September 28, 1927

Courtesy United States Department of Agriculture

have to go to the market sooner or later. And holding is not an inexpensive practice. Storage and insurance charges and interest have to be paid; it takes a price increase of a cent or two a month to offset the expense.

And there was nothing in what the Government put forth to indicate that prices would rise much, if at all, until a short crop in the future brought readjustment. Governmental agencies argued only that holding would "stabilize" the market and prevent further declines.

Virtually all of those agencies seized on the situation as a peg on which to hang a lot of advice to Southern farmers about their own business. The Department of Agriculture worked out its "Safe Farming" program, which was emphasized in nearly all of its general discussions of the cotton situation. And the worse that situation could be made to appear, the more compelling seemed the advice poured upon the heads of Southern farmers by factotums in the Government.

A year's work to the wagon

they always do, and had their proper effect-perhaps too much effect of the price-raising kind.

Even the mills of Lancashire took several hundred thousand bales more of American cotton than during the previous season. Germany's takings, totaling nearly 3,000,000 bales, were for the first time the largest of any country. Continental mills as a whole took more than ever before. Even those of Soviet Russia took nearly a half million bales of American cotton. Japan's takings increased forty per cent. Shipments to

China and India, where American cotton met directly the competition of Oriental cotton, totaled a half million bales.

Some of the increase in exports was undoubtedly due to the low prices during much of the period when the bulk of the cotton was being marketed by producers; likewise some of the nearly a million bales increase in the American mill consumption.

But not all of it is soundly so attributable. For exports had reached the prewar average volume in both of the two preceding seasons, when prices ranged above 20 cents a pound. And a large proportion of the cotton sold by the producers during the period of low prices attained a primary market value of more than 15 cents a pound long before it was made into yarn or cloth.

Foreigners profited most. This was because of their heavy buyings when the prices were low. And they bought heavily no doubt because they had a clearer and more accurate view of the situation than the one which commonly was presented in this country.

This was true because in the American view the domestic trees obscured the all-world forest. The purely domestic situation was so unusual that no one apparently could believe that its abnormal features were offset by contrary conditions abroad.

Avalanches of figures on domestic production and consumption were put forth. They were gathered by an army of workers, chiefly in the Government's service.

But the Government left the gathering of information abroad to a few trade and agricultural commissioners, busy with many things, and to the slow-moving International Institute of Agriculture at Rome. The result was that the information received from the other countries was far behind that gathered in the United States, and by comparison was fragmentary only. Yet the foreign angles of cotton amount to one-half or more of all. One-third of production and two-thirds of mill consumption is ordinarily outside the United States. All (Continued on page 125)

115

L

ET us assume that you, reader, are one of the 2,000 civilians,

men and women, now flying airplanes in the United States, that you have been granted a pilot's license after only six or eight hours spent in the air with a competent instructor, and that you now look upon flying as a normal operation, as simple in many respects as driving a motor car.

What? As simple as driving a car? Largely yes. You know your car, its engine, the rules of the road. With experience you have learned how to make turns, climb hills, and negotiate bad spots. You have your road maps showing each turn in the highway and all the various landmarks calculated to keep you on the route.

You watch your fuel supply and so schedule your run that you may reach a service station before exhausting your gas and oil. And if you are a wise motorist you will never set out on a long trip without first seeing to it that your machine is in the best possible condition. Flying is just like that.

Of course it has its own peculiar features. You fly in a medium having three dimensions instead of the terrestrial two-thickness, depth along with the length and breadth. You have realized this on your first flight and you understand that this third dimension is the element that makes flying different. You must go up to get anywhere and eventually you must come down, two features without parallel in surface transportation.

But you have been surprised at the ease with which you have mastered those apparently difficult feats, and you are tempted to give the builder of the plane most of the credit, also the man who so developed your engine that its excess power now assures you of certain control. You know it is no magic carpet, that it stays up because of the resistance which the air offers to the wings. The air packs beneath the lower surface of the wings and as your propeller forces them through it they are constantly lifted.

Nor must you be an acrobat. The designer and the builder have balanced your plane for you. With enough motor power to establish a continued heavy air resistance against the wings your plane remains balanced automatically. Thrown off balance by deliberate or ill-advised manipulation of the controls it tends to

By WALTER HINTON

XCEPT for the third di

EXCE

mension, flying an airplane is no more difficult than driving a motor car. To bank your plane on a turn is no more difficult than turning a corner with automobile. your Since the day is not far distant when the airplane will be as much a part of our daily life as the automobile now is, Walter Hinton was asked to explain to Outlook readers just what you have to know and what you have to do to fly. Walter Hinton, it will be remembered, was the first man successfully to pilot an airplane across the Atlantic.

