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and justice, his familiarity with foreign tongues, and his unusual memory for events combined to an extraordinary de

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gree to fit him for his lifework. Next week we shall give a further account of his life and service.

Our Buttressed Bureaucracy

EAR-ADMIRAL T. P. MAGRUDER has started the bees buzzing in the hive at Washington. He has committed the indiscretion of publishing some public figures. In an article in the "Saturday Evening Post" he has pointed out that the cost of the Navy in 1926 is nearly four times what it was in 1908. Nineteen years ago, when Theodore Roosevelt was President, the United States fleet's auxiliaries were few, now they are many. But the difference does not account for the difference in cost. The nub of the whole matter may be found in the fact that there are over three times as many officers on duty in the Navy Department at Washington now with their attendant clerical assistants as there were only nine years ago. This is what in business is called a big overhead. The Navy is overorganized afloat and ashore. Admiral Magruder goes into detail. For example, he cites the case of a force consisting of four auxiliaries-fuel, supply, and repair ships and five tugs commanded by a rear-admiral. He tells the old story of the unnecessary navy yards. He describes the red tape and the typewriters.

What Admiral Magruder says about the Navy Department could also be said in varying degrees about other depart ments at Washington. We had occasion a few weeks ago to print three articles which described a similarly enlarged overhead in the Forest Service. Only last week we referred to the harm that a blundering bureaucracy had done to the cotton growers-another example of the same evil, an overgrown overhead.

What happens when such bureaucratic evils are pointed out? Do we find the bureaucrats thanking the critic who points out the harm that they are doing? Do we find them turning to industrial

democracy with efficiency. He argues that in proportion as people control their own government they tend to make that government costly. This is in a measure probably true. We must pay the price for the liberties we have, and if we pay it in money at least we are better off

Acme

Eamonn De Valera, Irish agitator

than by paying for it in blood. But that is no reason why any people should endure both the veiled autocracy of the bureaucrat and his inefficiency. If we are going to be inefficient, let us at least get rid of bureaucratic tyranny. Our departments at Washington need overhauling.

The Outlook for

The appeal to the voters went out, will be recalled, because the antagonists of the Government-Eamonn De Va lera, the old chief of the Sinn Fein re publican extremists, now head of the slightly more reasonable Fianna Fail faction, and Tom Johnson, leader of the Labor Party-had secured as many seats as the Government in the lower chamber of the national Parliament. To redress this dangerous situation in the Dail Eireann, President Cosgrave determined upon general elections. The outcome resulted in weakening the Labor Party strengthening the De Valera faction, and improving the position of the Govern ment, but leaving it still anything but secure. This showed how much Ireland continues to be ruled by the sentiment of enmity to England and how little by the sense of actual welfare.

President Cosgrave himself has said in a recent interview: "Is it necessary to antagonize England in order to display a national spirit? England is our best customer." Yet Agitator De Valera, going out and making irresponsible pledges to the voters and hinting at independence of Great Britain, was able to come perilously close to upsetting the Government that has gained for Irishmen the only freedom and real economic advancement they have known for seven centuries.

The influence De Valera now commands in the Dail Eireann will test his practical statesmanship. He can use it constantly to embarrass the Government and keep President Cosgrave and his associates from carrying on their constructive work. Or he can use it to teach his followers the better way of seeking their objectives through cooperation with the executives of the Free State in every plan for the improvement of life in Ireland.

Americans have a concern in the course of affairs in Ireland, both because many good citizens of the United States are of Irish origin or descent and be cause the cause of Irish self-rule has always enlisted naturally a large degre

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engineers to get expert advice in plan- Must Ireland Fight Her of American sympathy. And if Ireland

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War Again?

NARROW margin of six votes in Parliament is all that keeps the Government of the Irish Free State in power. After the hardfought election that followed President Cosgrave's call for the support of the people, that is the small balance of power that he and his Cabinet were able to secure. He now has the delicate task of keeping that sensitive balance down on the side of the forces of order in Ireland.

should get into difficulties with Great Britain again, it would not fail to reac upon American politics as it did for merly-and particularly upon relation with the British Commonwealth. Any trouble in Ireland is fought out partly here in the United States. Because goo relations between Great Britain and the United States are of cardinal importanc to both countries, peace and prosperity and as high a degree of contentment a the Celtic temperament will permit ar desirable for their effect on Anglo-Amer ican understanding.

October 5, 1927

When the Irish signed a treaty of amity with the English and the Free State came into being, many Americans breathed a sigh of relief. They would be deeply disturbed now to see the new system in Ireland upset. So they will hope that De Valera and his adherents may see how much better is an arrangement that is working and holding out the hope of better things—even if it is not all that Irish republicans may desire than a theoretically ideal arrangement which really means ruinous conflict and bloodshed.

