June 13, 1928

Kansas City

THE most highly charged Republican

National Convention since that of 1912 is gathering in Kansas City as this issue of The Outlook reaches its readers. The overcharge may flow harmlessly away through a ground wire, but potentialities of shock are many. Deadlock, bolt, drafting of Coolidge, are among the spectacular things regarded as possible.

Pre-convention activities in the open ended with two questions uppermost and unanswered: What is the effect of Hoover's defeat by Senator Goff in West Virginia? and, Will the farm revolt materialize at Kansas City sufficiently to affect results or even to disturb proceedings?

Mr. Hoover entered three favorite-son States. He won in Ohio against Willis, dead, and lost in Indiana and West Virginia. Successive defeats at the hands of "Jim" Watson and Guy Goff did not increase his prestige, though by how much they diminished it is not certain.

On the Democratic side in the last contest, Smith swept uninterruptedly on, winning the preferential vote and about half of the delegates from West Virginia, However, the close race given him by Senator Reed in this most Northernly inclined of the border States showed him as not quite the universal choice that he has sometimes appeared. As to the farm revolt, fourteen States with a combined delegate strength of 380 were in line to send marching clubs to Kansas City to protest the Administration's treatment of the McNary-Haugen plan and to demand what the farm organizations want in platform and candidate. Meanwhile, the Executive Committee of the Corn Belt Federation served notice on the Republican Party

that "it will not tolerate the selection of bolt of millions who voted for Coolidge such a man as Hoover or Coolidge." A bolt of millions who voted for Coolidge in 1924 is threatened.

From private sources in the corn country, however, come reports that enthusiasm for the revolt is not great and predictions that the army of protest at Kansas City will not be large.

China Reunified

THE Chinese Nationalists, who started two years ago on their seemingly hopeless campaign from Canton, have brought under their sway all of China within the Great Wall and captured from the northern militarists the capital city of Peking.

It is as if a band of reformers should start out from San Francisco to capture Washington-and succeed.

Chang Tso-lin, the northern dictator, has relinquished Peking, announced an end of the civil war, and acceded to the Japanese warning against any extension of disorder to Manchuria by retiring to his capital at Mukden without fighting. Thus he has saved his skin-but not his face and becomes a negligible official

dependent on Japanese protection for safety.

Japan declares that it has been her policy to open the way for the victory of the Nationalists and the unification of China.

But the Nationalists challenge her assumption of a special position of authority in Manchuria, and in their territory anti-Japanese agitation and a movement for an anti-Japanese boycott are spreading.

One of the first moves of the triumphant Nationalists undoubtedly will be to move for a revision of all the old Chinese treaties with foreign Powers and for a completely new deal in the relations be

tween China and the rest of the world. They have indicated that by demanding, in April, revision of Portugal's treaty of 1888 on a basis of entire equality. And one of the first tests of the Nationalists will be whether they themselves can hold together. They have three military leaders-General Chiang Kai-shek of Canton, General Feng Yu-hsiang of Chili, and General Yen Hsi-shan of Shansi-the first two of whom may be But the particularly eager of power. civil administration of the Nationalists at Nanking, directed by the long-headed Tan Yen-kai, seems likely to be able to hold control.

Colombia-Dry Off and On

THE Republic of Colombia is trying out a new liquor law. On June 1 the legal sale of liquor was barred between the hours of 4 P.M. and 8 A.M. Colombia will therefore be under a dry régime for sixteen hours out of every twenty-four, and in addition will be entirely dry on Sundays and holidays.

That a Latin country should attempt to enforce a Sunday closing law is a fact.

worthy of notice. We hope that Bogota

will have better luck with its Sunday closing law than did New York before the passage of the Volstead Act.

America to Australia by Air

MIDWAY between Hawaii and the Fiji Islands, as we write, the Southern Cross seems quite likely (barring disaster) to finish within a few hours its astounding flight of 3,200 miles over the Pacific. She will then face the last of her three steps from California to Australia. From Oakland to Brisbane the distance is 7,288 miles.

