tially from that in South Carolina or in Virginia. It does differ, however, in non-essentials.

OTH South Carolina and Virginia, I

Bo

am inclined to think, are somewhat less dry than is North Carolina. Perhaps they are somewhat less inclined, also, to give weight to the religious issue. But they are decidedly more inclined to indulge the feeling that Governor Smith is just not the kind of man who ought to be a Democratic President of the United States. The result of the conglomerate in votes or loss of votes will not differ much among the three States.

If, however, there is one of these States which might swing into the Republican column, it is North Carolina. Queerly, perhaps, North Carolina and her daughter, Tennessee, have always been somewhat less bound by Southern tradition than have Virginia and her oldest daughter, Kentucky. In North Carolina the Republican Party has for years played a wise game of waiting. In those years North Carolina has become, in large measure, an industrial State, with some inclination toward a high tariff. of disaffection for Smith, might easily

Those facts, added to the fact

Plowing up peanuts on a Virginia plantation

today will not continue until election time next year. A very considerable

allowance must be made for inevitable changes.

In the first place, many men who now believe that they would vote the Republican ticket if forced to a choice of that or a Democratic ticket with Smith on it will not be able to force themselves to do it when the time actually comes. Most of them can, however, force themselves to stay at home on election day.

Some others who, if left to their own inclinations, would vote the Republican ticket would fall in line for Smith after the party whip had been wrapped around their shins a few times.

Some others still-and they may be more numerous than appears at this time-would listen to reason as to the quality and qualifications of Governor Smith. They do not know the story of what Governor Smith has achieved. The fault is not theirs. The story, that has been told of Governor Smith is a story of a wonderful personality, not the story of a forceful executive. They have heard a great deal of his ability in a campaign, but comparatively little of his ability in the Governor's office in Albany.

F Republicans should abandon their

few months ago an unwise Republican in Kentucky asked for Federal soldiers to supervise a municipal registration. If some unwise Republican along the seaboard should do a similar thing alon toward election time next year, it would be worth thousands of votes to Governor Smith-assuming, as is commonly done, that Governor Smith is to be the nominee.

Personally, I think that assumption is somewhat violent. Most of the Southern States could be induced to vote for Governor Smith if he were the nominee But they would not now vote for him for the nomination.

One-third of the delegates to the Democratic National Convention can prevent the nomination of any man.

One-fourth of the delegates come from the Solid South.

The difference between one-third and one-fourth is one-twelfth.

It does not take many delegates, ever if they are scattered-a few men in va rious State delegations-to make onetwelfth.

If Governor Smith is to win the nom ination without Southern support, he must have practically the undivided sup port of the rest of the country-Middle West, Far West, and all.

If he can secure that, he can do some

moorings than most people believe possible.

As sentiment now exists, North Carolina would go Republican as against Governor Smith. And Virginia would come perilously close to doing it. Even those newspapers in Virginia which want to support Smith are not quite certain that they could carry the State for him. But, of course, sentiment as it exists

mixing into the Democratic row, they could drive many Democratic recalcitrants back to the reservation. Some measure of certain kinds of meddling would be tolerated. But it is a deplorable fact that Southern Republicans have had great difficulty, through sixty years, in getting out of their minds the old idea. of bayonets at the ballot-box. Only a

can do it only if the opposition which is so apparent in the South does not exis at all anywhere else in the country.

It looks to me as though Smith mus have Southern support to win the nomi nation. And if he is to have Southern support, his champions must be intelli gently about the job of winning a South ern hearing now.

Ο 3

N man-made wings, the culmina

tion of an age-old dream of mankind, The Outlook for November 9 met me on the Pacific coast. Beneath the towering walls that overshadow, the peaceful Valley of the Yosemite, I sat me down to read Edna St. Vincent Millay's passionate denunciation of the fear that makes for the cruelty of mankind.

It is not for me to debate the premises upon which she bases her plea. There are other things in her appeal that move me more strongly than any discussion of the verity or falsity of her logic. Surely, at least, she is right when she cries out for tolerance and understanding. May there be other voices as powerful as hers to arouse the peoples of the world to the love of freedom of thought and to labor for justice between. man and man.

It is strange that so trumpetlike an appeal should end with a dirge. Dirges are not the music which trumpets must sound when they call to war.

