the violinist's thought to the strings every player's tone has its own character. This tone is a reflection of the personality of the player. It is quite true that instruments have their own tones. But a good performer can extract from an inferior violin the best tone of which it is capable, while an incompetent one will draw from a Stradivarius only an indifferent quality. Heifetz owes much of his success to the ravishing beauty of his tone. Would you know something of the secret of the infinite variety of shades at the command of the violinist? Watch the wrist of the bow arm. To be sure the entire arm should be absolutely without constriction. It should not be what the athletes call muscle-bound. But the soul of the bowing is in the perfectly flexible wrist. Even the manner of holding the bow with the fingers of the right hand possesses comparatiye insignificance, since different master performers have different ways.

Tone may be large or small. A large tone is advantageous in playing with an orchestra, but it is not essential to beautiful performance. Erika Morini has a big tone, but Erna Rubinstein's is more admired, for it is essential that the tone be pure, mellow, and sonorous. Purity means freedom from scratchiness or twanging, from audible scraping of the hairs of the bow on the strings. It should flow apparently spontaneously, like clear water from a spring. It should always be mellow, which means that it should not be squeaky, or dull and opaque, or hard, as if the strings were of metal. Steel strings are some times used, but they should not sound steel-like. The term "sonority" does not mean loudness, but resonant vibration. There is a peculiarly bell-like quality in

a sonorous violin tone, and one should expect it from every good performer.

A beautiful tone, perfect intonation, and free elastic bowing are the prime requisites of good violin playing. Two or three special effects will doubtless attract the attention of what is called "the average" hearer, and he may wish to know something about them. Harmonics are those high, flutelike tones which seem to lie beyond the natural range of the instrument. It was long ago found that by lightly, instead of firmly, touching a string with a finger of the left hand a performer could cause an overtone to be heard while the fundamental tone was silent. Every musical sound consists of a fundamental and several overtones. The untrained listener can hear some of these overtones when a big bell rings. The harmonics of the violin and other bowed instruments are overtones, and they can be produced from all four of the strings, each giving a different quality and thus adding to the number of tonal tints at the command of a composer.

Reverting to the bow, the listener may acquire some idea of the elasticity and freedom of the bow arm from noting how the violinist plays staccati-those short detached notes which seem SO astonishing when they are sung. A clear, light, firm staccato can be obtained only by good bowing. The position of the bow on the strings affects the tone. Playing close to the bridge gives a thin, nasal tone, often used in orchestral pieces for special effects. Playing a little fur ther away increases the power. But as the bow approaches the finger-board the tone decreases in strength and increases in mellowness. Playing right over the finger-board causes the tone to become veiled and very soft. A different variety

of soft veiled tone is secured by the use of the mute, a little wooden contrivance in appearance like a small comb, pushed down over the strings at the bridge.

All concert-goers who are observant must have seen violin and cello players causing the fingers of the left hand to quiver when pressed on the strings. This produces what is called the vibrato, a swift trembling of the tone, which is believed to be expressive of feeling. It might be so were it not that most performers use it all the time, so that it becomes a mere mannerism. Leopold Auer, teacher of Heifetz, Elman, Zimbalist, and other eminent players, is very severe in his censure of this continual employment of what ought to be introduced occasionally and for a manifest purpose. "The vibrato," he says, "is an effect, an embellishment; it can lend a touch of divine pathos to the climax of a phrase or the course of a passage, but only if the player has cultivated a delicate sense of proportion in the use of it."

