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September 21, 192)

ber in the United States, and that delays in the final disposal of criminal cases are far much shorter. The reason for this was indicated in a recent address by Lord Hewart, Lord Chief Justice of England, before the Canadian Bar Association. The present Court of Criminal Appeal has been in existence in England a little less than twenty years. A case is rarely before the court more than four or five weeks; many cases are withdrawn because of intimations by the court that the prisoners involved have a poor case. There is a cogent reason for this: the court has the power to increase as well as to shorten the time of a sentence. Thus counsel for a convicted man take a serious risk if they appeal on frivolous grounds.

For the same reason, as well as because of the general discouragement of delay for delay's sake, the number of criminal appeals in England is decidedly small-about seven per cent of possible appeals and in actual numbers from 420 to 712 cases a year, while the average of cases quashed has varied from 39 to 14 in a year, and of those reduced from 47 to 17. The work of this court does not, of course, infringe on the right of the Crown's prerogative through the Home Secretary, to act in remitting sentences, but this power is rarely exercised and Lord Hewart stated that the Home Secretary and the Criminal Court of Appeals in certain matters act in concert.

It is clear that this simple system has worked well because it will not tolerate

retirement of a man who has been unhappily employed.

In the opinion of President Coolidge, according to a despatch from Theodore C. Wallen to the New York "HeraldTribune," Lord Cecil's resignation has had the effect of making more remote the possibility of an agreement upon the limitation of naval armament between the United States and Great Britain. It could have no effect upon opinion in the United States, for that opinion is already firmly set in the direction of further limitation. On British policy the resignation can have only the effect of strengthening the views of the British Government, for it removes from the Cabinet the one man who disagreed with the Cabinet's policy. The only resignation that could have affected British policy would have been that not of Cecil but of Chamberlain.

The effect of his resignation on the League of Nations also tends to thwart his own purposes for the League. The fact that Cecil, at least for some time, will not be representing Great Britain at Geneva is likely to make British participation in League conferences less active. That may in turn mean a gain for French influence and of French conception of the League as a Continental organization, and perhaps also closer Franco-German League relations.

France Takes a Leaf from Our Tariff Book

dilatory motions and grant excessive S

postponements. The bar soon recognized the situation and now the privilege of appeal is not abused, as it certainly is in this country.

The Effect of Cecil's Resignation

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Viscount Cecil resigned from the British Cabinet merely to gain his own liberty instead of being the mouthpiece of policies in which he did not believe he got what he sought. But if he thought by resigning that he might promote the cause of disarmament and the ideals which he believed to be embodied in the League of Nations he has so far apparently missed his aim. What he might have accomplished if he had resigned when he was called upon to advocate policies he did not believe in and if he had made of his refusal to serve a protest against those policies can be only a matter of surmise; but he withheld his resignation until he had served the purposes of the British Government. Now his resignation so far from having the effect of a protest becomes merely the

HOUTS of alarm and hurt amazement

have begun to go up in official and commercial circles over the news that France has put in effect a new protective tariff imposing much higher rates on American goods. But any real excuse for protest from the United States seems hard to find.

Revision of the French tariff was well known to be under way. In advance, it appears, it had been understood that only certain "intermediate" rates-and not the extreme high rates-would apply to products of the United States. The revised schedules of customs duties became known after the signing of the commercial accord with Germany. Then we discovered that the full high rates were to affect American goods, while German goods were to benefit at many points by "most favored nation" treatment. In consequence, American trade amounting to $80,000,000 a year will have to fight for its life-for the wares represented in it will be taxed three to four times as much as wares from Germany.

Discussions of a new Franco-American trade accord are pending; and it is inti

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mated that France might agree to permit American goods to enter France at the new minimum rate, which would be about 40 per cent above rates previously enjoyed. But she will do that only in return for some solid concession on the American side. Germany was able to offer France definite inducements in terms of special treatment of a whole series of French exports. France wants to open up a more favorable market in America for her silks, perfumes, and other products; but there has been little evidence that Congress would agree to more lenient tariff terms than those in the present schedule of duties.

