however, pending a special twenty-fourhour relay race in the Garden.

The High Cost of Illness

It will be interesting to watch the reaction of some members of the medical profession to the work of the newly formed Committee on the High Cost of Medical Care. Dr. Ray Lyman Wilbur, President of Stanford University and chairman of the Committee, has revealed that its purpose is to reduce the burden of the average American family in obtaining adequate treatment during time of illness.

The present cost of illness in the United States, Dr. Wilbur reports, is probably $3,000,000,000 a year. There are frequent complaints, in many cases justified, that the fees charged by doctors are impossibly high. On the other hand, physicians as a whole are not earning adequate incomes. Dr. Wilbur concludes that "the system" is wrong, and his Committee will spend five years attempting to find a remedy.

It is already known, of course, that the burden of illness falls most heavily on the man with a moderate income. The poor can have free treatment at a clinic. The wealthy can pay the bills of

eny fancy specialist. But the man who earns from $4,000 to $10,000 has an

appalling task when hospital, nursing, and doctors' bills pile on him at one time. The medical profession has not been, it must be admitted, unanimously helpful in solving this acute problem. It is only recently, for instance, that the storm of criticism regarding the Cornell Clinic in New York, where first-rate treatment at moderate cost could be obtained, has died down. Many doctors said that the clinic was taking bread out of the mouths of honest physicians.

And is the Committee on the High Cost of Medical Care planning to investigate fee-splitting between surgeons and general practitioners?

France Is Full of Tourists

THE Frenchman, says a correspondent of the New York "Herald Tribune," has learned that travel is not necessary to his learned that travel is not necessary to his education; he can see the world from a comfortable and inexpensive seat in front of his favorite café. This discovery has

led to a tabulation of characteristics by which various nationals may be recognized. For instance:

countries is an idiot, a drunkard, a thief --or absent. Every Britisher has three traveling bags-one he has just bought and two others, one forgotten at Gibraltar and the third left by mistake at Colombo."

The American is one "whose tours most closely resemble the course of an agitated flea. He visits everything and sees nothing. Berlin was the place where

it rained that morning. Rome, the place where he was forced to take a taxi between stations; Madrid, the city he reached just in time to go to bed; and Paris was the last stop before the boat train. Any American who doesn't wear yellow shoes, takes a long time to choose his dinner and still longer to select his wine, and reads anything except a railway schedule is certain to be called English."

A Frenchman, of course, is easily identified as the man who makes his glass of syrup and water last longer than an old-time sermon.

Texas Strategy

THE recent Democratic Convention in Texas revealed some of the subtleties of Southern politicians who wish to keep step with events in the Nation without losing their influence with the home folks.

On the the surface surface the Convention reached a seemingly normal compromise. Its largest faction, led by Governor Moody, turned down the recommendations of the minority group of extreme drys and Ku Klux relicts, pledging the Houston delegation never to accept a Smith nomination. Then, turning the steam-roller on the unexpectedly strong pro-Smith minority, the harmony element named only drys of unblemished record as delegates to Houston, and instructed them to oppose the nomination of a wet candidate-meaning Smith. At the same time it was agreed that the National Convention's choice should be accepted as final.

Thus by throwing their patronage first to one extreme and then the other, the harmony faction prevented the line being too sharply drawn between the Smith supporters and their last-ditch oppo

nents.

Next, it put Texas Democracy down as definitely and aggressively dry. This is supremely important in Texas political psychology, because it deprives dry voters of an excuse to desert their party next November, on the plea that the

unlimited vacation. He counts always on the guide, and the guide in certain

them on prohibition.

As a result, the harmony leadership,

with the aid of the pro-Smith faction, has done all in its power to make bolt propaganda discreditable.

Both in their speeches and in their slights to bolt talkers the harmony delegates succeeded in stigmatizing a bolt as the natural crime of Ku Kluxers, soreheads, and primary-pledge breakers. To accomplish this many pro-Smith leaders in the harmony faction had to sacrifice all hope of delivering the Texas delegation to Governor Smith. But the National Smith organization will bear no grudges, since the Convention went on record as dry, but did not utterly repudiate Governor Smith.

It seems possible that Texas has set the fashion of Southern Democratic political strategy for 1928. Furthermore, the legend that Southern party leaders are lying down on the job because of antipathy to Smith is considerably discredited. Men of such varying shades of opinion would hardly have worked so hard to bring about these subtle alignments if their zeal for party triumph was not healthy as usual.