Boswell the Incomparable

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OME have called Boswell an incomparable fool (Gray said, "Any fool may write a valuable book by chance"), but that he wrote an incomparable biography is undeniable. Few indeed read his "Tour of the Hebrides" or his "Life of Paoli," but to know Boswell's Johnson is part of a liberal education. It is true also that few now read Samuel Johnson's writings; but we all know Johnson as if we had just met him around the corner. "Who threw this Scotch cur at Johnson's heels?" said some one. "He is not a cur," retorted Goldsmith, "he is a bur . . . he has the faculty of sticking."

Goldsmith's remark shows only a part of Boswell's nature. Boswell was not all sycophant; he stood up to the Great Bear in argument sometimes; he discriminated between Johnson in earnest and Johnson growling in ursine humor; he was a marvel as a verbal reporter and a depicter of manners and personal peculiarities; his "Common Place Books" show that in his "Life" he followed his notes closely.

If unpublished letters and casual writings of Shakespeare were found, the literary and bibliographical world would go wild. The recent find of such literary remains of Boswell are far less important, and yet of exceeding interest. Collectors must almost tear their hair at learning that the only reason that the manuscript of Boswell's Johnson is not to-day in the market-unique, priceless -is that Boswell's descendants did not take care of it, and it is in a hopeless condition except for perhaps twenty pages. This indifference is quite in line with the feeling of Boswell's immediate relatives, who were not at all proud of Boswell's attendance on Johnson and his curious fame therefrom. The descendants have kept as a memento the ebony case in which the manuscripts were found; America has the contents.

The treasures newly acquired by an

American collector of rare books, Colo

nel Ralph Isham, are in this country and will be retained intact by their owner, but will be edited and published.

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Included among the papers are the original "Account of Corsica;" letters from Burns, Goldsmith, Rousseau, Voltaire, and Pitt, and letters written by James Boswell himself; Boswell's proposal to his Peggy and her reply; and many other things of high literary interest to all Johnsonians and Boswellians. Just how much of the newly acquired

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material has never heretofore appeared in any form it is impossible to state before a full authorized description is published.

Perhaps the new interest in the old, favorite biography will lead some of those who have an idea that it is dull and musty to pick it up and read a bit here and there. It is true that, like "Hamlet," it is full of "quotations," and for the same reason, but it is a treasurehouse of jest and retort, wisdom and whimsicality, humor and character.

On the Importance of Being
an Ambassador

By LAWRENCE F. ABBOTT
Contributing Editor of The Outlook

HE office of ambassador is one of the most important and difficult in the structure of modern governments. In fact, the office is so modern that its power for good or evil is yet hardly realized by the great mass of citizens. The ancients had no conception of a resident representative in a foreign country, and so the word ambassador has no classical derivation. It is of medieval creation, and down to very recent times the function of a foreign ambassador was something like that of an aristocratic and high-class spy whose duty it was to promote the interests of his royal master and to damage as much as he could the plots and plans of the kingdom to which he was sent. The French philosopher Bayle, whom Dr. Johnson regarded as the soundest political critic of his time, said that the first article of the political creed of ambassadors, whatever may be their religious creed, is to concoct lies and persuade society to believe them. Even as late as Bismarck this was the generally accepted doctrine in European foreign relations, and led the great German Chancellor to remark that the surest way for a diplomatist to conceal his intentions was to tell the truth about them, for nobody would believe he was telling the truth.

In one of the numerous delightful and efficacious speeches which that prince of envoys, Joseph H. Choate, made in England when he was Ambassador to the Court of St. James's he alluded to the old school of diplomacy in paying a tribute to the foreign policies framed in Downing Street, the place of the official residence of the British Prime Ministers. What Mr. Choate said on that occasion, the annual Lord Mayor's banquet of the year 1900, is worth quoting in some fullness not only because it is apropos to my

subject but because at the time it excited much interest on both sides of the water:

Downing Street, if it may be called a street at all-which I somewhat doubt is altogether an American street, and, however the representatives of other nations may feel, we are entirely at home there. [Laughter and cheers.] I will show you how it is an American street, and how it derives its origin and its history from the earliest periods of the English colonies in America. I doubt whether many within sound of my voice know why it is called Downing Street. Now at the school which I had the good fortune to attend . . . in Massachusetts [the Boston Latin School] ... over the archway of the entrance there were inscribed the words Schola publica prima-the first school organized in Massachusetts-and underneath was inscribed the name of George Downing, the first pupil of that school. Then in Harvard College we find him, a graduate of that institution in the first year that it sent any youths into the world, the year 1642. He soon found his way to England. He became the chaplain of Colonel Oakey's army under Cromwell, and he soon began to display the most extraordinary faculties in the art of diplomacy of any man of his day. It was the old diplomacy. [Laughter.] It was not anything like the new diplomacy that Lord Salisbury and the Foreign Ministers here present practice. It was the old kind. Downing developed a wonderful mastery of the art of hoodwinking, in which that kind of diplomacy chiefly consisted. In the first place, he hoodwinked Cromwell himself, which showed he was a very astute young man. [Laughter.] . . . He hoodwinked the Rump

and when the restoration came, he practiced his wily arts upon the merry Monarch . . . three great tri

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umphs in diplomacy-all by one man.