When an international group of bankers suggested some months ago that-in the interest of economic revival-the European nations ought to modify the tariff barriers between them, there was general expression of approval. The American bankers and the Administration took occasion to explain that the manifesto was not supposed to apply to the United States. Now France and Germany have acted on the suggestion, and taken a step towards what is in effect a continental customs agreement. It may be extended. France is now preparing to negotiate with Belgium. And enthusiasm in the United States is distinctly less. Yet France is only exercising her right to apply the protective principle which we consider so salutary for the United States.

Back of the whole discussion, of course, is the issue of the war debts. France has failed so far to secure terms from the United States that satisfy her and make her willing to ratify an agreement to pay. She may have made up her mind that if she cannot get the modification she thinks she deserves, American business-to the extent that it is carried on in France-must help her to pay the charges by bearing a larger share of the inevitable higher taxation which she must face.

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proposal of a general agreement to outlaw war and in the Swedish contention, courageously and candidly put, that the Big Powers were endangering peace by arrogating to themselves private discussion of the great questions most likely to brew trouble. To this the answer, of course, is that these are questions that most vitally concern the Big Powers and unless they can reach an agreement no other nation's opinion can have determining weight. And to Poland, German delegates unofficially replied that her scheme is a move to get the eastern frontiers between Poland and Germany safeguarded. Poland sees France coming to an understanding with Germany, and is worried. But Germany has agreed in the Locarno pact not to make war on Poland, and "that is enough."

Germany made the first dramatic move for the Big Powers, by declaring that she would accept the clause in the statutes of the Permanent Court of International Justice at the Hague calling for compulsory arbitration of disputes. The first of the large nations to assent to this clause, Germany has set an example which the others will have to consider.

M. Briand, now Foreign Minister of France, many times Premier, and veteran statesman at the League, followed with two impassioned addresses on peace. Stirring his hearers with the force of his unmatched eloquence, he declared that the idea-even the wordof peace has mystical force, and that through the League peace has come to stay. (No mention of Morocco, Syria, or the troubles between Italy and Jugoslavia.) By the time he had finished, there was little memory of what Dutch, Polish, or Swedish speakers had said. Just as, until she develops a general like Foch, no little nation has much chance to win a war, so none of the little nations is likely to win an oratorical contest at Geneva until one of them develops an orator like Briand.

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has become as old-fashioned as the oxcart. Indeed, materialism may almost be said to have ceased to have any meaning, because it is hard to know what meaning to give to matter. The world as it is seems to have little relation to the world as it seems to be. To one not accustomed to think in terms that are the commonplace of the physicist, modern scientists speak as strange a language as ever was employed by mediæval schoolmen.

At a recent session of the British Association for the Advancement of Science Sir Oliver Lodge, who is most popularly known for his speculations about life after death, but who has an honored record as a man of science, having been professor of Physics at the University College, Liverpool, Romanes Lecturer at Oxford, and President of the Mathematical and Physical Section of the British Association and President of the Physical Society of London, gave his view or theory of the composition of the universe. He pictured all the space as filled with a substantial fluid, transmitting waves and constituting the seat of electric and magnetic fields. Electrons he supposed to be interruptions in the flow of this fluid, setting up strains. Thus matter is simply composed of the strains in this universal fluid ether. In a special article in the New York "Times" Dr. Michael I. Pupin, Professor of Electro-Mechanics in Columbia University, has taken issue with Sir Oliver Lodge. He declares in it that all experiments to verify the existence of such a dense, all-permeating ether, in violent motion, have failed. In its place Professor Pupin presents the theory of the existence of an ultra material substance which may be called the electrical flux with points of convergence which are electrons.

To the ordinary man or woman who has simply heard about electrons, takes on faith the statement that excited electrons are what transmit and amplify the sound that is heard in a radio set, but has not the trained imagination to see electrons in constituent parts of an office building or a baby, these discussions seem to take for granted an invisible and intangible world of which the world that we see is but the outward appearance.

