than the preservation to the States of their right to the exclusive use of the police power. Yet I found a Southerner of the truest type, Dr. T. N. Ivey, editor of the official organ of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, taking practically the same view. "The States should suppress lynchings and punish lynchers," Dr. Ivey said in effect. "If they will not, public sentiment will force the Nation to take a hand, and it should. Whether the States have already sinned away their day of grace I do not know."

A former professor in the University of Tennessee, long in the South, but of Northern birth and Republican ancestry, was firmly of the opinion that the Nation had both the right and the reason to act if lynching became a National problem. Yet this man put more stress than any educated Southerner I have talked to in a long time on the naturalness of the feeling that leads to lynchings and the incentive to the use of force-even illegal force-that exists wherever there is a large population that understands and respects no law but the law of force.

Both contrasting with and complementing these views are those of a thoughtful Negro leader, Professor Isaac Fisher, of Fisk University. He favors a Federal law and pleads with Southern lawmakers to welcome, not oppose, "Federal assistance—not interference"in the stamping out of a great evil. Only an awakened public opinion can stop lynchings, he says; a Federal law will be but the beginning of the work necessary to be done. "Any one who imagines that habits of thought can be changed by legislative enactments needs to turn back and read again the history of civilization." Federal law is needed, not because it will stop lynching all at once, but because it will strengthen public sentiment against it, make the task of State and local officials in protecting the weak and ignorant easier, and give hope and courage to the Negro race.

This call for immediate Federal action voices the feeling of Negroes generally. The Negro mind-so far as one outside

the race can judge-is filled with the horror of lynchings. The race fears the lynching mob and resents with intense bitterness the thought and feeling that tolerate mobs and their unholy deeds. Without Professor Fisher's understanding of the limited results that Federal legislation can achieve, the Negroes generally see in it their only hope and long for it with an intensity not generally appreciated.

The Negro view can be taken for granted. That the views of the men I have been quoting are the views of the majority of Southern whites I very much doubt. I am inclined to think that the majority view was presented by the business man who said that he was opposed to both lynchings and a Federal law against lynching. "I do not believe the Federal Government ought to interfere with matters that can be handled locally. I believe its interference would provoke resentment in the South and do more harm than good. No community is going to take kindly to the exercise by an outside authority of powers it has been itself exercising. The Governors of the States are the men who can do most to prevent lynchings. A State police force in every State would be a great help. Only the development of a general feeling against lynching can finally end it. This feeling is steadily being developed. A Federal law would check rather than aid its development."

A young man with an interest in things political expressed similar opinions: "The Federal Government is interfering in too many things now. What is needed is not more laws, but better enforcement of the law we have. Even if things go on as they have been going, I am opposed to a Federal law. It will be better for a few lynchers to go unpunished than for the National Government further to weaken the power of the States."

This is the view taken by most Southern politicians and newspapers, the view probably yet held by the majority of our people. I think there is no doubt, however, that the majority holding this view is all the time becoming smaller. The conviction that lynchings must be stopped-by the Nation if the States cannot or will not do it-steadily deepens. The people of the South are coming to feel a sense of shame for their long endurance of this crime against democracy and humanity, and most Southern States are now making an honest effort to put an end to it. If the three or four States that yet seem indifferent remain so, they will find themselves before long without the support or the sympathy of the States that are trying to erase the blot that now clings to the whole South.

Thoughtful Southerners are coming, too, I think, to realize that it is finally by public sentiment rather than by law that lynchings will be stopped. Much can be done, beyond doubt, by the speedier trial of persons accused of crime, but this could be carried too far in individual cases. Much can be done by prompt, energetic action that will make evident the purpose of public officials to enforce the law against mobs and mob members. Too much can scarcely be done along this line. In some States, at least, public sentiment is even now with the official who is not afraid to put down mob violence with a strong hand if necessary, and officials are showing a determination along this line they did not so fully display a few years ago.

"Any Governor can enforce the law," said Governor Taylor, of Tennessee. "It is all nonsense for a man in office to say that he cannot. If he is willing to act and not afraid, he can do it, and publie sentiment will back him up in it." Governor Taylor has shown commendable

energy in law enforcement and has unquestionably had the backing of the public. In some instances and in some sections an official might not have this public support, and with public sentiment against him the most vigilant and active of officials might not be able in extreme cases to prevent a lynching. It is seldom, however, if the proper effort were made, that the leaders of a mob could not be apprehended and put to trial.

