A THREATENED TRAGEDY

B

Y treaties entered into during the

war and at its close portions of what was before Turkish territory were apportioned to certain of the Allied Powers. In this apportionment Cilicia, which was largely Armenian territory, fell to France as within its zone of military occupation for the maintenance of order and for the observance of the terms of the armistice. It is now authoritatively announced that France is about to withdraw her troops from Cilicia and pass over the administration of that state to the Nationalist Turks. The three Armenian communities in Cilicia (Gregorian, Roman Catholic, and Protestant) and many Moslems unite in appealing to the French authorities to remain at least for the present, but so far the appeal has been in vain. It is reported that France, in withdrawing, has made an agreement with Kemal Pasha, the Nationalist Turkish leader, for the protection of the Armenians. The statement that the protection of a flock of sheep is thus intrusted to a pack of wolves may be unjust to the Armenians, but in view of recent history cannot be said to be unjust to the Turks. The race and religious prejudice animating the Turks is increased because in the recent war the Armenians were allies of the French and fought desperately against the Turks under French lead. It is said that about two hundred thousand Armenians, Syrians, Greeks, and pro-French Moslems are involved in the danger of massacre in Cilicia.

It must be confessed that France is in a difficult situation.

France has spent

far more money in trying to maintain order in Cilicia than she can afford. She is sharply criticised for her maintenance of a large standing army, and is accused of imperialistic ambitions, disturbing to the peace of Europe. But when, yielding to pressure, she proposes to reduce her army by withdrawing her troops from a distant province she is charged with breach of faith in deserting a helpless people intrusted to her keeping.

It is difficult to see what official action the American Government can take to prevent this tragedy. One principal objection urged against the League of Nations was that America ought not to share with European nations in dealing with European problems. The Presidential election sustained that objection.

Moreover, it is hardly possible for the Administration to interject this problem into the Washington negotiations, which are limited to questions of a very different scope. The attempt to lay broad foundations for an enduring peace in the Near East ought not to be lightly hazarded. It is possible that private influences could be brought to bear upon the French Government by the diplomats of England and America to delay the withdrawal of the French forces. It is even possible that an official notification to the Turkish authorities by England, France, and the United States that any failure to protect the Armenians would be regarded as an unfriendly act might have a protective force. And we think it highly probable that an aroused popular sentiment in the United States against leaving the Armenians unprotected, even if it led to no governmental action, would have considerable influence on the French Government, if not on the Kemalite Turkish Government. Such popular sentiment ought not to be unaffected, however, by the fact that while the United States is limiting the number of immigrants to its shores, France leaves open the door to Syria to Armenian refugees.

Certainly the facts ought to have some effect on those happily tempered pacifists who imagine that complete disarmament by all the civilized nations, leaving the helpless undefended against the criminals, would secure peace and a world justice.

RUSSIAN RELIEF

PRESH

milk and asked for a doubling of the appropriation.

Congress has now consented to this, after a very lively debate in which the bill was opposed by those who thought it violated the spirit of our Constitution and by those who asserted that the appropriation would be additional material for the cause of Bolshevism. The President at once signed the bill.

The food is to be assembled through elevators without profits to them, and will be transported to the port of departure from this country at reduced rates, if possible, upon the railways, thus enabling as large an amount of grain as is possible to be secured for the appropriation. Nineteen million dollars of the $20,000,000 to be appropriated is now in the hands of the United States Grain Corporation, formed during the war, of which the President of the United States is the sole stockholder. This corporation is now being liquidated, and the money would soon be turned into the United States Treasury. Its diversion to the purchase of food, provided for in the bill, will be welcomed by the farmers of the West, who, humanitarian as they may be, will be glad to profit by the legislation.

The bill applies to that most sorely stricken region in Russia, the part of the valley of the Volga River between the cities of Kazan and Saratov, a region about four hundred miles long. It lies several hundred miles to the east of Moscow. a world Ordinarily this region raises more than enough to feed its people. But for three years in succession they have endured a great drought, which, in addition to the economic cruelty of the Bolshevik Government, has reduced very many millions of people to starvation. And this at a time when we have more foodstuffs in storage than ever before in our history!

He

RESIDENT HARDING's request for an appropriation by Congress of $10, 000,000 to supply corn and seed grain for the starving Russians was followed by the appearance of Secretary Hoover before the Committee on Foreign Relations of the House of Representatives. said, in rejoinder to the claim that private, not public, charity should fill the need: "There are a great many committees working throughout the country under a great deal of difficulty but not without energy. I do not believe, however, that the total collections since August of the entire group amounts to $750,000." He also showed that Governmental aid on a larger scale than the President suggested would be needed. He requested some 22,000,000 bushels of grain and 500,000 cases of preserved

tions are retained and that relations are steadily improved."