In these days faith and science are converging. Indeed they seem to be but two aspects of the same working of men's minds. Of course science is at war with dogma; but so has always been real faith. There have been men of faith who have been dogmatic; but there have also been dogmatic men of science. They have been men of faith and men

The Outlook for

of science not because of their dogmatism, but in spite of it.

And as science approaches what seems to be the domain of faith and as faith approaches what seems to be the domain of science, it is becoming clear that the old problems of theology and the new problems of science are much alike. Are we in this new world of science after all only what the old theologians condemned us to be, mere creatures of an arbitrary will destined to a fate over which we have no control, saved or damned as a power not ourselves may determine? What the old theologians called Predestination the modern scientist calls the Mechanistic Theory of the Universe. Theologians have rebelled against the idea that man is but clay in the hands of an Almighty Potter. And now scientists are rebelling against the idea that man is nothing but a mechanism. Professor Henry Norris Russell, Director of the Observatory at Princeton University, has written a book just issued by the Yale University Press on "Fate and Freedom." He approaches these questions not as a theologian but as a scientist. He believes in the mechanistic theory of the universe; but in spite of it he believes in man's freedom. And his faith in man's freedom is the faith that he employs as a scientist.

But that is another story, and we shall keep it for another time.

The Funicular and the Forester

TH

HE chiefs of the United States Forest Service, from Pinchot to Greeley-only Graves intervened-were discussed around a luncheon table one day. A man who had worked under all three of them contrasted Greeley with Graves. "Greeley," he said, "has more sheer ability in originating things, but he does not take advantage of what other men know."

"As I understand you," said another member of the group, "Greeley has more initiative but less referendum."

There are times when one must give thanks for that lack of "referendum.” Such a time is the present, when Colonel Greeley, over the protest of some of those who would have had him refer to them, has vetoed a proposal to build a funicular road to the summit of Mount Hood,

"The forest chief's mandate," writes one of the protestants, "imperial over a domain of 160,000,000 acres, was handed down in a letter to the Pacific Northwest District Forester following

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"The overlord of a domain vaster than many monarchs rule," continues the protest, "has spoken."

Yes, he has spoken; and the people of the United States should give thanks for Colonel Greeley's lack, in this case, of "referendum." Some citizens wanted

the thing done-it would "attract tourists." Some officials in the Service wanted it done, apparently-it was the kind of thing which they regarded as "progress."

But the Forester has spoken, and in words of wisdom. "I believe it necessary," he wrote, "to move slowly and cautiously in entering scenic and beautiful areas of National Forests with mechanical forms of transportation when economic resources or the requirements of inter-community traffic do not compel it. I believe that . . . the Forest Service should deliberately preserve some parts of our most attractive mountains from development. At the most we will have none too many of them a few decades from now. Under such reservations we

Mount Hood, Oregon will do well to include, when we can, natural features which have a hold upon public sentiment as objects of veneration."

Let us hope that this pronouncement is, as those who would have been referred to fear, "the Monroe Doctrine of our public timberlands."

almost every advance in the air is marked by the loss of its explorers or its scientists. Yet they would be the last to request that the advancement of the cause for which they gave their lives be retarded.

Hazardous flights should not be prohibited, but they should be attempted only after careful study by experienced personnel with the best of modern equipment and for a definite

Progress Not Safety- purpose. First

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WO striking sentences from editorials in English papers are to the point in the discussion as to restricting or regulating air "stunts" and transoceanic flights. One expresses doubt as to the possibility or desirability of "legislating against human courage; " the other says: "Legislation cannot curb man's courage, but the weight of general opinion may cool a foolhardy man's ardor."

To these may be added comments on the present situation in a statement made by Lindbergh through the Associated Press:

The result of total restriction might be compared to the effect on aviation in general had legislation been enacted against all flying during the first few years following the flight of the Wright brothers when, hour for hour, any flight was more dangerous than transoceanic flying is at present.