THE EDITORS.

regain its balance after the controls are restored to normal, or flying position providing that you are high enough to permit the machine to do this before it collides with the surface. No mystery there.

L

IKE any motorist with his car you project a long trip-over land or water. You have learned that airplanes, like motor cars, differ. Each type is designed for a specific purpose. Each has its own peculiar characteristics, but all are governed by the same principles, the same natural laws. You should not overload your plane. You cannot make a light sport car serve as a delivery truck. Moreover, you cannot overload your plane safely, because it will lift only a certain weight, based on the power of the engine, shape of the wings and other technical features. So you choose for your long flight that machine which seems best fitted for the job. Let us say that your choice is a happy one.

Some fifty different materials have gone into this machine, as many skilled trades are represented in its construction. Your mechanics fill it with gasoline and oil, and unless you have an air-cooled engine, they must fill the radiator with water. You climb in, first making sure that the chucks are against the wheels, if it is a land plane. You switch on the ignition. Your engine is cranked either with a self-starter or by turning the propeller as you sometimes

crank the engine of your car. The propeller turns. You warm the engine, the blocks against the wheels, assisted by humans holding the wings, preventing a premature start. Gradually you advance your throttle until the engine is making enough revolutions to lift your craft.

You throttle down again, test your controls, look in all directions to be sure you will not collide with another machine. A last glance at your instrument board: everything in order. You "give her the gun," head on against the wind to lessen the running distance on the surface.

ON the ground the controls have been

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neutral, save that the elevators hinged on either side of the tail have flopped down of their own weight so that they now resist the air stream. In this position the control stick in your cockpit leans forward. As your plane starts forth you do little or nothing. The plane acts of its own accord. But you must be cautious: you want your plane in flying position, the tail up and level. This occurs automatically as you gain speed; but you must exert a very slight pressure on the control stick to prevent the tail bobbing up and throwing your machine on its nose.

As the machine rolls forward gathering momentum the stick slowly swings back to neutral, straight up. By this you know the tail is level. At a certain speed, depending on the surface, the type of plane and its weight, you find yourself in the air. The ground recedes slowly. You watch it until you are sure that it is far enough underneath to permit a safe turn.

The turn is the thing: and here you are grateful to the pioneers and engineers and pilots who have evolved the present system of control, though the principles were invented by the Wright brothers and remain the same.

Like the tail and fins of a fish the plane has a rudder, in front of which is a fixed vertical fin to which the rudder is hinged. Both help you to change your forward direction. Sticking out sidewise like little wings are the horizontal stabilizers to which the elevators are hinged. They help to keep the plane from nosing up or down unless you steer it so.

Your wings are so built at an angle that they tend to keep your machine

devices with its system for enabling you to correct your course at regular intervals. Or you may have a radio and take your bearings with fair accuracy.

Overland you are sighting aerial beacons, but if you are trying to fly the Atlantic or Pacific, you must be an experienced navigator, a science in itself.

Daylight again-your goal lies only a few hundred miles distant. Your gauge records a dwindling fuel supply in the main tank. You turn on the emergency supply. You recognize a landmark noted on your map, a lighthouse, a railway junction, or in a modern community its name in big letters easily discernible from above. The route lies straight ahead. The weather is fair. You relax, eat a lunch; then if you are air-seasoned, you might reach for a book and thus relieve the monotony of uneventful flying, which is something no motorist at the wheel can do.

of the wind and come down as you took off, against it, being sure to time your slow glide so you can level out and touch the field at the right place, affording your plane a clear, smooth runway on the ground. Practice has enabled you to judge accurately when to throttle down; pull back ever so slightly on the stick to put the wings more against the wind, like a duck landing on the water or a bird on land, and just before your wheels and tail-skid touch the earth at the same time, in a perfect three-point landing.

Rather involved? It all depends on your experience and your plane. Fast military planes have faster landing speeds than slow machines. A good field is important. In a small field you may have to side-slip to get to earth at the right spot; but this is one of those technical points similar to driving in crowded traffic. I have seen pilots come down three or four times and take off again without touching the ground, before they succeeded in reaching the point they required in order to permit a smooth safe runway. I know boys in

their 'teens who fly regularly alone, putting their machines down in pasture lots and anywhere else that they may decide is a convenient place to land.

If you study flying as you study your motor car, you become adept at meeting any emergency. In the air you may cruise about at will, taking time to decide just what you want to do and how best to do it. On a motor highway you must act more quickly because of limited space with only two dimensions.