...

In the natural course of things Downing would have been haled to Tyburn and hanged by the neck until dead, but he won his way into the favor of King Charles by claiming that the King must forgive his past backslidings because of the vicious principles he had sucked in in his early New England education. [Laughter.] Finally he died, and by his will he devised his mansion and estates and farm at Westminster to his children, and now they are gone, leaving no rack behind except a little bit of ground one hundred yards long and twenty yards wide, sometimes narrowing to ten, which bears still his illustrious name. It is the smallest, and at the same time the greatest, street in the world because it lies at the hub of the gigantic wheel which encircles the globe under the name of the British Empire. I have heard it called a cul de sac-a place where you can get in but cannot get out. How, however, other nations may find it, we Americans, by reason of our prescriptive rights in the premises, find it to be a thoroughfare. [Laughter.] We feel entirely at home in it. Our feet are on our native heath. We can go in and go out, and give and take on equal terms.

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Whatever may have been the diplomatic morals of the Anglo-American Downing in the seventeenth century, at the opening of the nineteenth century the ideas of the ambassadorial function

-at least in Anglo-American relationsbegan to undergo a radical change. It gradually dawned both on the official and the popular mind that the real work of an ambassador is to promote the mutual friendship and welfare of the two countries with which he is officially related. Americans may modestly congratulate themselves that their representatives have had no small part in effecting this change of attitude. Among the distinguished names on this ambassadorial roll of honor are those of John Jay, Edward Everett, Charles Francis Adams, James Russell Lowell, Edward J. Phelps, Joseph H. Choate, and Walter Hines Page. Two of these saved us from the imminent danger of war with Great Britain-Adams, by his famous note to Earl Russell during the Civil War, in which he said, referring to the building of ironclads for the Confederacy in an English shipyard, "It would be superfluous for me to point out to your lordship that this is war;" and Page, by suggesting to Sir Edward Grey that a French cruiser instead of a British cruiser be despatched to capture the American contraband steamer Dacia, thus calming

American irritation with Great Britain, which was at the breaking-point.

Ambassadors do not often have international problems of this magnitude to solve. Their duties are largely social. But the important influence of social tact on international relations is proved

Dwight W. Morrow, who has just been
appointed Ambassador to Mexico

conclusively, if it needed any proof, by the historic achievement of Colonel Lindbergh in France. Lord Cromer, one of the great diplomatists of modern times, in discussing the social aspect of ambassadorial functions employs the following entertaining anecdote to illustrate the qualifications demanded of an ideal ambassador:

It is related that a lady once asked Madame de Staël to recommend a tutor for her boy. She described the sort of man she wished to find. He was to be a gentleman with perfect manners and a thorough knowledge of the world; it was essential that he should be a classical scholar and an accomplished linguist; he was to exercise supreme authority over his pupil, and at the same time he was to show such a degree of tact that his authority was to be unfelt; in fact, he was to possess every moral attribute and intellectual faculty which it is possible to depict, and, lastly, he was to place all these qualities at the service of Madame de Staël's friend for a very low salary. The witty Frenchwoman listened with attention to her friend's list of indispensable qualifications and eventually replied: Ma chère, je comprends parfaitement bien le caractère

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The Outlook jot

de l'homme qu'il vous faut, mais je dois vous dire que si je le trouve, je l'épouse. [My dear, I know exactly the kind of man you are looking for, but I think I ought to tell you that if I find him I shall marry him!]

England-for Lord Cromer was speak ing of the English diplomatic service is not the only country that expects to get ideal ambassadors "at a very low salary." We have been and still are parsimonious in this respect. Our first and probably most famous, ambassador to England, Benjamin Franklin (I am using the term ambassador in its gen eric sense of legate, representative, commissioner, envoy), paid a large part of his necessary expenses out of his own pocket, and so have all his successors Dr. Andrew D. White, one of the best of our Ambassadors to Germany, said about twenty years ago that his office cost him nearly twenty thousand dollars annually in addition to his salary, and he was not a rich man nor did he enter tain socially beyond the actual require ments to maintain the dignity of his office. What, then, the American people -or, at least, those who are publicspirited enough to think about it at all -desire in their ambassadorial representatives is a combination of wisdom, learning, tact, a high sense of public and private honor, a knowledge of political problems, and some private means to maintain the dignity of the office.