The pioneering and developing of

It is evident that public opinion is already at work to discourage mere recklessness. The loss of Old Glory as we write it is reported that the wreck of the plane has been found at sea with no trace of the three members of her crew, Bertaud, Hill, and Payne; the disappearance of Redfern on his South American flight; the loss of the St. Raphael and deaths of Minchin, Hamilton, and the Princess Lowenstein-Wertheim; the loss of the Canadian plane Sir John Carling with Tully and Medcalf, and the fact that, in all, this summer twenty flyers, including two women, have lost their lives in transoceanic flights or in connection with such flights-all these tragic events have brought out strong expressions of disapproval. The remedies proposed range from legislation by Congress to establish governmental power to restrain and forbid down to specific criticisms such as restricting ocean flights to seaplanes, requiring planes on over-ocean flights to have more than one motor, and insisting on

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radio equipment and small boats for inflation.

As a result of the agitation several flights have been cancelled or postponed.

The prizes that led to most of these adventures may not be the best way to promote sound aviation, or even to advance it at all. Unquestionably some

of the aviators, swept away by the excitement of the Lindbergh and Chamberlin and Byrd achievements and anxious for the victor's reward, started overconfidently with too little training and too little testing of their machines. The list of names of the dead is one to fill American hearts with regret-but it is also one to make them proud. We all can extend the deepest sympathy to families bereft. But neither they nor we can afford to let these unavoidable tragedies lead to discouragement of aviation. President Coolidge and Secretary Hoover have indicated that they recognize this fact.

It is reasonable to require official inspection of planes, care in granting pilots' licenses, and measures to prevent obviously wild and foolish "stunts," but it is not in the interest of progress to debar competent airmen from undertaking everything that an official might consider dangerous.

Through failure no less than through success, something is learned. Experimenting must go on. To retard it would be to run the risk, by cowardly evasion of the issue, of even greater waste of life. For the development of aviation must and will go on. The quickest way to make aviation as safe as possible is to encourage experiment and trial. That

is the only way to give inventive genius its chance to improve and perfect airplanes.

To this the reply from some quarters will be that preservation of life is more important than adventurous testing of new powers. But the reverse is the truth. Courageous adventure for purposes worth while is more important than safety of life.

Danger is at the bottom of all heroism. The spirit of adventure and high accomplishment must not be checked. It has been and is one of the finest traits of human accomplishment and to it we owe much of the advance of knowledge and civilization.

Life must be safeguarded, but that high emprise which sends men and women upon dangerous quests must not be hindered. The taking of "long chances" must be discouraged, but not sternly discouraged, because it has been by the taking of "long chances" that

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Let others praise brave men of arms, markable conversation-some of it tableGreat monarchs and old bishops

sainted;

I'll celebrate the simpler charms
Of men who knew not war's alarms,
Who merely talked, wrote, sang or
painted.

I

-Biographia Poetica.

SPEAK of him as a humorist be

cause the encyclopedia-or, rather, the encyclopedia which I frequently consult-so calls him. He was really by vocation an English divine, by avocation a witty writer and table-talker. Now good table-talk, skillfully reported, forms one of the most entertaining departments of literature. In testimony whereof it is sufficient merely to mention Boswell's Life of Johnson. But it is a rare art, now fallen somewhat into desuetude, partly because in these speedy days we have little time for talk, and partly because the genus Boswell, as a literary plant, appears to be nearly extinct. Some have gone so far as to assert that it has bloomed only once in the whole history of literature.

There is that famous passage of Macaulay's, for example:

Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets, Shakespeare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes not more decidedly the first of orators than Boswell is the first of biographers. He has no second. He has distanced all his competitors so decidedly that it is not worth while to place them. Eclipse is first, and the rest nowhere.

to

That Macaulay, an Englishman, should have compared Boswell Eclipse is not surprising. Eclipse was the name of the most famous horse that ever ran on English turf. Foaled in 1764 on the day of an eclipse of the sun, he was never beaten, and in his first race his owner won enormous odds by prophesying that the result of the race would be "Eclipse first, and the rest nowhere."