WHAT with prohibition and careful and cautious political leaders, President Nicholas Murray Butler, of Columbia University, is not a happy man these days. Nor, it is possible, has he added to the happiness of Republican campaign managers, with the exception of Governor Lowden's chief of staff.

Mr. Butler is sixty-six years old, and he has just expressed the opinion that "we are approaching the most disheartening pre-convention campaign within my memory. Despite the economic and political situation of the world and our relation to it all, and despite our pressing and insistent domestic problems, there has been almost no discussion, indeed no reference, to any of them.

"No candidate for the Republican nomination, with the exception of Governor Lowden, has ventured any statement whatever as to his position in regard to any one of these vast problems so important to the prosperity, to the honor, and to the influence of the American people. Instead we have had an exhibition, through the press and the mails, of an application to politics of the most obnoxious development of modern business to wit, salesmanship.

"Friends of some of the candidates seem satisfied to put the Presidential nomination on the same plane as a patent medicine or a suburban real estate development. With this the infantile amusement of straw-balloting has gone

on side by side. It is almost unbelievable that at such a time such a condition could be found to exist in the Republican Party."

Then, having pointed out that New York's big delegation is largely uncommitted, Mr. Butler said some things that must have caused Governor Lowden's supporters to cock their ears.

"What Governor Lowden has said so emphatically as to the necessity, from the view-point of party success as well as from that of party principle, of preserving the balance between a prosperous agriculture and a prosperous industry, meets the strongest approval of myself and a host of our fellow-Republicans in this part of the country. To suppose that we can win the election without the hearty support of the agricultural vote of the strongly Republican States of the

Brown in the New York Herald Tribune
Copyright, 1928, New York Tribune, Inc.

That turn-about act always makes a hit

tional prohibition have brought into be ing."

Mr. Butler brought his remarks to close with the pious hope that 192 would repeat the story of 1888; in which year, old citizens tell us, Benjamin Harrison was elected President on a platform that old-line Republicans seem to regard as the last word in party orthodoxy.

Romantic Engineering

CABLE despatches from Egypt tell of
plan now before the Egyptian Gover
ment to connect an immense area of the

Libyan Desert which lies below sea-lev
with the Mediterranean by means of a
canal, and thus to permit the generation
of about 300,000 horse-power from the
water that would enter the desert from
the sea-enough power, when transmit-
ted over wires to the Nile delta, to irri-
gate its whole fertile area by means of
motor-driven pumps.

This almost romantic engineering pro ect was outlined last year in London before the Royal Geographical Society by Dr. John Ball, Director of the Egyptian Desert Surveys, who is one of the few who have actually traversed the inaccessible areas involved in the plan. A hundred and forty miles west of Cairo there is an immense area below sea-level called the Qattara Depression. It is about th size of Massachusetts. The plan is sin ple: to build an 80-mile conduit from the Mediterranean to the Qattara De pression, at the southern end of which hydraulic turbines would be installed and let the water run into the Depression, giving up its energy as it passed.

At this point the alert reader inquire "But what happens after the Depression is filled?" Thanks to the sun, it would never be filled. Allowing one-eight inch daily evaporation over the whole West and Northwest is an illusion of the Depression, about one billion cubic fee first magnitude.

"We [the New York delegates] wish to confer with our fellow-representative Republicans . . . and to agree upon a candidate who has Republicanism in his heart as well as in his head, who has intellectual and temperamental competence for the office of President, and who can be elected.

"Such a man must not lose the support of the agricultural West by lack of knowledge or sympathy with the worldknowledge or sympathy with the worldwide farm problem, and he must not lose the votes of the Republican States of the Atlantic seaboard by reason of his unwillingness to approach with open mind the solution of the problem of the Nation-wide liquor traffic and lawlessness which the futile attempts at Na

of water would disappear daily, and with a 160-foot difference in level, over 270,000 horse-power could be generated com tinuously. What this method would be is simply the reverse of the usual cycle of power. In the latter the sun evaporates water, it falls as rain, runs off in streams, and delivers up its power. Here we would have run-off first, then evaporation. Incidental advantages of th plan would be navigation from the seat the Depression (by locks); increase humidity, hence increased rainfall along the present deserts; and valuable fisher ies in the Depression. To get a fu appreciation of the immense capacity of the Depression note that the entire Nik flood, if turned into it, would require twenty years to fill it.