If careful planning and study of prob

lems may assure success, this AmericanAustralian flight should gain victory. The Southern Cross is a three-motor Fokker with Wright Whirlwind engines. One of the requisites laid down by Commander Byrd in his just-published article of warning entitled "Don't Let Them Die" is that long over-ocean flights should be made only in multi-engine planes; another is equipment for landing on water with ability to keep afloat; a third is thorough knowledge of navigation. To the ignoring of these conditions Byrd attributes many of the fatalities of last summer. The Southern Cross meets these requirements; of her four adventurers, two are skilled pilots, one is a navigator, one is a radio operator, and all are experienced aviators; the fact that two (Lieutenant Lyon and James Warden) are Americans and two (Captain Kingsford-Smith and Captain Ulm) are Australians with fine war records gives an international quality to their joint undertaking.

The steady, assured voyage of the Southern Cross from Oakland to Wheeler Field, Hawaii (2,400 miles in 272 hours), was an evidence of skill and coolness. On June 3 the plane took off easily from the Kauai field, and six hours later was reported by radio as having made 600 miles of the long trip to Suva Island. The fliers seemed confident that they had fuel enough to last, but admitted that it was possible that they might have to descend at Canton, a mere sandspit, 1,270 miles north of Suva; even so, fuel, it is thought, could be obtained by radio message in three days.

Meanwhile search for Nobile's party is slowly getting under way. They may quite possibly be subsisting on their ex

tra supplies and on hunting somewhere in the ice-fields beyond Spitsbergen, and they may be found by airplane search. Men have been lost in the Arctic region for years, and still have been found. A French explorer, Dr. Charcot, comments: "So long as a man lost in the Arctic has a jacknife and matches, never despair."

Overlords of Vice

IN Chicago, that always interesting city, they have been surveying crime and are finding it in a healthy state, well organized and deftly interlocked. They have also been probing into the 1926 killing of William McSwiggin, Assistant State's Attorney, who was murdered by machinegun fire while in the company of gangsters and beer-runners. Students of crime in this afflicted section of the country believe that this unsolved murder is the missing link in making the connection between politics and crime in Chi

cago.

The survey was conducted by the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology, with funds supplied by the Carnegie Foundation.

"On the whole," says Judge Andrew A. Bruce, President of the Institute, "the survey gives to the public an amazing story of interlocking interests of gambling, bootlegging, vice, and politics; and the use of gangsters by certain lines of legitimate business as a means of destroying competition.

"Administrations come and go, but the overlord of vice continues in power. Gambling, prostitution, and liquor selling can only exist on a profitable basis by the consent of officials. But the bootleggers, gamblers, and operators of com

mercialized vice houses cannot depend upon the regularly constituted agencies of law for protection from competitors in their own class. The courts are closed to them."

Here, Judge Bruce points out, there is more work for the gunmen.

"The syndicate having the largest force of gunmen is best able to enforce its claims to supremacy, and in turn is most likely to be favored by the politi cians who engineer official protection."

This exposé of the rule of vice may be one of the reasons why the church people are continuing to pray, as they did before the April primaries, for their candidates in the judicial elections that are pending at this writing. It may be, too, that certain of Judge Bruce's remarks were taken to heart by Mr. Morris Becker, proprietor of the Sanitary Cleaning Shops, Inc.

For ten years, despatches say, Mr. Becker's shops have been burned, his employees assaulted, robbed, and threatened by the gunmen of his rivals. Now, it is announced, Mr. Becker's principal partner is Mr. Al (Scarface) Capone.

"I now have no need of the State's Attorney or the Police Department," Mr. Becker says. "I have the best protection in the world."

Mr. Capone is one of Chicago's overlords of vice. He was a suspect in the McSwiggin case, and his name appears frequently in the survey of crime.

Nearer a Pledge Against War

SECRETARY KELLOGG's plan for a general agreement by the Powers to renounce war as an instrument of national policy and settle all disputes by pacific methods continues to make progress.