As if indeed it mattered the least bit in the world whether the crossings be clean or foul, when of all the people passing to and fro there in the course of an eight-hour day not one out of ten thousand has a spark of true courage in his heart, or any love at all, beyond the love of a cat for the fire, for any earthly creature other than himself. The world, the physical world, and that once was all in all to me, has at moments such as these no road through a wood, no stretch of shore, that can bring me comfort. The beauty of these things can no longer at such moments make up to me at all for the ugliness of man, his cruelty, his greed, his lying face.

I have read these lines again and again in the light of the journey which, in the past few weeks, has carried me from the towers of Manhattan on a great circuit of North America to the shores of San Francisco Bay. As I read the words that Miss Millay has penned I set them off against the pictures that have passed before my eyes, and wonder if, after all, the dark tower to which Miss Millay has come is a reality or a phantom.

Out from New York Harbor sailed the Malolo, heir to all the traditions of

the sea and to that wisdom and courage which has been throughout all time the birthright of those who have trafficked on great waters. The latest and greatest of ships to be launched on the shores of America, the Malolo stands for something more than dollars and commercial enterprise. The men in whose brain that ship was born, the men who wrought her vast structure from iron and steel, the men who found in her the culmination of their ideas of public service, were not, I am sure, moved by cruelty, greed, or lies. There was in There was in them, I am certain, much of that poetic spirit which animates those whose tools are words and dreams instead of steel and iron. Without courage, without vision, without faith, such a ship as the Malolo is never launched from the ways.

ON

N the morning of the third day the Malolo steamed past the fortress headland that marks the entrance to Havana Harbor. Those proud bastions can indeed tell story not unmixed with tyranny and greed. Yet today their tourist-worn ramparts are a memorial to the truth that love of liberty won its battle in the very face of their frowning walls. Weyler's troops no longer threaten from the Morro's portals the clean and growing city that once spread sickness and death along the shores of the Western Hemisphere. There have been many Morros in the history of mankind. There will be many more. But such fastnesses we know are not impregnable.

O

NE of the reasons why Morros fall can be learned in a glance from its cwn towering walls. Across the harbor's mouth there is to be seen a fragment of stone and plaster enshrined beneath a marble canopy. Against that fragment of wall forty Cuban students once stood before a Spanish firing squad. The order was to count off and kill every fifth man. In the line stood two brothers. One counted faster than the officer in command and found that the fatal lot would fall upon his brother at his side. He seized his brother, forcing him into his own place in the line, stepped into his empty place, and fell before the deadly volley. Such heroism is as much

a part of the history of the world as the tyranny that made it possible.

T

'HOSE who know the history of Cuba trace its liberty as much to the courage of three American soldiers who faced the deadly perils of yellow fever as to the courage of those countless men who faced the perils of Spanish bullets. You know the story of those men and how they volunteered to test the new theory that yellow fever came from an insect's bite. You know that without hope of substantial reward, with nothing to gain save what appeared to be an unheroic death from a terrible disease, they quietly stepped forward when a call came for volunteers. Their act freed a whole hemisphere from the fear of a dread plague. They, too, are part of the history of mankind.

A

Two days' journey brought the Malolo to the entrance of the Panama Canal and the history-haunted land that is now but a placid passageway between the oceans. Here it was that there ran the royal highroad that carried the ravaged treasures of South America to the royal coffers of Spain. Along this highroad marched Morgan and his men, bent upon the bloody destruction of old Panama. Through this territory ran the first transcontinental railroad in the Americas- a road that cost unspeakable things in the lives of those that built it. Here, too, the grandiloquent de Lesseps brought the savings of French peasants to fulfill his heroic dream of blasting asunder the continents that God had joined together. With tools inadequate to the task, without the knowledge won from the sacrifice of those three American soldiers, he (Continued on page 403)

T

WO things perhaps contributed

to my feeling of slight disappointment on coming away from the Theatre Guild's production of "Porgy," the folk-play of South Carolina Negro life along the Charleston water-front. It has been inordinately praised; and I read the book when it was published last year.

Certainly "read the book and see the play" is not the best of all possible advice. Instead of enjoying the play more, one is apt to be like the child who is grieved when the story departs even slightly from what is already well understood beforehand. In this case I knew the story could easily be compressed within the limits of the two hours and a half, and I expected it to be magnificently presented.