From Washington

tha Vetoes Vetoed

It has been a week of vetoes and vetoing of vetoes. Congress had other reasons than resentment for proceeding forthwith to override the President in practically all instances, but resentment played its part.

The Tyson Bill to extend retirement rights to emergency officers of the World War; the Oddie Bill for a ten-million

dollar road-building program on Western public lands; the bill granting increased pay to night workers of the Post Office Department, and the one making rental, fuel, and light allowances to fourth-class postmasters-these became laws over Executive disapproval. The largest vote for sustaining the President (22) came on the Oddie Bill; the smallest (9) on the Night Postal Workers Bill.

The President had vetoed these bills, as he did the McNary-Haugen Bill, because he believed that they were either inherently or economically unsound, or both. One bill had the approval of the American Legion, another of the army of postal workers. Congress, by its ac

Reid in the Hutchinson (Kansas) News The trouble with volunteer fire departments

placing merchant crews on the Naval Reserve list, and Government insurance is provided for all vessels on which loans are made. In short, the law is regarded as one which will go a long way toward of Government aid which avoid the sembuilding up American shipping by forms blance of the ship subsidy to which

but merely to that feature of it which provides for a subsidiary plant at Cove Creek on the Clinch River, more than three hundred miles above the Shoals. His contention was that Tennessee was being deprived of its rights in the power to be developed at this site.

Joined by Tydings, of Maryland, and Blease, of South Carolina, McKellar kept the Senate in session all night. But finally he gave up, with the taunt that the President would veto the bill.

Probably the President will. It is before him for action-a Government operation bill fathered by Norris and nurtured by Morin. The President has said in more than one Message that Muscle Shoals should be operated by private enterprise.

Power in First Place

MEANWHILE, the Swing-Johnson Bill for Government construction of another mammoth power plant in Boulder Canyon of the Colorado was pressed to victory in the House. This proposal, too, is the target of Senate filibustering and is likely not to succeed at this session.

But the question of whether the great power sites are to be controlled by the

question. Does it regard the veteran and the rural mail carrier as more potent in politics than the farmer? It may be absolved from thus slurring the Regular Army man, for it sustained the veto of the Steck Bill to create the official position of bandmaster in the Army. But then Army officers did not want bandmasters in the officer's mess, anyhow.

The Substance of Subsidy

MIXED in with all of these things was the Jones-White Shipping Bill, which the President signed on the same day that he vetoed the McNary-Haugen Bill. Some of those who supported the McNary-Haugen Bill supported also the Jones-White Bill, but most did not. The bills were similar in that each provided special Governmental aid for a special class. But they were supported, mainly, by different schools of economic thought in Congress. The extreme McNaryHaugenites were rendered the bitterer by the approval of the other bill.

The Jones-White Bill extends a number of substantial benefits to private shipping. A revolving fund of $250,000,000 is set up from which loans are to be made for construction of privately owned vessels. Special compensation is provided for carrying the mails, certain ameliorations of salary and wage burdens are brought about by means of

been opposed.

engage Congress at other sessions. Muscle Shoals and Boulder Canyon have been the pioneers in the fight, but other great sites are coming into prominence. A resolution by Representative Crampton has been adopted preventing, until Congress has time to investigate, the carrying forward of plans for private development at Great Falls of the Potomac. An Ohio company proposes a $60,000,000 development.

The Great Falls are less than twenty miles above Washington, in an area admirably suited for a wilderness park. A bill for the creation of such a park, introduced by Senator Capper, cannot emerge from the jam at this session.

Twenty Millions Less Taxes TAXES are to be reduced to the extent of $222,495,000. For practical pur

poses, the $495,000 may be omitted. Treasury actuaries and Congressional committee experts do not come within, or closely without, that sum in forecasting what a tax law will yield.

The bill is a compromise between the $290,000,000 House bill and the $205,000,000 Senate bill, and is $22,000,000 in excess of the greatest reduction that the Treasury can stand, according to Secretary Mellon's prepassage statement.

Between parties, there was no compromise. This is a Republican bill, in

contrast to the last one, which was a cooperative achievement. In the Senate, however, the Democrats came perilously close to "putting over" a part of their more drastic program. Vice-President Dawes saved the day on a tie vote. And that was possible only because Senator Blease suddenly discovered that he was paired and moved reconsideration in order that he might refrain from voting. For a few minutes the Democratic proposition was actually carried.