What Mr. Stone added as to the right and wrong kind of leadership for the Negro race is worth quoting at some length:

There are to-day two groups of Negro leaders groups which are as wide apart as the Poles and which are as distinct as the whites and Negroes themselves. I am not going to call any names. One set of Negro leaders is distinctly radical. The leadership of the other group is conservative and is working for peace and harmony between the races. with the white people to choose which Negro leadership they will encourage.

It is left

There is no more trying position in American life to-day than that of a conservative Negro leader in the South. He must steer an even course and at the same time maintain his position of leadership without sacrificing any right principle. When Booker T. Washington died and I was appealed to for a suggestion as to the man who was best fitted to succeed him, I replied, without hesitation, that Robert R. Moton stood head and shoulders above all other men.

Mr. W. Anthony Aery, the secretary of Hampton, himself a white man, tells us that in traveling with Dr. Moton on the trip during which the Greenville meeting was held he found himself comparing conditions between the races as they are now and as they were when years ago he made a similar trip with Booker Washington. He noted in Mississippi "a growing spirit of racial good will and racial o-operation." He found "white and black folks everywhere discovering almost intuitively-that they cannot make much real progress by hoeing their rows as separate groups. They are. discovering that they can go ahead very much faster by pulling together and by forgetting some of their differences."

We agree heartily with Mr. Aery's conclusion that "the influence of men like Booker T. Washington, Robert R. Moton, and others scoffed at as conservatives has been invaluable in bringing about this era of good feeling."

THE COLLEGE WORKSHOP

N a recent address President Rich

I mond, or Union College, said some

thing so true and simple and yet so startling that we are glad to reprint it in full:

However men may differ as to specific remedies for the present disorders, all men of sense agree at one point, and that is the necessity of getting back to work. In the four years of the war the fruit of the work of millions of men for many years has been destroyed. It is gone, and no amount of economic juggling will bring it back. If the prosperity of the world is to be restored, it will be because we are all willing to work

(C) Harris & Ewing

HENRY WATTERSON harder and to put more of ourselves into our work.

There may have been a time when the word work, as applied to a college, would have seemed to some a kind of academic pleasantry. If there ever was such a time, that time has passed. The picture of a college where the long hours were passed agreeably under the shade of the classic elms, smoking pipes and singing college songs, has a certain attraction to the retrospective imagination of the graduate and to the prospective vision of the freshman. But to a man who knows anything about the life at Union College there will be a mournful realization that the largest part of the picture has been left out.

I might as well tell you at once that this is a college where honest work is not only expected but required. There is no reason why a boy who comes to college should expect an easier time than a boy who goes to work in a factory or in an office. The idea that in coming to college a boy is postponing his life-work for four years while he floats down the stream of time untroubled by the hard realities that other young men of his own age have to face is not at all our idea of what a college means. Neither is a college a kind of intellectual incubator where young fledglings are hatched out with no effort of their own. A college is a workshop, and if it is going to maintain its place in the esteem of a Nation that has supported us with such unstinted generosity we must see that the gospel of honest work is not only taught in the college but practiced by all of us who have anything to do with it. This may sound a little disagreeable to some easy-going young aspirants who have been looking forward to a comfortable time, but let me assure you that the only way to be happy here, or anywhere else, is to make a real business of the thing you are doing. The most delightful thing a man does is to exercise and develop the powers that are his. What we shall try to do for you here is to help you to understand and value your own

powers and to teach you how to use them to the best advantage while you are here, and afterward when you take your place in the field of active life which you shall choose.

Unfortunately, too many undergrad uates in American colleges are inclined to regard a college course as a sort of glorified vacation. It will not do them any harm occasionally to recall the fact that their friends who entered business on leaving high school or preparatory school have to keep regular hours and do regular work. One of the great advantages of the education which the graduates of Annapolis or West Point receive is that the undergraduates in those institutions work as regularly and as hard as if they were apprentices in some great industrial plant. Regular hours and a regular system of work will do wonders for a student even when he is not a genius. Indeed, in most fields of human activity, the erraticism of genius is likely to be beaten in the long run by the regularity of an ordinary mind.

HENRY WATTERSON, NEWSPAPER MAN

H

ENRY WATTERSON, who died in Jacksonville, Florida, on December 22, made the Louisville "Courier-Journal" a National newspaper and a political power. Colonel Watterson served in the Confederate Army, but whether he had the exact rank of colonel or was a Kentucky colonel by the brevet of State and National affection is not important. To newspaper men he was "Marse Henry," and perhaps no man in our time has been better liked by the men of his own profession. He has been described as the last of his line in that he was the last of the great personal figures once so common in American journalismGreeley, Raymond, the elder Bennett, and Dana are the names one associates with him. He was born eighty-one years ago, was held on the knee of Andrew Jackson as a child, and knew every President from that time to this. It has been pointed out that the period covered by Watterson's life and the life of John Quincy Adams, whom as a boy he knew, covers the entire period of the country's history from Revolutionary days.