In one sense, it is. Cleon Throckmorton has caught up the orangesplashed, blue-shadowed colors of Catfish Row and made them serve far beyond ordinary limits of stage settings. Also Rouben Mamoulian has directed the Negroes' singing of the spirituals with a wondrously skillful eye to their dramatic effect upon the narrative. He has directed them much as a grandopera conductor would, catching the precise dramatic pitch of the scenes and carrying them on higher with the music, until several of them verge on positive genius-notably the one in the highceilinged room with the boarded-up shutters and the broken plaster decorations, where the Negroes are gathered singing, while outside the hurricane rises and knocks upon the door with the knuckles of Death.

Higher and higher rises the hurricane, and the music rises with it. On the wall the shadows of the Negroes tower and sway like giants from a devil's lamp. Crash! The door is flung open and Crown enters. Crown, the murderer, naked to the waist. Crown, not afraid of the devil. Filled with ironic laughter over the fear of the Negroes huddled before him. Friend of God. phemer.

Crash!

Blas

The swaying Negroes cower. The music rises higher and stronger till it is like a wail. "Oh, Lo'd hab mercy on me!"

And over against it now Crown, the defiant savage, jeers, dances, strikes crippled Porgy and does a breakdown among the frightened Africans like some evil spirit of the hurricane itself. Color, emotion, and music; scenes of

with

Our Own Theatre List "Broadway," Broadhurst.-Life back-stage in a Broadway cabaret. Done vim, rum, and pistols. "The Road to Rome," Playhouse.-A slightly Rabelaisian take-off on history which might have been a great play if genuine emotion had been substituted for wisecracking. An amusing evening, as it is. "The Shannons of Broadway," Martin Beck. -Vaudeville and melodrama, with vaudeville taking the tricks. "Burlesque," Plymouth.-Back-stage drama in the small towns, with maternal emotion making a success of an otherwise ruined actor.

"Escape," The Booth.-Strung on a thin thread, but the most satisfying play on Broadway.

"The Good Hope," Civic Repertory Theatre. -A slow tragedy of the men who comb the sea for fish and the women they leave behind.

"Trial of Mary Dugan," National.--Evidence turned inside out, in an expert and engrossing mystery murder trial. "Balieff's Chauve-Souris," Cosmopolitan."Mother Goose" under one arm, the "Arabian Nights" under the other. "An Enemy of the People," Hampden's Theatre.-It's bitter; but it's Ibsenand true. "Coquette," Maxine Elliott.-A tragedy of youth and small-town life in the South.

Musical Shows

"Hit the Deck," Belasco.-Louise Groodyand a fast show.

"The Five O'clock Girl," Forty-fourth Street Theatre.-Has nearly everything. "Good News," Chanin.-We haven't seen it, but our friends like it. "The Mikado," Royale.-Our old friends Gilbert and Sullivan excellently represented. "The Merry Malones," Erlanger's.-George Cohan-and everybody dances. "Manhattan Mary," Apollo.-Ed Wynn.

What more?

despair and fear, primitive love and hate; a clear impression of African Negro life lived as a totally separate, untouched thing within our civilization -all these are contained in "Porgy," as well as much more. It is real darky life, of the most primitive sort, as lived along the Charleston water-front, mirrored with extraordinary sincerity and fidelity. On the tragedy of Porgy and the only woman he ever had, Crown's Bess, are strung many poignant scenes of murder and passion, of superstition and fear, of Negro humor and naïveté. Coming from it, one realizes the thin veneer of civilization that coats many of our lower-class American Negroes. Beyond that, one has beheld and listened to a gorgeous thing, worth going to simply for its pastel colors and primitive music.

First of all, frankly, in the acting. Porgy himself does not catch and hold the imagination as did Porgy of the book-Porgy of the goat-cart, who sat silent and rapt all day long, begging and dozing lightly in the terrific heat of King Charles Street; conveying to those who gave him alms a disquieting impres sion, a sense of infinite patience that only half concealed a terrific energy-an energy realized at night in Catfish Row, where life became intense, burning with excitement, and he threw the ivories with the stevedores and fishermen. Sphinx by day; crippled gambler by night.

From the Porgy of the book I received an impression of strength which I did not get from the character as portrayed on the Guild Theatre stage. To me, therefore, by that much the drama loses power.