Great as Boswell's place is, however, Macaulay's estimate that the rest are nowhere is a little rhetorical. Without Xenophon or Plato we should have no Socrates, nor without Matthew, Mark, and Luke should we have the most re

talk-that ever fell from the lips of man.

But my preface bids fair to outrun my subject. So let me abruptly say that the forgotten humorist of whom I started out to speak is the Reverend Sidney Smith. He was born thirteen years before the death of Dr. Johnson and next to the great lexicographer was probably the best table-talker that the English-speaking race has so far produced, the only possible exception being

the twenty-sixth President of the United States. In common with Dr. Johnson the witty Canon of St. Paul's possessed not only a genius for good talk, but cer tain other characteristics, such as a strong but clumsy body, moral courage based on commonsense, a love of good food, a hatred of the iniquities of taxation, and a satirical attitude towards American culture. A little more than a

hundred years ago Sidney Smith was widely and bitterly known in the United States because of the following passage from an article he wrote for the "Edin burgh Review."

In the four quarters of the globe who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue? What does the world yet owe to American physicians or surgeons? What new substances have their chemists discovered? or what old ones have they analyzed? What new constellations have been discovered by the telescopes of Americans? What have they done in the mathematics? Who drinks out of American glasses? or eats from American plates? or wears American coats or gowns? or sleeps in American blankets? Finally, under which of the old tyrannical governments of Europe is every sixth man a slave, whom his fellow creatures may buy and sell and torture?

This passage is worth reprinting, no as an example of humor-though it i witty-but because its substantial trut affords a standard by which we may modestly measure the improvement w have made since it was written in 1820

Another passage in the same "Edin burgh Review" article deserves recalling not because it is, like the preceding que

September 21, 1927

tation, amusingly archaic, but for the reverse reason—it prophesies evils which Americans are only too conscious of suffering to-day:

David Porter and Stephen Decatur are very brave men; but they will prove an unspeakable misfortune to their country if they inflame Jonathan into a love of naval glory, and inspire him with any other love of war than that which is founded upon a determination not to submit to serious insult an injury.

We can inform Jonathan what are the inevitable consequences of -being too fond of glory: Taxes upon every article which enters into the mouth, or covers the back, or is placed under the foot-taxes upon everything which it is pleasant to see, hear, feel, smell or taste-taxes upon warmth, light and locomotion-taxes on everything on earth and the waters under the earth -on everything that comes from abroad or is grown at home-taxes on the raw material-taxes on every fresh value that is added to it by the industry of man-taxes on the sauce which pampers man's appetite and the drug that restores him to health-on the ermine which decorates the judge and the rope which hangs the criminalon the poor man's salt and the rich man's spice on the brass nails of the coffin and the ribbons of the brideat bed or board, couchant or levant, we must pay. The schoolboy whips his taxed top-the beardless youth manages his taxed horse, with a taxed bridle, on a taxed road:-and the dying Englishman, pouring his medicine. which has paid 7 per cent, into a spoon which has paid 15 per cent, flings himself back upon his chintz bed, which has paid 22 per cent, and expires in the arms of an apothecary, who has paid a license of a hundred pounds for the privilege of putting him to death. His whole property is then immediately taxed from 2 to 10 per cent. Besides the probate, large fees are demanded for burying him in the chancel; his virtues are handed down to posterity on taxed marble; and he is then gathered to his fathers, to be taxed no more.

Rather good this, for a clergyman of the Church of England who was about to enter upon what Mr. H. L. Mencken would call the dull stupidities of the Victorian era. Dean Inge himself could hardly do better. While I am in the very act of transcribing this lively warning of Sidney Smith's, my morning paper tells me that our own Government has a surplus of several hundred millions acquired by taxation and is in a quandary about what to do with it. One way out of the difficulty might be to use it in hiring more tax collectors.