Colonel Watterson exercised a great influence in public affairs, not only by his editorial work, but by his vivacious and often uncomfortably frank utterances. Not infrequently he hit two ways at once, as in his famous "Now and ever, to hell with autocracy. Now and ever, to hell with the Hohenzollerns and the Hapsburgs," to which he added later in a letter, "And to hell with prohibi tion along with the Hapsburgs and the

Kadel & Herbert

AIRPLANE VIEW OF ELLIS ISLAND, WHERE IMMIGRANTS ARE EXAMINED BEFORE ENTERING THE UNITED STATES

Hohenzollerns." Of a leader in his own party, namely, William Jennings Bryan, he said as long ago as 1900: "He has had his fling and has failed. He should yield leadership to other hands and devote himself to healing the breaches." And after Theodore Roosevelt's death, Watterson said, "Our differences cut no figure in our personal relations."

If sometimes excessively outspoken, Colonel Watterson was not at all irresponsible. In a review of his autobiography, published in 1920, we quoted his serious view of newspaper duty: "I ⚫ truly believe that next after business

that theoretically Watterson made implacable enemies, but practically he did not, because, though his temper was hot, his nature was kindly. He hated emotionalism and hysteria, but he was always ready to fight for his political principles, even though at times he skirmished outside party lines.

By Colonel Watterson's death the country loses a brilliant writer, a notable public figure, a man of marked individuality, and one of surprising vitality.

LO, THE POOR IMMIGRANT!

integrity in newspaper management Co

comes disinterestedness in the public service, and next after disinterestedness come moderation and intelligence, cleanliness and good feeling in dealing with affairs and its readers." Speaking to a gathering of newspaper men on the day of Colonel Watterson's death, a Washington correspondent who as a younger man served under Colonel Watterson on the "Courier-Journal" quoted him as saying: "A 'Courier-Journal' reporter always gets the news, and always gets it first; but he always remembers in getting it that the 'Courier-Journal' is a gentleman."

It would be hard to say whether Watterson was the more striking and salient figure in journalistic life or in political life. Both sides are brought out in the autobiography, and we strongly recommend Americans generally to read that book, which is one of the most illuminating and entertaining of American biographies.

A keen and just characterization is that of one writer, who says, in effect,

HRISTMAS on Ellis Island, in New York Harbor, was different from any preceding Christmas there.

Heretofore those who have been compelled to spend that day on that island had at least the pleasant anticipation of entering a new and prosperous life in America. But on Christmas day, 1921, Ellis Island held more immigrants than it had capacity for, and very many of them were deprived of any anticipation of a new and prosperous life in America.

The They were facing deportation. transatlantic steamship companies have delivered aliens in excess of the quotas established under the Immigration Law passed last May. That law limits the annual number of incoming immigrants to three per cent of the number of foreign-born persons of any nationality in the United States-a mechanical and mediæval provision, as The Outlook has said. It deprives us of aliens whom we want and gives us aliens whom we do not want.

It provides that a fixed number of Poles, for instance, may be admitted to

the country during each month of the year, the total forming, of course, three per cent of the Poles already resident in America. Now the Poles in Europe who want to come here may embark from Dantsic, as the one Polish port, or from any other port, may take passage on any ship, and may arrive at New York, Boston, Philadelphia, or other Atlantic ports. Not until, the vessels containing these Poles have docked is it finally possible to decide how many incoming Poles have a right to remain here.

Suppose the immigrant is deported. What then? Many families have sold their homes and have spent practically all that they had in getting to ports and paying steamship fares. Now they must return in this winter-time to their own impoverished countries, with no home to go to and probably without the opportunity of taking up again the work they had abandoned. There may be even something worse. The story is told of some Armenian women and children who three months ago came to the United States seeking safety, who were deported because the Armenian quota had been exceeded, and who returned to meet, not only death, but a still more terrible fate.

THE ATLANTIC CARRIERS

IT

T is not unnatural that the transatlantic steamship companies should wish to take as many emigrant passengers as they think they can land. They have been exasperatingly exceeding their monthly immigrant quotas, despite the fact that they had before them fig ures showing the exact status of the quotas from each country. No less than three thousand aliens in excess of thes quotas have been disembarked at our ports. Some immigrants, by executive clemency, have been temporarily ad mitted under bond, where it has bee shown that deportation would be an ex treme offense against humanity, and i addition, the eleven hundred immi grants at Ellis Island under orders t be deported have now been admitted fo ninety days. More than twelve hundre aliens have been returned to their for mer homes because of excess of quota At present over two thousand aliens i New York Harbor await an opportunit to be landed.