Beyond that the play that has been fashioned is frankly merely an episodic. pictorial folk-play. The book is followed very closely-except at the endand the dramatic thread that binds the scenes is very thin. Astoundingly weak curtains are only partially redeemed by music and color. Even the "Fifteen" struck by the hurricane bell while Catfish Row waits for the grim warning and the wind starts to rise peters out into a very flat moment. Nothing at all hap pens presumably because, in a book on real life, a hurricane is plenty. In the play, however, one is left wishing for something more; the return, perhaps, a that instant of Crown, or something to point the reality of life as lived by the characters.

To a certain extent, the play is thu afflicted all the way through. Event are not so ordered as to bring abou proper climaxes. At any moment good stage picture is considered enoug to bring down the curtain. Much i thus lost. For whether the spectato analyzes his dissatisfaction or not, it i there. What could easily have been great play of the emotions of Negroe remains simply a colorful folk-tale wort seeing, worth hearing, but not wort writing down as dramatic literature.

As interesting as the play, to me, wa the fact that next to me were two e

Who's Afraid?

(Continued from page 401)

was doomed in advance to fail. The task which dropped from his hands was left for a wiser, though no more courageous, generation to perform.

As the Malolo rose quietly and serenely to the level of Gatun Lake, passed through the severed backbone of the Isthmus, and descended again to the waters of the Pacific, it traversed a route made passable by mankind through something more than cruelty and greed. Greed and cruelty have indeed dyed black the history of the Isthmus of Panama, but its palm-clad hills and blue waters have witnessed dreams and visions that were sheer poetry.

T

HE Malolo lies, as I write, at her dock awaiting the moment when she shall begin her first voyage to Hawaii. Above her spacious decks rises the rugged skyline of San Francisco. A ittle over two decades ago those hills were a flaming furnace. Men and women saw in that holocaust the end of lifetimes of labor and the destruction of all that they held dear, and yet before he ruins ceased from smoldering they had set their faces towards the future and planned greater and better San Francisco that is now more than a realty. A material triumph? Perhaps. But such triumphs are triumphs of the pirit, too. Without the spirit, the tanrible reality cannot be born.

I

WAS SENTENCED in the lower courts of Boston the other day for a larceny offense to twenty days in jail and a fine of ten dollars. The irony of that sentence you will see if you read

on.

In 1900 I was committed to the Concord Reformatory for an indefinite term. Upon my release from that institution I received three dollars and the best wishes from the warden to "make good." But I had no intention of "making good." That well-meaning official might just as well have spoken to the surrounding prison walls.

I was just launching upon a criminal career that covered a period of twentyseven years twenty spent behind prison walls and seven of precarious liberty.

My first burglary offense went to the jury on July 10, 1902. I received a sentence to five years' imprisonment. Upon my release I received ten dollars, a prison suit of clothing, and again the best wishes of the warden to "make good." On ten dollars.

A well-known shoe manufacturer of Boston had a beautiful home in the suburbs of the city. It was broken into at night. I was the candidate to stand trial for this offense. Without a defense counsel to plead my case, I went back to the Charlestown Prison from a sentence of six to eight years. But everything has an end, and once again I stood in the warden's office to receive the State's ten dollars and the warden's wishes to "make good."

Now the average warden has not much sentiment towards his charges. I believe every warden uses the same expression. So our parting was merely a brief formality. Make good on ten dollars.

The money Massachusetts gave me furnished me transportation to New York. The Bowery was my goal. There I met an old pal of mine, a "paperlayer," in the vernacular of the underworld, or, in other words, a forger. Together we let loose a score of bad checks.

1 See editorial comment.-The Editors.

In order to elude the authorities I enlisted in the army. But my career as a soldier ended abruptly with a two-year sentence at the military prison at Leavenworth. The army is a little more liberal with "conduct time" for good behavior. So in a year I received my discharge from that institution.

My liberty was of short duration. The New York authorities were at the outer gates to take me back to stand trial for the bad checks. A visit up the river for a few years under Warden Osborne's administration finally terminated, and again I stood in the warden's office and received my discharge and ten dollars and his admonition to "make good."

I have now become a fifth offender, for my last offense against society cost me a long sentence. I received my discharge the other day. The ten dollars the State of Massachusetts gave me has not as yet given me a new start in life.

Since my release I have done a little figuring. According to my calculation, I have accomplished thousands of dollars' worth of profitable work. For this I received fifty dollars from the States of Massachusetts and New York.