Personally, I believe that lynching must be stopped-in the South and elsewhere. The States can and should stop it. If they do not, the Nation should and must do it. National legislation can be prevented, and should be prevented, only by the earnest effort of the States to protect their citizenship. If National legislation becomes necessary, and is wisely conceived and fairly administered, it will commend itself to the thoughtful Southerner, just as the Federal Child Labor Law, despite his objections to its passage, was coming to commend itself.

Right now what is most needed is not more laws, either State or Federal, but a quickened sense of public duty and individual responsibility in the matter. The people who would end the crime of lynching can do most to accomplish their desire by bringing home to the public mind the horror, the futility, and the danger to our whole fabric of government of such lawlessness. Similarly, the men who are concerned to preserve to the States their ancient rights can do most to accomplish that end by bringing to the citizens and the officials of the States in which lynchings most frequently occur a realization of the fact that civilization will not much longer tolerate the repeated and unpunished murder of men-black or white, guilty or innocent-by excited and passionate mobs.

T

HERE is an old tradition of some

two years' standing that any Eng. lishman who visits America (and, he who reads might almost suspect, many who do not) must necessarily write his impressions of how prohibition does not work and how American uni versities do, and generally, from a perhaps three weeks' experience, tell Americans how they ought to manage their country. As I write Professor Stephen Leacock's "Discovery of England" lies before me. I have, I hope, learned its lesson. The tradition will by me be more honored in the breach than in the observance. My Discovery of America is that it is a land whose hospitality is almost staggering. My impression of my first visit to America is that it will

BY M. C. HOLLIS

SECRETARY OF THE OXFORD UNION SOCIETY

not be my last. Beyond that I will not commit myself. I am an original Eng lishman, who believes that the problems of America, educational or otherwise, must be solved by Americans.

My task is less ambitious, and perhaps less impertinent. I have had the good fortune to be a member of a debating team from Oxford University which has been touring a few of the Eastern American universities, and I have been asked to write of the differences between Oxford and these universities. How far the universities which I have visited are typical of American universities, and how far, therefore, my remarks are capable of generalization, I simply do not know. I should imagine that there is no such thing as an American uni

versity and that Harvard is a great deal more like Oxford than it is like one of the big State universities of the Middle West. I can write only of what I have seen, and I have seen these seven universities-Bates College in Maine, Swarthmore, Columbia, Yale, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania.

And of the other term of my comparisons and contrasts. I am comparing, not with "the English university"-which is a phrase that means nothing at all-but with Oxford. And whatever the English university would be like, it would certainly not be like Oxford and Cambridge.

Between Oxford and the Eastern universities the first difference by which every one must be struck is the funda

mental difference of system. I was told by a professor at Columbia that he often used to be asked how it was possible to enter "Oxford College." The phrase is natural to an American and extremely amusing to an Englishman. For in America, as I understand it, the words "college" and "university" are used more or less indifferently. A man "goes to college" and he means merely by that that he goes to a university. It is therefore natural to speak of going to "Oxford College." For the constitution of a university in the United States is not like the Constitution of the United States. The only universities whose constitutions are like the Constitution of the United States are Oxford and Cambridge.

Just as the United States consists of united States, so Oxford University consists of united colleges. There are, I think, twenty-six colleges at Oxford, to one or other of which practically every undergraduate belongs. He will live and eat and sleep in the college buildings when he first comes, as we say, "into residence." Even when, after two years, owing to overcrowding, he is turned out of college and has to find lodgings for himself in the town he is still a member of his college. He may still dine in the college hall any night that he wishes to do so, and it is to the college authorities that he is responsible for the work that he does (or does not). At Oxford we are Democrats rather than Republicans. The college rights are very jealously guarded. It is the college which is responsible for all internal discipline, and, as recent experience has shown, it is practically impossible for the University authorities to touch an undergradute if the college authorities see fit to take his side.