The bulk of the reduction in the bill as agreed upon in conference-$135,450,000 comes from the reduction of the corporation rate from 131⁄2 to 12 per cent. The only other large item-$66,000,000 results from repeal of the 3 per cent tax on automobiles.

Secretary Mellon's twice-renewed fight for repeal of the inheritance tax is again

THOMAS S. BUTLER, of Pennsylvania, was the father of America's modern Navy. For thirty-one years a member of the Naval Affairs Committee of the House, for many years its Chairman, he had consistently supported the program of the big-navy men-until the beginning of the present session of Congress.

Chairman Butler wrote last December, at the request of the Navy Department and with the approval of the President, a naval construction bill that alarmed him. He never supported it. On two occasions he said to The Outlook's correspondent in Washington that it was a mystery to him. Though author of the bill and chairman of the committee having it in charge, he pushed the mammoth

program aside and introduced another bill providing for construction on a much less pretentious scale.

Mr. Butler died the other day with the Naval Construction Bill still unenacted, still a mystery in the public mind if not in his own. Perhaps there will never be an explanation of why the President, a small-navy man, approved a construction program so large as to frighten the big-navy men.

Chairman Butler died, as Chairman Madden, of the Ways and Means Committee did, with the last bill on which he had labored pending and in dispute. Oldest member of the House in point of continuous service, he had devoted more than three decades of his life mainly to the upbuilding of the Navy.

Heat in Politics

THE political observer has been able to discern many indications that, this year, the Republican National Convention will be a hotter affair than the Demo

A

cratic. Confirmation comes from the Herbert Janvrin Browne Long-Range Weather Forecast Service, which has definitely announced that the weather will be hotter in Kansas City than in Houston. A cold wave was to start in the Northwest on May 22, on a schedule that will bring it to Texas as for the Convention.

Otherwise than meteorologically, however, both Conventions promise to be decidedly warm. No candidate in eithe party has enough delegates to insure a nomination. Hoover has 3391⁄2 undis puted. A majority-545-will nom nate. On the Democratic side, Smith has 558 undisputed. Two-thirds-7331 ---will nominate. Delegates not certain are claimed by both Smith and Hoover, but not enough in either case to insure the nomination. On the Democratic side, no other candidate has as many as 50 delegates undisputed. On the Republican side, Lowden has 1881⁄2 undis puted.

N INVISIBLE

CLOUD of vapor brought back to Hamburg lately the terrors of war. It was phosgene gas-that killed 11 people and disabled 250. Soon the great German port resembled a city under siege, with troops in gas masks guarding the sector in which the gas had escaped.

More was left to be cleared away than the peril of further poisoning. Both in Germany and throughout Europe and America arose inquiries as to how the gas came to be in Hamburg. But the affair remained temporarily mysterious and obscure.

The phosgene fumes escaped from a burst container in the Stolzenberg plant, where a large stock of the gas proved to be stored. All that the proprietor would say was that he received it from army stocks left over from the war, and that he had supplied phosgene on order to firms in the United States and in Czechoslovakia. The destination and purpose of this particular supply remained unexplained. There was talk-that Stolzenberg did not deny-of a gas plant in Trotzk, Russia, controlled by the German Reichswehr, or Defense Force, which he had aided to establish, And there were rumors that this gas might have been intended for the Reichswehr as part of a secret reserve. The German Government issued a denial that the gas was stored in Hamburg on behalf of any

military authority. And so the cata trophe waited to be fully explained by an official investigation.

Phosgene is used in the chemical in dustry for the preparation of anilir dyes and of drugs. Its manufacture in three factories in Germany was permi ted by the Allies under the Versailles Treaty. But the Stolzenberg plant wa not one of these three. Since the Interallied Military Control Commission in Germany has been abolished, it seems likely that the whole affair may be mac the subject of an inquiry by the League of Nations at the next meeting of its Council, to which was transferred responsibility for the limitation of German war equipment.

CON

ONSPIRACY against the French Government, in an attempt to separa the province of Alsace from France, wa the verdict against four out of fiftee men who have been on trial in Colmar in a case that has commanded the attention of both France and Germany. Its prosecution has caused excitement and disorders throughout Alsace, and at i end sympathizers rushed to shake th hands of the convicted men. They were the leading spirits in a movement for Alsatian autonomy. Two of them-Georges E. Ricklin, a former Deputy the German Reichstag, and Joseph V. Rosse, co-proprietor with him of a pub

lishing concern-were chosen to the French Chamber of Deputies in the recent elections. The other two are journalists. All were sentenced to terms of from one to four years in prison, to be followed by five years of exile.