Excellence in violin or cello playing, like that in all other musical performance, is dependent upon something beyond technic. There must be purity of taste and propriety of style; but such matters do not readily lend themselves to definition. However, the most inexperienced music lover will have no difficulty in perceiving that shallow and showy compositions, such as the concertos of Paganini or Ernst, admit of more ad captandum playing than the dignified and deeply felt creations of Bach or the elegant and finished writings of the Italian classicists. At the bottom of all truly great musical performance there is a certain indescribable, but none the less evident, nobility which always succeeds in making itself

(C) Mishkin

JASCHA HEIFETZ

known to those who do not wish to find sensationalism in solo art. For those who do it is safe to say that the best violin playing is always unbearably dull. Excitement is what the unthinking concert-goer desires. He would rather observe the stormy flights of rash Toscha Seidel up and down the fingerboard or the bold attacks of Boris Hambourg on his cello than to be wafted into a celestial dream by the seraphic chanting of some new Sarasate or the organ tones of a Casals. Technically, almost all violin playing is now good. It is in the departments of taste and style that we have to seek for supremity. Many music lovers prefer Elman to Heifetz because, as they put it, he is "more emotional." Well, you have to make your choice. The finest violin playing is certainly emotional, but never sentimental, lachrymose, rude, or unfinished.

While we are considering the playing of bowed instruments, we may give our thought for a moment to the performance of the best of their combinations, the string quartette. All that has been said about tone and intonation applies with equal force to quartette performance. In the department of intonation the requirements are very exacting, for an absolute agreement among four stringed instruments is rare, and yet it is essential to true beauty in quartette achievements. Finish of style in the performance of such an organization is another necessity. To attain it the four performers must play together without the slightest inexactitude of attack or movement, and every phrase must be delivered with flawless smoothness, purity of tone, and justness of accent.

The subject of interpretation cannot be discussed. All that can be made obedient to clearly definable law is the technic of performance. The rules which apply to it are general; those which might be laid down in regard to interpretation would surely have to be equally general, but much fewer. It is difficult to go further in determining the requirements of interpretation than to say that the style should be appropriate. Now style is itself a dubious term, for it is open to more than one construction. We are quite ready to assert that the style appropriate to the performance of one of Bach's unaccompanied violin sonatas is not that which should be applied to the Mendelssohn Concerto and that a chamber music organization could hardly be expected to treat a Beethoven quartette as it would that by Debussy.

But these are obvious generalities. An actor does not read the lines of Augustus Thomas as he would those of Shakespeare. But when we have accepted this rather hazy conception of style, we are still confronted with the fact that every composition worthy of study has its own individuality, and that this individuality demands of the interpreter a special style. Beethoven's "Emperor" piano concerto cannot be played in the same style as his G major concerto. The true artist will of course endeavor to assimilate the art work and reproduce it as nearly as he can in its own spirit. But he can never be any one except himself. When he tries to be, he smothers himself in the wet blankets of tradition. In regard to violin playing there are some very uncomfortable traditions which cramp and fetter the genius of young artists. These are the traditions about

the true school of Tartini, the true school of Bach, and other true schools, of which we know very little and in some cases nothing at all. Here, again, it is a pleasure to quote the great teacher Leopold Auer:

Tradition in reality weighs down the living spirit of the present with the dead formalism of the past. For all these hard and fast ideas regarding the interpretation of the older classic works, their tempi, their nuances, their expression, have become formalisms, because the men whose individuality gave them a living meaning have disappeared. The violinists of to-day are rightly just as individual, each in his own way, as were those of the past. Let them play honestly as they feel they must; let them give us beauty as they-and we-understand it. Let them express themselves, and not fetter their playing with rules that have lost their meaning. Let them not hamper that most precious quality the artist hashis style-with the dusty precepts handed down from times gone by. How is a violinist to conceive the meaning of an older work which he may be studying if his own musical instinct, his freedom of conception, are obfuscated by the dictum, "This must be played in such and such a manner because So-and-So played it that way two hundred years ago"?

Therefore in the end we are forced in matters of style to rely largely on innate and sedulously cultivated good taste. The finer the fiber of the artist, the finer will be his style. And for every composition he must have a certain special manner, which the good taste of the hearer will promptly accept as the right one.

"God has blessed us with bountiful crops."-(Extract from any President's Annual Thanksgiving Proclamation.)

