HERE are diseases of the state as well as of the human body. Such a pestilent fever as that of the Ku Klux Klan is sure to be followed by reaction. Alabama has suffered from this pestilence, and is now on the way to recovery.

The theory that the way to make a community moral is to violate its laws and make cruelty by hooded mobs take the place of its courts has had its day in Alabama, and its practitioners are now themselves criminals before the

THE WEEK

ing." These are noble aims, but they hardly call for the senseless mummery of the K. K. K. A man of legal and political knowledge ought from the beginning to have known that secret and criminal acts of coercion and cruelty would follow, would have their little run of excitement and political success, and in the end would be repudiated by the law-abiding majority. So it has happened in other States; so it is now happening in Alabama.

Morrow and Mexico

Jury returned over a hundred indictments against hooded "regulators." The Judge denounced "the rule of mask and lash." The "Exalted Cyclops" fled the State.

But the most remarkable change has been on the part of Attorney-General McCall. He has openly confessed membership with the Klan, has resigned that membership, has denounced its cruelties and spoken of its work as a cowardly reign of terror. He seems particularly affected by the fact that Klan methods have driven men out of employment and asserts (wrongly, we hope) that "the State is powerless to cope with this brand of intimidation which carries the sting of want to defenseless women and helpless children."

McCall is now earnestly promising to push the prosecution of the many flogging cases on the docket, but it is said that in the worst cases (the Jefferson County whippings) 115 out of 125 jurymen called were Klansmen. An ex-Klan Attorney-General striving to convince a jury of Klansmen that the works of the Klan are criminal and detestable would be a novel and pleasing spectacle. Mr. McCall's letter of resignation from the Klan maintains that the principles of the Klan were right but its leadership bad. One of those principles, he says, is to protect and preserve Protestantism; another, to preserve and protect the Anglo-Saxon race; another, to produce "tall men, sun-crowned, who damn treacherous flattery without wink

American Ambassador to Mexico, reached his post General Arnulfo Gomez -the candidate for President who led the late revolt against the Calles Government-escaped across the border into Guatemala. His wife's family owns a ranch near the frontier, and it was said he evaded the thousands of soldiers and armed peons pursuing him and sought refuge there. So with his associate, General Serrano, executed-the movement which he headed ends in rout.

The story of how Federal officers and troops killed Serrano casts a disturbing new light on conditions in Mexico. Evidently they murdered him without even a court martial, entering his home and shooting him out of hand. José Elguero, leading editorial writer of the "Excelsior" of Mexico City, expelled from the Mexican capital, said in an interview at San Antonio, Texas, that the slayers not only shot but stabbed and beat and tortured Serrano, and that they acted under orders from General Alvaro Obregon, formerly President and now the only candidate for the office to succeed Calles.

Furthermore, reports of a split between Calles and Obregon have come from Mexico City through citizens of the United States arriving at San Antonio.

The accuracy and meaning of all the conflicting accounts of affairs in Mexico are impossible to estimate. We have reason to be glad that an Ambassador of the cool judgment and international ex

perience of Mr. Morrow is in charge of the interests of the United States. He faces an emergency as difficult as any envoy from Washington has had to meet.

From New York to New York

N aviation there are records and records. Some are for wondrous feats; others, for serious well-planned work. Lindbergh completed on October 23 his tour of 22,350 miles in his tried and true partner, the Spirit of St. Louis. He was cne minute late in the final flight from Philadelphia to Mitchel Field, New York, and in his eighty-two voyages through all the forty-eight States he was just once delayed by fog. Not Lindbergh luck, but Lindbergh promptness, skill, and accuracy account for this achievement. Now the famous "We" will be divided before long, the plane to take its place in the Smithsonian, the aviator to continue to help the cause of aviation in whatever way seems best.

The plan of the long educational journey was adopted to make people everywhere realize that aviation is no longer a sport, but a business; that modern airplane equipment may be depended upon to do steady, regular work, and that aviation can be made a definite, timed, means of transportation.

Incidentally, Lindbergh's offhand, modest talks have made personal friends for him among many thousands who have admired his conduct and now like him both as man and as aviator. He made 147 speeches and about as many parades this was his hard work; the flights were play.