The affair has revealed how serious a problem France has on her hands in the reconciliation of the provinces she lost to Germany in 1871 and regained in 1918. At that time the National Council of Alsace and Lorraine, formed after the German Revolution, declared that the people would return to France with joy, under conditions safeguarding their beliefs, traditions, and economic interests. It might have been easy to win their enthusiastic and unqualified allegiance by considerate treatment at the start. The French Government suppressed the National Council, and placed the administration of these two Catholic provinces under a notoriously anti-clerical Secretary of State. The question of language has made as much trouble as religion, for two-thirds to three-quarters of the people of both Alsace and Lorraine speak German dialects which the Government has desired to supplant as rapidly as possible. French became the language of instruction in the schools. The officials put in public office were from other parts of France, and knew little or nothing of these new territories. Finally, in 1925, their administration was transferred to Paris, which was to the local residents an unwelcome centralization. So arose the irritations that led to the movement which Ricklin headed. He declared that he never intended to separate Alsace from France, but only to

secure for Alsatians control of their own affairs. France naturally could not tolerate the autonomist agitation. But from it and from Germany's experiences in the provinces she can learn something to guide her future policy more wisely.

VEN

ENIZELOS, the statesman who more than any other one man was the architect of "Greater Greece," is back in Greek politics. Coming out of a in Greek politics. Coming out of a retirement of over seven years, he has declared his intention to resume the leadership of the Liberal Party. And observers are predicting another stormy period for the Greek Republic.

Venizelos explained that he felt his guidance necessary to preserve order and prevent the country from drifting into disaster. He challenged the nominal head of the Liberals, Finance Minister Kafandaris. Venizelos has sought a reform law regarding elections to the Senate which the Finance Minister has op

posed. At a special session of the party, Kafandaris announced his resignation from its chairmanship and from his Cabinet post. Five other Ministers followed his example, fearing trouble ahead. Premier Zaimis found himself forced to quit office. quit office. So President Kondouriotis faces the task of finding Greece a new Government that will not at once plunge the country into civil war.

Venizelos is the man who was respon

sible for the policy of attempting to re

deem the Greeks of Asia Minor from Turkish rule. After he was defeated in the elections of 1920, the Turkish Nationalists drove out the Greek armies. Since then the main problem of Greece

has been how to absorb the million and a half refugee compatriots whom the calamity drove to her shores.

Just what Venizelos is driving at now is not apparent. His royalist opponents assert that this old diplomatic friend of France is bent on blocking the policies of friendship with Italy which Foreign Minister Michalakopoulos has been developing to the point of a new GreekItalian treaty. And it is not impossible that behind the play of local Hellenic politics is a larger strategy of European power aiming to prevent Mussolini from uncomfortably extending Fascist influence in the eastern Mediterranean.

FRO

ROM SOVIET RUSSIA have come denials of the report-repeated in these columns last week-that a Communist conference took place recently in Cassel, Germany, on means of agitation in armies and navies. The denial did not receive as much prominence in the newspapers as the original report, and I wish to give it equal emphasis here. here. The Soviet explanation is that the alleged news was a piece of antiBolshevik propaganda-probably British. There is, of course, no way of checking the accuracy of either statement. Anti-Bolshevik propagandists British or others-would have obvious motives for circulating such a report, and Bolshevik apologists would have equally obvious motives for discrediting it. You can read both accounts and take your choice.

VILNA, according to the new Constitu

tion just adopted for Lithuania, is the country's capital. the country's capital. The only incon-. venience is that the city is in Polish hands. The Polish General Zeligowski seized it some seven years ago.

Poland and Lithuania were technically -though not actively-at war over the issue, until they agreed at the Council of the League of Nations last December to come to a pacific understanding. Since then all attempts to reach a real diplomatic agreement have broken down. And this fresh Lithuanian claim to a city that Poland holds is not likely to soothe the feelings of the Polish dictator, Marshal Pilsudski. For that matter, neither were Polish seizure and retention of the historic Lithuanian town calculated to captivate Lithuanian hearts and cement a lasting amity. In fact, Polish-Lithuanian relations are, as they have been ever since the war, quiet because there are so many more Poles than Lithuanians. Temporarily, which means indefinitely, the actual Lithuanian capital continues to be at Kovno.