T

HE history-minded reader will easily recall that it was exactly this event of bounteous crops which gave birth to our festal time known as Thanksgiving Day. The proclamation of Governor Carver to our Plymouth colony forefathers had all the fitness of an emergency occasion to call it forth too, since a repetition of the sparse yields of the year before would have marked the end of another "forlorn hope." The Governor's proclamation was, in fact, made to a body of householders supported by a style of farming in which each one gleaned from the soil at first hand the means by which he lived. As technically phrased in the words of modern economics, it was a proclamation to participants in a self-subsisting style of farming, which then prevailed the world over. This was before the great change had taken place which put agriculture upon a commercial basis.

The time-worn words quoted above provoke feelings quite other than those of gratitude, however, to no small part of our National family when made use of in this first quarter of the twentieth century. It is, indeed, to the modern farmer an exact case of using old skins for new wine. By him farming is no longer looked to as a direct source of living to his household, but is regarded as the means of making money profits the same as is the case with any other industrial pursuit. Farming is now to only a slight extent a self-subsisting industry. It purveys to the market for its rewards and is affected by all the hazards of an ill-mated demand and supply of products.

The main crops of this year-as were those of last year, and the year beforepromise to be of the bumper sort. The official crop report from the Department of Agriculture shows for this year maximum yields for corn, cotton, hay and oats. Wheat is higher in yield than the average for five-year crop periods, as are also the potato, the apple, and the tobacco crops. From this teeming embarrassment of riches there is but singularly little of joy among farmers. A Congressional commission of inquiry into the causes of agricultural depression has just issued a report of seven volumes upon the subject. An emergency conference upon the farmer's needs was called by President Harding at the beginning of the present year, and Secretary Wallace declares that the present state of farming in this country is the worst in all history.

BY WILBUR O. HEDRICK

The farmers' disgust with bumper crops comes from the fact that they over-supply the demand; therefore they always sell for less money than do normal crops or, even at times, scant ones. A random selection of the big crops of staple sorts during the past decade shows this plainly-the sixteen-millionbale cotton crop in 1914 sold for $56,000,000; and the three billion-bushel corn crop in 1920, for $2,208,000,000. On the other hand, the average returns per annum for the preceding five years for each of these crops equaled, for cotton, $79,200,000; and for corn, $3,150,000,000, respectively. In his annual report for 1921 Secretary Wallace confirms the truthfulness of this outcome by the statement, "A large crop brings the farmer fewer total dollars than a small one."

The human demand for the products of our farms is fairly fixed and inelastic. Dr. Pearl, the statistician of the Hoover Food Control, in a recent book entitled "The Nation's Food" shows that during a seven-year period (1911-18) this demand amounted annually to 129,931,314 millions of calories. No other nation in the world consumes so much. There is little room, therefore, for expansion in the American appetitie. Indeed, subtle food distributers or middlemen have devised many other uses for food than that of mere nourishment. It is widely used, for example, as a method of hospitality: it gives social distinction, and it has curative qualities. Pushing middlemen have made food more attractive for all these purposes by processing the raw material into novelties of all sorts, by packaging it, and by the almost unlimited use of advertising. Schools of domestic science everywhere have also done their best in making food more attractive to the consumer, and therefore creating a bigger outlet for the farmer's crops than he had previously enjoyed.

Farm fecundity, however, under favorable conditions, can easily overflow all these channels of outgo and resolve itself into a simple case of an over-supply of food. Dr. Pearl shows that during the years shown above the yield of these farms was per annum in excess of 144,636,152 million calories, a clear surplus of more than 4 per cent beyond the amount demanded. The money effects of this fatal variance between demand and supply may be seen from the claim made by our Secretary of Agriculture that the crop of 1921, though huge, returned to the farmers $7,000,000,000 less than during the previous year, and for 1922 $4,000,000,000 less than for the preceding year. It may be said further that the crop of this year promises no variation from this rule.