And remember, an airplane does not fall or crash to the ground when the motor stops. If it stops cold, which is a very rare thing, your plane will glide forward as long as the controls are in neutral position; meanwhile, you look for the spot which affords a safe landing, and you bank your plane in circles until ready to flatten out and glide into it: the danger here lies in losing your head and working the controls the wrong way. too close to the surface for a safe recovery when you discover your mistake Motorists do that very thing, sometimes. Others drive cautiously, and therefore safely.

I

N summoning me to say a few words

on schools and politics The Outlook knows that this sort of cloud shadows wander over our cities and that the Associated Press has given newspaper editors to understand that Chicago is in this kind of shade. Result? One hundred and eleven editorials on keep "politics out of the schools." Why?

Maybe it is because of the persistence of a good old notion that schools are for something better than politics.

We schoolmasters have been taught that American education began with laws establishing a school system as they said "to thwart that old deluder Satan and to bring up youth as the laws of God and of the Commonwealth doth require."

Those lawmakers of 1647 couldn't make their verb agree with its subject, maybe, but they labeled the schools with a moral purpose that sticks. Every book that summarizes, in 1927, the aims of schooling puts, in the front rank, character, conduct, ideals, behavior. I have never heard a man or child express his notion of schooling who did not imply that this design of two hundred and eighty years ago is still a prime purpose of public education.

But, "to bring up youth as the laws of the Commonwealth doth require" is politics. It looks to me as though it got a great push in the reshaping of our ideals in 1776. Whether Hamilton wrote it for him or not, Washington fathered the doctrine that "a plan of universal education ought to be adopted so that a government dependent on public opinion might have a public opinion enlightened."

Franklin had said more than twentyfive years earlier "we must have public education so that men will serve the country with honor to themselves and it." Madison and Monroe were for general education "to train the governors of a self-governing people." Jay called education "the training of the soul of the Republic." Oscar Hansen of Columbia University has just dug up over three hundred pamphlets, letters, and speeches of revolutionary times setting forth schemes of American education working out the ideas of statesmen, scholars, patriots; Benjamin Rush, Attorney-General Robert Coram, Chief Justice Nathaniel Chapman, College President Samuel Knox, Editor Samuel H. Smith, Lexicographer Noah Webster, Jefferson

POLITICS in our schools

is the last thing every good American wants. Children are our most precious possession. They are America's only real safeguard against the future. Nevertheless, according to William McAndrew, you could make a spot-map of the United States and show cities where the main obstacle to education is political school boards.

William McAndrew ought to know. For the last three years he has been running all Chicago's schools, backed by a non-political school board. Not till last August did the politicians "get him." Now he is out-and able to express his ideas. Twice ousted by politicians once in 1891 and again year. -THE EDITORS.

in August this

and his learned friend du Pont de Nemours, and many others. Hansen's book, "Liberalism in American Educa

Wide World

"Big Bill" Thompson, being sworn in as Mayor of Chicago for the third time

tion," outlining these schemes leaves no doubt in your mind that the new nation intended to preserve itself by setting up a system of public schools to teach politics.

In the pre-Revolutionary schools you paid in proportion to the number of your own children in them. In the new system, everybody paid, whether they had children or not. Every State adopted the scheme. Part of every cent you spend for anything goes to the support of schools, not as a charity for Jones's children, not for their benefit, but as Thaddeus Stevens and Daniel Webster and every proponent of the free-school system promised, for union, for justice, for tranquillity, for defense, for general welfare-that is, for politics.

But all along there was retained the duty of thwarting that old deluder Satan and of bringing up youth as the laws of God doth require. John Adams must have public schools "to train men in their political duties as citizens;" Jefferson will have public schools "teach children what is going on in the world, now, and to keep their part going on right." At its first opportunity to put the doctrine into action the Congress decreed for its new territory: "Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government, schools and the means of education shall be forever encouraged." By the plan of its founders, by its being a public and not a parental expense, public school education is clearly devoted to teaching public morality and pure politics.

What Happened to Politics? B

UT, to the ordinary American, politics in the schools is as abominable as obscenity in a prayer-meeting. Something happened to an ancient and honorable word. "Politika," said the Greek, "it means the prosperity of the state." "Politicae," said the noble Roman, "that is the public business." "Politics," said the Americans in 1787, "means union, justice, tranquillity, defense, general welfare." But by 1840 Emerson was saying, "Who that sees the meanness of our politics but only congratulates Washington that he was laid sweet in his grave?" The last edition of gentle Peter Mark Roget's treasury of words, brought down to 1925, offers these foul-smelling ideas in one rank bouquet: chicanery, knavery, duplicity, jobbery, trickery, politics. You can get