"Safe as a railroad train," said Mr. H. F. Guggenheim, head of the Guggenheim Fund for Promotion of Aeronautics, which made this long tour possible. And by that he meant that this flight was planned to run on schedules that could be observed, in a plane that was made and kept safe for its pilot, so that it reached each city at 2 P.M. as promptly as the railway trains kept to their time-tables.

The tour increased public interest in

three ways, Assistant Secretary MacCracken points out: by stimulating interest in the air mail-one evidence is a very large increase in pounds of mail carried; by encouraging cities to build. or improve airports; by showing that present-day air equipment is sound and trustworthy.

Fight Films

RIZE-FIGHTERS can

PRIZE-FIGE

travel freely

about the country. A match between the champion heavyweight of the world and the former champion may be staged in a great arena at Chicago and thousands of people may legally attend the spectacle. But a Federal law prohibits the transportation of the representation of that prize-fight in movingpicture films.

What sinister spirit is there in a "fight film" that makes it so much worse than the products of child labor?

That it is Constitutional to prohibit inter-State commerce in fight films is well established by decisions in the United States Supreme Court. The question is not whether it is Constitutional, but whether it is wise. How did such a law ever come to pass?

It is about fifteen years old. At that time prize-fighting had sunk. to a very low estate. So obnoxious had the socalled sport become that in most States it was illegal. Nevada was a State in which it was still permitted, and there was staged the battle between Jeffries and Johnson-white man against black. Circumstances had made this match a focus of bitter racial animosity. There was no such regulation of professional boxing as there is today. The laws of the States that prohibited boxing were a real expression of prevailing sentiment throughout the Nation. Under those circumstances, a Federal law prohibiting inter-State transportation of fight films was virtually inevitable. To prohibit prize-fighting in a State and then to let films picturing a fight be shown would be thoroughly inconsistent. The States. themselves are powerless to exclude such

films by State law. Inter-State trans

portation is not within the powers of the State. That comes under the regulation solely of the Federal Government.

So the Federal law was passed. As a consequence, partly of the law but more especially of the public sentiment that put the law on the statutebooks, there began a movement for box

ing reform. Now in various States there are boxing commissions to regulate professional boxing contests. Though there are many evils yet connected with the professional prize ring, the so-called sport is on a basis very different from that of fifteen years ago. And yet the Federal law forbidding the inter-State transportation of fight films remains on the statute-books and is enforced. It is certainly open to debate whether the law should not now be modified. Films of boxing matches conducted under regulation should, it would seem, be admissible to States in which regulated boxing itself is legal.

No Man's Land in Asia

HINA seems to be again a chaos with

CH

all signposts down. The apparently comprehensible line-up of southern Nationalists against northern militarists, which gave Americans some hope of a clear-cut issue between Canton and Peking, has vanished. In its place is a hurly-burly of local scraps.

Chang Tso-lin, of Manchuria, has evidently beaten back Yen Hsi-shan, of Shansi, from the northern capital. Feng Yu-hsiang-Yen's supposed ally—is reported to have invaded part of his province. Meanwhile, in the central provinces the Nanking Government is sending an expedition up the Yangtze River against General Tang Shen-tse, the "war lord" at Hankow, suspected of bargaining with Chang and the northern alliance of chieftains. And in the south there are rumors of disorders at Foochow and piracy around Canton.

At the same time Great Britain has withdrawn the larger part of her emergency force, which she concentrated in and around the International Settlement at Shanghai, leaving only about 6,000 out of her total of 20,000 troops. The remainder, with the American, French, and Japanese detachments, are evidently enough to assure safety to the foreign

residents.

before the Acropolis is, of course, a matter of conjecture; but Pausanias described it glowingly, and there is probably no place in the world so rich in possibilities. History and art memories abound in the records of the place. One "restoration" of the Agora-just how fanciful we do not know-shows it crowded with temples, columns, libraries, and statues. It existed centuries before classical Greece came into existence.