It is plainly to be seen from the fore

going that city people and farmers do not see the matter of crops and food as eye to eye. To the farmer the bumper crops which have been so much the theme of joyous newspaper headlines and editorials during the present autumn bring little else than grief. A new agitation for crop restriction, or for farmers' strikes, of which we heard so much two years ago, will probably be the reaction. Indeed, the displacement of the old self-subsistence style of farming by the commercial type has been so recently and so swiftly done that phrases and ideas upon the subject have not changed with equal speed. The rapid shift of the bulk of our people, too, from the country to the city which has taken place has also obscured clear thinking upon the relations between town and country. Some popular slogans, for instance, with regard to this greatest of pursuits are clearly city-made and are coming to have more and more an exclusive city acceptance.

One of these deifies the merits of "bumper crops." A second choruses the worth of a "back to the country" movement. Here, indeed, is a fine panacea for demobilizing the city. People will remove to the country, so the theory runs, and thenceforth feed themselves. and thus leave a larger food supply for those who remain in the city. The intelligent farmer's reaction to this proposal is the same, however, as is that of the steamship company when it hears that its rival is to put a new fleet of ships on the route. Why should the farmer always be the victim of back to the country movements, colonizing of soldiers schemes, and new homestead legislation on our dry or swamp lands? The flour-mill industry has never been debilitated by gifts of free mills from the Government, as the farming pursuit was by the gifts of free homesteads a few decades ago.

The stressing of intensive farming. which seems to be the press fashion of the day in treating of farming, has little of support among farmers. The thesis here, in brief, is that the intensive is the better style of farming, because it gives bigger yields per acre than are now the rule among us. Our farming, in fact, is so notorious for the low yields per acre which are got from the fields, as compared with those of other countries, that it has been called a system of "soil skimming" or "soil butchering." Our farmer is dull to these criticisms, however, since he knows that large yields per acre are costly in labor and fertilizer expense. Land, on the other hand, is abundant with us, so he prefers to get his crops from the use of much land rather than from the costly

labor. This is extensive farming, and it gives a lowering of the farmer's costs the same as the manufacturer gets a lowering of costs through the use of machinery, wherever possible, instead of

men.

The evil of bumper crops must at bottom, however, be laid in large measure to the farmer himself. The farming pursuit must be described as one which is in a highly unstable state, or, as sometimes more strongly put, in a state of genuine anarchy so far as production is concerned. The six million farmers of our Nation, loosely grouped into some dozen or more classes, according to their chief product, have only a faint sense of class unity. The independence, or, more properly speaking, isolation of farmers one from the other, has been a main element of pride to members of this pursuit from remote times. The control of the industry has been left to the bare operation of the laws of economics. this subject it has been taught that an excess of output in one branch of agriculture will cause farmers to give up this branch and raise something else, or, in case of general over-production, turn to some new trade. The functional effects of price, as these sorts of results are called in economics, find their best examples in farming.

In

But there are many farmers who de sire to continue as farmers for a lifetime and do not want to pursue any other calling. So, too, the shift from one farm enterprise to another is no longer easy, since each crop requires its own outfit of machinery and of training, and these are no longer of slight expense. The case, indeed, is on all fours in farming with the case of the soft-coal industry. Here we have been taught during the past summer that the cause of our present bad state is the fact of too many competing coal mines. Anarchy in production is the rule in both industries. This leads to rivalries and mistakes in production, with the resulting attempts to charge high prices as a means of writing off the losses which come from wasteful production.

Doubtless, too, it may be said that the marketing or distribution of the farmer's products to the consumer leaves much to be desired. The ideal set by the California Citrus Fruit Exchange for many years, of "one orange to each member of every family in the land each day," is far from being an attained goal in the case of other farm products. The middlemen distributers are to blame for this, and their failure adds greatly to the naturally weighty evils of the bumper crop. The food middleman system, like its parent, commercialized agriculture, are both of recent origin, and the former has had in late years a degree of harsh criticism from the public which exceeds that vented on all the other trades put together. The food middleman, as his name suggests, plies between the farmer and the city consumer and, without doubt, performs a

real service, but in a back-handed way. He of course handles nothing for which he is not paid, and this shows at once the vital distinction that there is between food need on the part of consumers and food demand-demand always implying ability to pay.