Acting on a suggestion from Sir Austen Chamberlain, British Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Mr. Kellogg sent an invitation to all the British Dominions to join in the agreement. Canada, the Irish Free State, Australia, and New Zealand have sent their acceptances. Only South Africa and India are to be heard from, and the expectation is that their replies will be favorable.

Meanwhile President Coolidge, speaking on Memorial Day at Gettysburg, has added his approval publicly, and taken occasion to indicate that Mr. Kellogg's draft for a treaty is only to be taken as a means to facilitate discussion by indicating what our Government would agree to. In other words, the phraseology and provisions may be modified within rea

son to meet the views of all the Powers concerned and make possible a final ac

Na recent sermon the Rev. Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick had this to say about the current concern with religion:

"Multitudes of people are trying to Save religion. Sometimes they are trying to save their own religion; they feel it slipping; they have not much left of the original capital with which their childhood homes endowed them; they are somewhat desperately clinging to as much religion as they have left and hope

that they can save it. "Many other folk are sure about their own religion, but they are trying to save the religion of the churches. They go about steadying the ark; they are deeply in earnest, often militant, sometimes hyslerical. They are sure that religion

somehow must be saved.

"For my part, I am through trying to save religion. That seems to me a fallacious method of approach. The proposition upon which we are to put our minds... is that the only successful way

to save religion is to get a religion that will save us. That distinction is profoundly important. If we are trying to save our religion, we are on the wrong track; the right track is the discovery of a religion that will save us."

To what Dr. Fosdick says we add that when we cease to try to save our religion we begin to think honestly about it. Professor Leuba's article in this issue may not compel agreement in the mind of the reader, but it will impel to honest and fearless thinking. A religion we cannot think fearlessly about is not worth saving.

Harvard Wins

HARVARD has been declared the winner of the recent "brain tilt"-as the headline writers put it-with Yale. Two teams of ten men from each University, men chosen for their intellectual abilities, took an examination in English literature on April 30. The papers were graded by a committee of neutral professors, a long and arduous task.

A Harvard-Yale football game is treated with solemnity and dignity. Special writers are assigned to write thousands of words about its various features. Their treatment of the contest is reverential, as befits a contest of international importance.

But the recent innovation at Yale and Harvard, based on intelligence rather than brawn, becomes a "brain tilt," "grind battle," a "gray matter Derby." The whole thing seems to be very humorous. As a matter of fact, the undergraduates of both Yale and Harvard have given the contest definite indorsement. There were many applicants for

the two teams. The prize was $5,000 worth of books, paid for through an endowment provided by Mrs. William Lowell Putnam in memory of her husband. The books will be given to the Harvard English Department.

Country Doctors

LAST summer the members of the National Grange appealed to the American Medical Association to "avert a general breakdown in rural medical service" and cited statistics to show that the average age of country doctors was fifty-two. Since the average doctor dies at sixtytwo, it was pointed out, something must be done within a decade.

The problem of medical care for the rural resident has been a troublesome one for many years. Doctors, in the great majority of cases, no longer train themselves for general practice. Instead, they become specialists, and must live in the cities to make a living. In addition, the country dweller is beginning to go to the city for expert assistance. He does this, that is, if he can afford to do so. And what it means is that the country doctors treat an increasing number of people unable to pay any fees at all.

The Albany Medical College is now undertaking to remedy this really grave situation. With an endowment of $2,000,000, about to be raised, the College intends to train doctors for general practice and to form an alliance with graduates in the field which will help them in the struggle for existence. Graduate courses will be offered for the rural physician. The people of the country districts will be urged to go to their local physicians.

Miss Tarbell Is Troubled

IN this issue The Outlook publishes the story of a woman who used to believe that prohibition would prohibit; and, picking up the current "Delineator," we find that Miss Ida M. Tarbell is similarly disillusioned.