Judged by these qualifications, the latest ambassadorial appointment is an eminently good and satisfactory one Mr. Dwight Morrow, who has just been appointed Ambassador to Mexico to succeed Mr. Sheffield, meets the requirements in a peculiarly happy fashion President Coolidge and Mr. Morrow were classmates at Amherst in the class of 1895. Mr. Coolidge knows, more intimately probably than any other man, that Mr. Morrow's prime interest and motive in life is public and civic service, and not private gain. The fact that he has been for thirteen years a partner in the firm of Messrs. J. P. Morgan & Co., from which he has now resigned, is of no significance whatever except in two respects which have a direct bearing on his new office he has had thirteen years of notable experience in dealing with men and affairs and with international problems of both economics and politics; and he has presumably acquired sufficient means so that he can perform his ambassadorial duties without fear or favor or without any anxiety about their effect on his private welfare.

This is excellent so far as it goes, but it is not enough. An ambassador must

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With the Ring?

What's Wrong With

An Interview by Dixon Merritt

OLDIERS' FIELD had folded it

self around the mightiest mass of men and women ever drawn at one time to one sporting event on this continent. Gene Tunney for the skill of it, and Jack Dempsey for the kill of itand for a million and a half of dollars, more or less-were shortly to meet in the center of that square marked off by silken ropes, 20 X 20, and fight with their fists until one or the other of them should be confirmed as the champion pugilist of the world, until the crown should settle firmly on the head of Tunney or flit back to the head of Dempsey, still welted from wearing it until a year before.

With JAMES J. CORBETT

Soldiers' Field, on the windy lake front of Chicago, had seated its hundred and fifty thousand. Away to the north, two blocks away at the least, lay dim and mottled masses, like mud flats in a river fog-the multiplied thousands who sat in the cheap seats, so far away that they could neither see nor hear, so far away that many of them actually never knew the result of the big fight until they went back to town and read it in the papers. Even the forty-dollar seats, ringside, sprawled broadly as a prairie corn-field. The banked tiers down the sides of the field looked, in the scramble of blaze and shade, like two great cities on distant mountain-sides, lights glowing in the windows of half the houses, some of them always going out, others always coming on-the matches struck to light a hundred thousand cigars and ciga

rettes.

"Look at it well, my boy. It's a sight that you never will see again-the biggest crowd that a prize-fight ever drew, and the biggest that a prize-fight will ever draw."

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HE voice was the voice of James J. Corbett, "Gentleman Jim," former world's champion pugilist, always and forever the world's beau ideal of the boxer-the man who introduced boxing to the prize ring. The man who, with his head and his feet-and some help from his slender hands-put the killer Sullivan to sleep in the twenty-first round. The man who stood in front of the mauling, pile-driver fists of Peter Jackson, the Negro, for sixty-one rounds. The man who did the dance of the frol

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icsome fay around the brawny bulk Jake Kilrain and boxed him into a s por.

There he sat, "Gentleman Ji Sixty. Clean and slim, almost, as w he gave a new meaning to the name the box-stall in his father's livery stab No cauliflower ear, no flattened nose, scarred lip, no slightest mark upon h anywhere of all his hard-fought batt in the days when, but for him, bruisi was the rule of the ring. He was a bar teller once, this Corbett. And as he s there, flashing his rapier wit as once flashed his fists, you might have thoug that he had gone on in that career un he was president of the biggest bank the land-except, perhaps, that his ey were too sympathetic for the eyes a banker. "Gentleman Jim," as waited through the preliminaries, ma ing prophecy of the future.

"Prize-fighting is at its peak so far crowds and gate receipts and purses a concerned. The game will develop, y -but in other ways. This is the bi gest."

He did not say "Thank God," but looked it.

"How? Who can tell? It's so differ ent from what it was in my day. S much bigger and-yes, so much bette in many ways."

"Better? But is it honest? Honestly is prize-fighting honest?" "Gentlema Jim" did not hesitate.

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"Ir's terribly hard for anything wit

as much money in it as there is in prize-fighting to-day to be honest-espe cially for a sporting, gambling proposi tion such as prize-fighting is. I don' know of anything dishonest that ha been done I wouldn't. But I know the temptations that honesty has to meet.

"If a fight is crooked, the two fighters do not have to be in on it. I doubt if they can be in on it and get away with it. But the referee. He's a poor man, usually; his earnings for a year are not a fractional part of what the short-end fighter gets for an evening's work. A few thousand dollars-or a few hundred thousands, maybe is a temptation.

"The referee might not always be able to control the result, but he can do & great deal to affect it. In the one par

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