On the other hand, he takes from the farmer only what he can sell at a profit, and this leaves much of a bumper crop as waste in its producer's hands. The paradox is therefore often seen of many people without sufficient food while much of this same food is wasting in farmers' fields not far away.

The middleman system, in short, has no programme by which its services are directed. Haphazard efforts are the rule, even in this vital task of feeding a nation, and as a result great wastes abound. The directness of interest and clearness of ends, on the other hand, with which mail is picked up at the farmers' doors and carried to its destination are widely different from the devious and halting practices which govern the distribution of food. During the war the middleman system of this country broke down and was unable to perform its functions. The Hoover system. though hastily got together and ill equipped, did much to show what could be done by a more deliberate and planned effort to take food from where it is grown to where it is to be consumed.

The remedy for the particular evil in farming which results in bumper crops takes on many forms. President Harding would have better means of spread ing market and trade news to farmers so that they may know beforehand what the prospects are for a good demand. His own words upon the matter are as follows:

One of the most serious obstacles to the balancing of agricultural production lies in the lack of essential information. With instrumentalities for the collection and dissemination of useful information, a group of co-operative marketing associations would be able to advise their members as to the probable demand for staples, and to propose measures for proper limitations of acreage in particular crops.

A second remedy urges the increase of the exports of farm products to foreign countries. This policy was the key to the outcry among farmers two years ago for the revival of the War Finance Board. There was clamor even for direct loans from our Government to foreign countries so that they might make purchases of foodstuffs from our producers. The speedy upbuilding of the buying power of these countries shows little of promise, however, while, on the other hand, farming is in the most advanced state of any European pursuit. Farming, through the ease with which it may be restored, is said, widely, to have come back to an almost complete degree among our late foreign friends and foes.

With nations able to feed themselves in this way and with little means to buy, no trade may be hopefully set up, therefore, which will take off our farm surplus.

Farmers themselves have tried to remedy the situation by various sorts of forcible means. There have been dairymen's strikes and threats of cutting down crop areas. The Night Riders were successful to some extent in keeping down the tobacco acreage in Kentucky a few years ago, and the burning of a bale of cotton scheme in the South in 1914-15 lowered the supply of this commodity. The failure of these efforts has pointed out the remedy which is probably most practical for farmers in seeking to control "bumper crops," namely, organization.

Farmers have been, indeed, organized for marketing purposes into co-operative associations for some time past, and these business concerns have been very successful. As is well known, these farmers' associations, whether of the grain elevator, live stock, produce shipping, or creamery types, are merely joint efforts on the part of farmers for the purpose of giving a common business service to each of their members. The last Census shows that ten per cent of our farmers are members of these bodies and that the gross amount of sales made through these agencies was in the year 1919 in excess of $700,000,000. Cooperation in these groups is usually made upon a commodity basis, and not rarely the local units are federated into State organizations, of which the California Citrus Fruit Exchange is the bestknown type. Whether large or small, however, these agencies content themselves with taking the place of the local middleman. They take over the services of the David Harums among our middlemen class, but otherwise they make use of the marketing machinery of the land exactly as did their forebears.

Another type of farm organization, and one which has held the very center of the stage for the past few years, is the Farm Bureau. This grew out of the agricultural extension movement put on by the Federal Government nearly a decade ago. It was plain that the county farm agent, provided by this plan, would not be able to carry his message to each separate farm family within his charge and that organization of some sort must be set up. The Farm Bureau was the result, and possibly there is no better description of its nature than to say that it answers the purpose for each rural county that the well-known Chamber of Commerce does for the town and city. Although these too have been federated into State and even National societies and number their members by hundreds of thousands, the edge of the movement has been dulled somewhat by the extreme multiplicity of reforms which were undertaken.

The type of organization which goes much further than either of these is the

type, however, which has most of promise for the prevention of bumper crops. This is the type to which dairymen have committed themselves in the milk areas of most of our large cities. It is the type with which the raisin growers of California, the Burley tobacco growers of Kentucky, and the prune and apricot growers of California have identified themselves.