There are two very prominent features of American university life of the development of which, owing to this college system, Oxford has never felt any need-the class and the fraternity. Take first the class. Some ten days ago I watched at Columbia the tug-of-war between the freshmen and the sophomores, and I heard and partly saw its preliminary processions. Those repetitions of 'One-Nine-Two-Four" and "One-NineTwo-Five" were the most curious things that I heard in all America. What was the reason for this violence of loyalty? Why should a man feel any community to another man simply because, if all went well (and, after having heard of the psychological tests which Columbia imposes, that in itself was almost inconceivable), they would both graduate on the same vague day some two or three years hence? It is impossible to understand a loyalty without feeling it, and no doubt I am wrong in thinking that this class loyalty must be a very artificial thing, perhaps even a nonexistent thing, as a genuine emotion, like another class loyalty, that very empty "solidarity of the proletariat" of hich we hear so much.

or at Oxford we do not have class

loyalty because we do not need class loyalty. The college system supplies us with our lesser loyalty, our hated friend and ever-present enemy, whom we meet and to whom we talk every day of our lives and whose existence is so essential to the existence of a university. All the athletic contests that are not interuniversity are inter-collegiate. The colleges, varying as they do considerably, are still nearly enough equal in num bers to make this possible. And this college loyalty is certainly no artificial thing. By 1936 the class of 1926 can exist only, I suppose, as a memory. But a college is a lasting thing, a building. perhaps half a thousand years old. It is something substantial to which the old graduate can return, and he need not find a contemporary in order to find a sharer of his loyalty and his love. It is only in an arithmetical sense that this college loyalty can be called a lesser loyalty, for if two old friends were to meet they would soon forget that they were Oxonians in their remembrance that they were at Balliol or at Christ Church together.

Be

The complete absence of this consciousness of year makes almost unintelligible to us the system of "hazing," which still survives in some American universities. There, too, it seems to be dying. At Oxford we never hazed. fore the war there was a certain formality of intercourse between a freshman and a senior (a senior is with us any one who is an undergraduate and not a freshman). The freshman would not speak to the senior until the senior had first called and left his card. But after the war we found that freedom had rather abruptly ceased to broaden down from precedent to precedent. An ex-colonel of forty-three might be a freshman and an ex-schoolboy of nineteen a senior. Our English sense of humor, even if, as Americans say, it does not exist, was sufficient to kill Oxford's last relics of class consciousness.

American friends often used to ask me whether at Oxford we have "fraternities." But fraternities, like classes, supply in American university life a need which Oxford, because of her college system, does not have. The object of a fraternity is, as I understand, to give the student somewhere to live. With us the college is above all things the place of residence. The difference is, first, that a college is, as I have tried to show, much more besides; and, secondly, that admission to a college comes, not through the election of those who already belong to it, but the passing of certain tests and examinations which the college authorities ordain.

We thus ought by rights to be free from the main charge against American fraternities-that they encourage the clique-but we are not. The fraternities, limited as they are, still survive at Yale, satisfying, as far as I could make out, no want whatsoever of their members. So at Oxford. I have shown that

we have no need for fraternities, but that is a different thing from showing that they do not exist. We can eat, we can even entertain in our private rooms, but still we must needs have our clubs. And there at least we jealously and uselessly reserve to ourselves the privileges of cliquishness. The Oxford Club is more like the Eating Club of Princeton than anything else that I saw in America, only it is more an addition to and less a part of our life than the Princeton Eating Club seemed to be.

There is, or has been, a very close parallel in England to the American fraternity, but it was not at Oxford or Cambridge, but at the English public school. The English public school is not, like the American public school, public. It is the most exclusive and expensive private, or, as you would say, preparatory, school in the country. It was, it is true, stolen from the public and only the name now remains as record of the theft. Eton, for instance, was founded by King Henry VI to provide an education "for seventy poor scholars." For these seventy scholars accommodation was provided in the college. As time went on, the reputation of Eton's education grew and people would come from afar to share it. Where were they to live? They formed themselves into groups and took lodg ings with landladies about in the town. These landladies were called dames and the houses dames' houses. The dames' houses at Eton a hundred years ago were, so far as I can discover, very like the American fraternities of to-day. The difference (and the downfall) was that their inmates were younger, and therefore noisier, than the university students. The noise defeated the dame. The evolution of the last hundred years has been that the dames have paid the penalty of their incompetence, which was to change their sex. They have been replaced by the house masterteacher and housekeeper in one-and fraternity has become paternity, with the house master as a very paternal autocrat. The self-determination of the organization has been regularized out of existence. Is not this almost what exPresident Wilson wished to see happen at Princeton, and will history repeat itself?