That is exactly what the Canon of St. Paul's prophesied would be the result in republican America if its citizens permitted their Government to imitate the taxing propensities of monarchical Britain.

I have given so much space to Sidney Smith's powers of satire that little room is left to touch upon that genial humor which made him so welcome a social companion. It was he who shocked an elderly and conventional lady parishioner by answering her complaint of the heart with the original but now familiar remark that he proposed to "take off his flesh and sit in his bones"; who defended Macaulay's sometimes interminable talk by saying that its brilliance was heightened by "occasional flashes of silence"; who, when a small girl in his presence stroked the shell of a turtle in order, as she said, to please it, retorted, "Why, child, you might as well stroke the dome of St. Paul's to please the Dean and Chapter." One of his intimate friends was Sir James Mackintosh, the historian, of whom Macaulay said: "In his most familiar talk there was no wildness, no inconsistency, no amusing nonsense, no exaggeration for the sake of momentary effect. His mind was a vast magazine, admirably arranged. Everything was there; and everything was in its place. His judgments on men, on sects, on books, had been often and carefully tested and weighed, and then had been committed, each to its proper receptacle, in the most capacious and accurately constructed memory that any human being ever possessed." Sidney Smith greatly admired this remarkable intellect but could not resist poking a little fun at it, as he did in a letter to a friend they had in common:

It struck me last night, as I was lying in bed, that Mackintosh, if he were to write on pepper, would thus describe it:

"Pepper may philosphically be described as a dusty and highly-pulverized seed of an Oriental fruit; an article rather of condiment than diet, which, dispersed lightly over the surface of food, with no other rule than the caprice of the consumer, communicates pleasure, rather than affords nutrition; and, by adding a tropical flavor to the gross and succulent viands of the North, approximates the different regions of the earth, explains the objects of commerce, and justifies the industry of man."

These are obvious trifles, of course, but they may serve to call attention to an American book, long since out of print, a copy of which lies before me as I write. It is a memoir of Sidney Smith,

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The

with selections from his writings, by Evert A. Duykinck and published in New York in 1856 by J. S. Redfield. Who the publisher was I do not know. He has left no business heirs. author was a well-known man-of-letters, a collector and amateur, in his day. His house in Clinton Place is said by a contemporary- William Allen Butler, the author of "Nothing to Wear"-to have been crammed with books from basement to attic, a collection "especially rich in English drama," and was a rendezvous for book lovers. The value of this collection may be verified by the curious to-day, for it was left by its owner to the Lenox Library and now presumably forms a part of the noble New York Public Library.

That Duykinck's memoir of Sidney Smith was highly esteemed by competent judges is indicated if not proved by the fly leaf of the copy I own which was once owned by Edward Everett and presented by him to Lady Holland, Sidney Smith's daughter. This fly leaf bears, in faded ink this autographic inscription

Lady Holland

with the kind regards of
Edward Everett

Boston 7 April 1857

Edward Everett was one of the most polished orators and cultivated scholars that this country has produced. He was successively a Unitarian preacher, professor of Greek at Harvard, editor of the "North American Review," Member of Congress, Governor of Massachusetts, Minister to England, President of Harvard, Secretary of State, United States Senator, and candidate against Lincoln on the "Bell and Everett" ticket of the Whigs in the epochal election of 1860. An ardent Union man, however, he supported Lincoln in 1864 and headed the Massachusetts Republican electoral ticket of that year.

It is perhaps not surprising that the only encyclopedic reference to Duykinck that I have been able to find is in the "Century Dictionary of Names," for he was not even a member of the most famous New York literary club of his day-which calls to mind the epitaph proposed by a French wit for an ambitious but unpopular fellow poet:

Ci Piron; il ne fut rien,
Pas même Académicien.

But that the names of Sidney Smith and Edward Everett are little more than encyclopedic titles to the present generation is a melancholy instance of the ephemeral character of literary reputations.

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