It is the type made fully legal by the Capper-Volstead Act of the present Congress, subject only to such oversight as the Secretary of Agriculture may give. Farmers' organizations of this type go much further than the mere marketing of their products or the setting up of a bureau for promoting purposes; they undertake the control of production itself.

Perhaps the now legal-proof dairymen's leagues illustrate the aims and methods of this new type as fully as can be done by single concrete examples. Dairy milk has become in recent years a necessity to cities to a scarcely less degree than a water supply. It is a commodity which does not stand long shipment, and hence must be produced in the vicinity of the place of use. This, together with the restraints of the sani

tary tests laid down by the city, makes the matter of monopolizing a supply of milk fairly easy for the interested dairymen. Competition as a regulator of the dairymen pursuit breaks down, as it always does where co-operation is possible. The chaos and anarchy of the milk trade about our large cities which have filled much newspaper space during the past few years are surely a reproach upon competitive control. The leaguing of the dairymen into joint effort has been the remedy by which a stabilized milk trade has been brought about in recent years. Dairymen near our large cities, numbering in each case many thousands, sell their product as a single man as the result of this organization. They insist upon "the closed shop" plan so far as the city distributer's right to buy of non-league dairymen is concerned. Their league pledges give the control of the size of herds which each may own to the organization, so that the danger of an over-supply of milk is cut out. By a closely bound union of this sort the dairying industry has become stabilized and made to yield a profit. Further, when proper public supervision is given, the consumer is not overcharged for his

milk, while always having the assurance of a full supply of this needed food.

The farmers of to-day, in some branches of their pursuit, are in the throes of the economic changes which overtook the laboring classes and the more capitalized industries three or four decades ago. They have felt the joys of product "pooling," of "collective bargaining," and of intensive co-operation, which these interests were denied by the anti-pooling, anti-agreement, and anti-trust laws of this period. During the war some potent object-lessons were given by the Government as to the gains which are possible through production according to a programme. The joint system of railways, the single food and coal control, and the unified labor and factory power of this time spoke loudly for the efficiency which comes from using the "get-together" plan in industry. A production programme, in short, more than anything else, is the need of our farmers at the present time. They would be stupid indeed, with the facilities given by our modern means of transport and communication, not to take advantage of organization in order to cope with the evils of bumper crops.

HERE were brave men before Agamemnon; but they did nothing that secured lasting record. There were voyagers who visited America before Columbus; but they did not open the continent to general and permanent settlement. There were steamboat makers before Fulton, and telegraph inventors before Morse; but they did not bring those devices into practical use.

There were in like manner bacteriologists before Pasteur; but none of them achieved results of epochal importance, or even realized the significance of what they did accomplish. We must honor them, of course, for what they did. Leeuwenhoek as early as 1673, using only a single lens, discovered microorganisms-a veritable landmark of ience. Inspired by this, Plenciz, a cen

tury later, conceived the theory that diseases were caused by such organisms, or at least were associated with them, and that there was a separate and specific bacterium for each disease. He was thus very close to a great truth, but he was unable to demonstrate his theory or to act upon it. The development of the compound microscope, scarcely a hundred years ago, greatly promoted bacterial research. Bassi in 1832 discovered that a disease of silkworms was accompanied by what he regarded as a minute vegetable growth; but he was unable to determine whether that growth was the cause or a result of the disease. A few years later Ehrenberg enumerated no fewer than sixteen different kinds of micro-organisms; Schoenlein found a minute parasite in the skin

disease known as favus, and Malmsten found a similar growth in barber's itch. Cohn, whose researches extended through many years (from 1853 to 1875), divided bacteria into two classes: the spherical cocci and the rod-shaped bacilli. All of these and others preceded Pasteur. Most of them were botanists, who regarded the micro-organisms as mere vegetation. Not one of them had any vision of the relation of their discoveries to human life and health, or of the development of a great system of therapeutics and prophylaxis. That was reserved for Louis Pasteur.

He began work chiefly as a chemist and as a student and practitioner of what we may call the mechanics of chemistry. His first important researches and discoveries were in crystallography and po