The historian of Standard Oil wonders if prohibition is not actually becoming a menace to temperance; if it "is any longer serving as a guaranty of temperance, whether it may not be that, having accomplished its revolutionary purposethe destruction of the saloon-it is not actually becoming a hindrance to further progress and may not in a few years, if things go on as they are, become a menace to the degree of temperance by choice which the country had achieved before the Eighteenth Amendment was adopted."

The trouble seems to be that Miss Tarbell, as a traveling lecturer, can't escape contact with actualities. She sees liquor in the Pullmans, smells it on the porter's breath, and is kept awake by the carousers in hotels and staterooms.

"Over-Sunday drinking parties in Western and Southern towns-I have never run across them elsewhere-are sometimes of dreadful proportion."

Mrs. Sabin, in The Outlook, asks for the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment. Miss Tarbell believing, as do so many, that it is fixed, is inclined toward modification of the Volstead Act-the light wine and beer theory.

"Modification would at least give a firmer ground on which to fight law violations," she says. "It would put us in a better case to use the appeal to selfrespect, and to try to win the co-operation of dissenters in working out a society of men self-controlled from choice. Is any other form of temperance worth the name? Can prohibition as we now have it make any further contribution to this goal?"

Miss Tarbell refers her question-Is prohibition a menace to temperance?to the Conventions about to open.

"It must be considered," she says, "by the gentlemen who gather in Kansas City and in Houston . . . if they are to frame platforms on which candid Democrats and Republicans can support with some degree of self-respect the candidates for the Presidency which they

nominate."

Miss Tarbell's suggestion may have no effect on politicians scheming for victory; but as the discussion of prohibition

gradually comes out into the open it be

comes apparent that there is a "wet" as well as a "dry" argument.

Mr. Raskob to Colonel Callahan

MR. JOHN J. RASKOB, Chairman of the Finance Committee of General Motors, came back from Europe the other day and found a letter on his desk. It was

from Colonel Patrick H. Callahan, of Louisville, and in it the Colonel took Mr. Raskob to task for his connection with the National Association Opposed to Prohibition.

Colonel Callahan is the same Colonel who two years ago wrote a letter to the Pope asking him to help enforce prohibition in this country. The Pope's answer, if any, has not been made public, but

rebellion. . . . A large number of p feel that a majority in this country hav no more right to curtail their freedor with respect to drinking beer, wines, even spirits, than they have to deny religious worship. These people feel tha they do no wrong in the eyes of Go when they buy and consume beer, wine The and liquors, in spite of the law. feel that those who have the mon pay for such beverages and have t analyzed can drink without risk health, while those who cannot either do without or take great risks being poisoned.

t

"It is for this reason that the grea mass of our workmen and poor peopl feel that prohibition does not pro but is a scheme to deny them somethin which their more fortunate brothers money can have almost at will. Is any wonder they should rebel?.

"Mr. Hoover thinks and many other did at one time think prohibition a and noble social experiment. But failed, and I personally cannot conceiv of any experiment founded on intoler ance and not on good morals being no ble."

Mr. Raskob resents the charge that and others who are working for th peal of the Amendment are "in any w lawbreakers or show any lack of res for our great Constitution."

"On the contrary, we are engaged a noble effort to restore to our people feeling of independence and liberty an the right to the pursuit of happine earnestly sought, prayed for, and f secured after the Revolutionary War

Modify Divorce Rules

DIVORCE became an issue in the cl hour of the Conference of the Metr Episcopal Church, in session twent days at Kansas City, and victory with those who would liberalize the rule

e

Heretofore ministers of that large an influential denomination have been bidden to marry a divorced person cept the innocent partner in a d resulting from adultery.

The amended Methodist Disc now reads:

"A minister shall not solemnize a ma riage of a divorced person whose for th band or wife is still living, except f innocent person, when it is clearly lished in his own mind that the tr cause of divorce was adultery moral equivalent."

The concession to the liberalizers is the last three words. Dr. Daniel Marsh, President of Boston Univers made the argument for that faction.