There was one side of Oxford life about which Americans seemed everywhere much better informed than I was. It was the Oxford tutorial system. I confess that it had never occurred to me before that Oxford had a tutorial system, but, on thinking it over, I suppose that it has. To use a tutor in order to teach I had always thought too obvious a device to be dignified by the name of system. But it has apparently been accepted as such in America, and even rejected as such and opposed as such. But acceptance and rejection and opposition are none of them really acceptance or rejection or opposition to the Oxford system. For the Oxford system of teach

ing implies the Oxford system of getting a degree, and that is a system which does not exist in America.

In America degrees are gained by taking a certain number of courses, and to take a course means, as it seems, to go through a certain prescribed ritual. Whether the Oxford system is or is not popular depends on whether it is or is not a part of the ritual. Thus at Princeton I found that it was, and was therefore accepted. At Harvard it was not. It was therefore looked on as a mere extra, and very properly disliked. But at Oxford it is neither a part of a ritual nor an extra. It is a convenience.

The confusion comes from a failure to realize the difference between the Oxford lecturer and the American lecturer. The Oxford lecturer is like a porter. Just as a porter is a person who offers to carry your grip for you, and if you prefer to carry it yourself it is your business, so a lecturer at Oxford is a person who offers to help you to get a degree, but if you prefer to get it without his assistance it is your business. And it would not be unfair to add that with some lecturers it is very much easier to get it without assistance.

Oxford University requires a student, before it will give him a degree, to have slept for forty-two nights during each of the three terms of three years within three miles of Carfax (a crossroads in the center of Oxford) and to have passed two public examinations-that is to say, to have written two series of papers which convince the appointed examiners that he knows as much about

his subject as he ought to know. How he acquires that requisite knowledge is his own business. If he is one who learns easily from lectures, there are lectures and there is a tutor to advise him to which lectures to go. But, if not, let him shut himself up with his books and never enter a lecture-room.

At Yale and at Swarthmore I was allowed to attend classes. At Swarthmore I am sorry to say that I was noticed and the ordinary course of study was interrupted in order that the class might enjoy the much more highly educative experience of laughing at my complete ignorance of the history of British foreign policy. But Yale was made of sterner stuff. The subject was the growth of trades unions. What I may call the lecture part of the class might well have been a lecture delivered at Oxford, except that the Oxford lecturer would not have known so many facts. What was very un-Oxonian was the preliminary written questions to see if the students had read what they were told to read. An Oxford lecturer, like Gallio, would have cared for none of these things, and, if he had, his class would have told him to mind his own business.

I saw much else that was new and wonderful. I found that universities in America have publicity agents. In Eng land we still pretend, having first taken care not to succeed, that we wish to keep out of the papers. At Harvard I was shown the mysteries of your university journalism, and, as a harassed university journalist myself, wondered at the free

dom and energy and imagination which could find facts enough to fill a daily newspaper. At Columbia I tripped even more badly, and joined the great lost army of contributors. But Swarthmore was perhaps our most interesting experience. There we found-what does not exist in England-honest co-education in working. It was so honest that I even had to debate against a lady. The co-education of Oxford means that men and women, as a concession, are allowed to live in the same town and, when they have finished doing that, to write the same letters after the name. Oxford's interpretation of the equality of the sexes is to call its women students Bachelors of Arts. Cambridge has women students, but no interpretation of the equality of the sexes. It is therefore the more praised of Professor Leacock. But it was a novelty to go into a university dinner and sit down between two ladies. I was surprised, and perhaps the test of co-education's success at Swarthmore is that everybody else present was surprised that I was surprised. But of that I cannot say.

The trouble everywhere was the shortness of time. I had never time to judge. I was whirled into a university life that was very different from any that I had ever known. I told it to join the League of Nations, and then I was whirled out of it. Nothing was left but a remembrance of wonderful friendship and hospitality and a great longing to come again and learn more truly what manner of men and women they are who give these great gifts.