I have not told all this, obviously, with an idea of excusing myself. But it strikes me there is bad management in the way I have been treated.

Once out of jail, I was always up against a line-up that made it practically impossible for me to get and hold a job, because of the prejudice against an exconvict. In one place, the other workmen began taking their coats out of the washroom when they heard about me. I was headed naturally back by society toward crime, instead of encouraged to "make good." That is the injusticeand the fact that I never left prison with anything like a fair balance of pay for the work I had done behind the bars.

I hope that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the State of New York, that are so far advanced in many other things, will make it possible for discharged convicts to get a new start with sufficient cash to make good on.

S

CIENCE seems on the way to solving the problem of economic conflicts between nations for sources of certain vital raw materials with which diplomacy has been unable to deal. Science goes about the task, not by trying to find a way of dividing available supplies, but by creating new supplies.

Oil and rubber furnish two examples. They are necessities about which there have been endless difficulty and dispute. Lately there came news that the German Dye Trust had perfected a method for producing synthetic petroleum. But this alone-despite its interest to a nation of motor-car owners-might not have commanded American attention if coupled with it there had not been a report that the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey had formed a combination with the German trust. This showed that the process was of such practical value that the most powerful oil corporation wished to have a hand in its control and use. By the agreement the American concern acquired a share in the rights for making artificial petroleum, which thus may supplement the resources of natural petroleum the country possesses if they should show signs of exhaustion.

Not content with synthetic petroleum, the Germans have been at work on methods of making synthetic rubber. At the fiftieth anniversary of the German Chemical Manufacturers' Association recently, a speaker predicted that artificial rubber will soon enter world markets in competition with natural rubber. Methods developed so far have cost too much to be practical, but a new method was announced which simplified the process of uniting the elements of rubber found in coal tar. The German Dye Trust has applied for world patents.

If the German product proves equal to natural rubber and as cheap, it will be of great interest to the people of the United States. We use more than half

of the world output of crude rubber, and have to depend largely on British-controlled plantations in the East Indies and Malaya for our supply.

G

OLD accumulated in the United States after the war is finding its way gradually into international use to put the finances of less fortunate nations on a firm basis. Brazil has negotiated a sale of bonds in our markets amounting to $41,500,000, of which $36,000,000 is to go to the Brazilian Government in the form of United States coin. Two gold shipments of $11,000,000 each have already been sent, and the balance is to be forwarded shortly. This is one of several such transactions by which our surplus of gold is being transferred to the credit of other nations, a second recent instance having been the sale of $15,000,000 in gold to the Bank of Poland to help stabilize the Polish currency.

PILS

ILSUDSKI, the Polish dictator, is after Lithuania-so Moscow will have it, but western Europe appears to remain unconvinced.

Poland and Lithuania have been technically at war for some six years ever since the Polish General Zeligowski seized the city of Vilna. The Lithuanians wanted Vilna as their capital, but the Poles likewise laid claim to it. Since it lies on a main railway line and is a junction essential to Polish army strategy, the right of the stronger prevailed

through her Foreign Office that simil reports, current for the past six month have been traced to German or Russi sources, and that differences betwe Lithuania and Poland are to come b fore the Council of the League of N tions in December. Consequent Marshal Pilsudski would hardly choo this moment for a campaign again Lithuania, even if he had such a plan mind at all. And it is to be recall that it was Pilsudski who quieted tr ble on the Lithuanian-Polish front last month, when quarrels had aris over the treatment of Polish children Lithuanian schools and Polish hothea were proposing reprisals against Lith anian children in Polish schools.

MOUKI

OUKHTAR BEY, the newly appointed first Ambassador from the Turkish Republic to the United States, is on his way to Washington. He is said to seek ratification of the Lausanne Treaty rejected by Congress, as the main aim of his mission. At the sam time a contract has been announced for the expenditure of $2,500,000 by the Turkish Government fo American industrial equipment This is to include construction o railroad shops for a new transpor tation line, to open up a rich agri cultural and industrial region o Turkey and connect with the Bag dad Railway.

Nationalist Turkey is renewin relations with America in the mos up-to-date style.

ERMANY has heard again that sh spending too much and too c lessly, and so is endangering fulfillm of the Dawes Plan for payment of damages. This time it is a German] says it, and one in the position of h est financial authority-Dr. Hjal Schacht, President of the Reichsba