Hence, at the Secretary of Labor's in stance, Representative Johnson, of th State of Washington, Chairman of th House Immigration Committee, has i troduced a bill empowering the Secr tary of Labor to penalize steamshi lines by withdrawing immigration priv leges from them for continued violatio of the quota law. Nor is this all. A the result of that law shows, in to

many cases efforts to get immigrants into this country amount to fraud, Mr. Johnson has also introduced a bill by which he would suspend the immigra tion of aliens to the United States for three years, the bill not applying to Government officials, to travelers or temporary sojourners for pleasure or business, to students who may enter the United States solely for the purpose of I study in educational institutions particularly designated by them, to ministers of any religious denomination, or to husbands, wives, and minor children of naturalized citizens or of persons who have taken out their first papers.

Mr. Johnson's bills should sufficiently warn the steamship companies.

THE CHRISTMAS AMNESTY

HE President on December 25 com

men convicted for violation of laws designed for the protection of the country during the progress of the war. Apparently in each instance the cases have been carefully reviewed and the decision rendered with the desire in view of protecting the interests of the country and serving justice. To disagree in certain instances with these decisions is not to criticise the motives which led to them.

The release of all prisoners convicted under war law is something which extreme radicals, pacifists, and sentimentalists regard as highly desirable. The normal-minded citizen is not inclined to take so generous a position, for he realizes that there are some things which no self-governing and self-perpetuating country can afford to give away. One of these things is the right and duty to protect itself from destruction. The law regards the deliberate taking of a human life as the most serious offense that the individual can commit. What can be said, therefore, in the case of the man or woman who attempts to take the life of a whole nation and who commits this act when that nation is in a ife-and-death struggle with a foreign

Foe?

Some of those who committed acts uring the war tending toward such a consummation were undoubtedly of unound mind. Some of them were igorant men and women who were led stray by cleverer and more vicious ssociates. Still others were active ympathizers with Germany and her im of world conquest.

It is perhaps time that the more igorant of those who were convicted of war crimes-the instigators of these rimes only too often escaped-should e released. Perhaps it is time to reease those whose mental disabilities do ot render them a menace to the coun

International

try in time of peace. Perhaps it is time to release those whose physical infirmities likewise limit the danger that might arise from their release from control. But in each instance the test should be the good of the country and not the desire to turn the way of the transgressor into a bed of roses.

Among the criminals recently released by the President there seemed to be some whom it was the plain duty of the Executive authority to release. There are others the propriety of whose release will-seem to many to be doubtful. One of these is Eugene V. Debs. On the list there is at least one name of a man whose release is an affront to every soldier. On his behalf it cannot be maintained that he was actuated by a mistaken idealism or moral convictions of any sort. One can understand how a man might honestly oppose the draft even to the point of martyrdom, but no man can honestly accept bribes for the issuance of fictitious exemptions from the draft. The fact that this convict served as a Government witness in other cases will not be accepted by ex-service men as a satisfactory explanation of his release. It is such cases as this which make the veterans of the world war feel that their services have been forgotten and in vain. If it were possible, we would not release from prison a man who sold exemptions from the draft until fifty years after the last veterans of the war were dead. Even then it might make some of them turn in their graves.

THE NEW PATRIARCH OF
THE GREEK CHURCH

HE Most Rev. Meletios Metaxakis, Archbishop of Athens, in the Greek Church, has been elected Patriarch by the Holy Synod sitting at Constantinople. It is the highest ecclesiastical authority and corresponds to the College of Cardinals in the Roman Catholic Church.

The election, however, has not been received with favor either in Constantinople or in Athens. It has been objected to by certain Constantinople authorities, who, not unmindful that Meletios is the first Patriarch to be elected in many centuries without political intervention, allege that a majority of the members of the Synod were absent from that body at the time of the election. The objection from Athens (it may have possibly inspired that from Constantinople) is what perhaps might have been expected from King Constantine. Meletios is a friend and supporter of ex-Premier Venizelos, and when Constantine returned to the throne was one of those marked for royal vengeance. As soon as Constantine found himself secure in his place he ousted Meletios from the Archbishopric. The King's present attitude, which he has made the attitude of the Greek Government, if not a spiteful political trick, is at least another attempt again to interfere with ecclesiastical order and procedure.

Though evidence of the strength of the Patriarch-Elect's position may be wanting in Constantinople and Athens, it is