In this case the preparation is a large part of the undertaking. It is this which has held longing archæologists at bay. Several thousand people live on the present surface; 450 separate pieces of property have to be bought. Professor Copps, of Princeton, Chairman of the Managing Committee of the Ameri

can

School of Classical Studies at Athens, is quoted as saying:

The findings in this district, the systematic excavation of which has been the dream of archæologists since the time of the liberation of Greece from Turkish domination, will probably be exceedingly rich. Small private diggings have assured this. Progress will be slow and careful. We can use no steam shovels. In some places within the area to be excavated the ruins crop out above the surface of the ground, and in others they lie buried beneath thirty feet of earth.

It had been planned to ask American

universities to unite in furnishing funds for the tremendous project. When the announcement of the anonymous donation was published, the press got the idea that all funds needed ($2,500,000 was the sum suggested) would be available from the same source. Professor Copps, in a letter to the New York "Times," has corrected this by saying: "As a matter of fact, the school has received the sum of $250,000 for the purpose of enabling it to negotiate the concession with the Greek Government and to make a beginning of the actual excavation. Beyond this there is no commitment and no obligation."

From one source or another the means to push the plans will be found, and the project fostered by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens will be carried to completion.

aid of Victor S. Yarros, in a book called "The Prohibition Mania" (Boni & Liveright). Professor Fisher deals with this subject as if he were addressing a class of students; Mr. Darrow, as if he were addressing a jury.

Professor Fisher has the air of an impartial investigator; Mr. Darrow has the air of a thundering attorney. Since Professor Fisher is a statistician and depends a good deal upon his figures for his conclusions, he is justly held accountable for the accuracy of his data. It is the two chapters in which Mr. Darrow with his colleague assails the statistics which Professor Fisher presents in the form of charts that are most seriously worthy of attention. Mr. Darrow treats Professor Fisher's figures unmercifully. He points out, for example, that one of these charts is based upon what Mr. Fisher himself says is R. A. Carradini's "shrewd estimate" made "from data of the Federal Government." Mr. Darrow calls these estimates "fictions." Estimates are by no means, however, necessarily fictions, as one who has built a house and gets estimates from a builder very well knows; but the value of such estimates depends upon the man who makes them; and therefore the credibility of these figures will depend upon the faith of the reader in the ability and judgment of Professor Fisher.

With many readers Mr. Darrow's style may be effective. He uses language like a bludgeon and lays about him with vigor. With other readers, less affected by rhetoric, Mr. Darrow's style will be not only ineffective for its purpose but actually adverse to it. A man really sure of his ground does not call his opponent names; but Mr. Darrow (or Mr. Yarros) starts out by classify

Clarence Darrow

ing Professor Fisher with "pseudoscientific advocates." Some of Mr. Darrow's language could be easily paraphrased and turned against him. For instance, he says concerning one statement of Professor Fisher's: "We wonder just what did induce the Professor to write this trash and publish it in a book." So an opponent of Mr. Darrow might quote his statement that there is no appreciable relation between crime and intoxicating liquors, or his statement that the liquor business is easily controlled, and make exactly the same comment: "We wonder just what did induce

Mr. Darrow to write this trash and pub

lish it in a book." Such arguments get one nowhere.

Those who regard prohibition as an outrage upon personal liberty will hail Mr. Darrow's book as a masterpiece; but most of those who regard prohibition as at least a social experiment that has been productive of some good and that is worth a thorough trial will, we think, remain unconvinced by Mr. Darrow's arguments.

It is a joyous debate. It is likely to arouse a good deal of thinking. The worst that could happen to prohibition would be public indifference to it. Both sides should read both books. Those

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who believe most heartily in prohibition should be the most eager to have it subjected to this very kind of discussion.

Humors Across the Sea

A METHODIST with a sense of humor

introduced in the Methodist

preachers' meeting in Chicago recently

a resolution of commiseration with the late King George III and the present King George V. These two Kings, according to the resolution, have been suffering under "the scorpion lash of affliction." The lash, it is hardly necessary to say, has been administered by Mayor Thompson, of Chicago, and his supporters in their effort to eliminate "British propaganda" from the teaching of American history in the Chicago public schools. Indeed, the patriotic endeavor is reaching out to the public library with the purpose of gathering together the "pro-British history books" there and burning them in a bonfire on the lake front. In the meantime, Superintendent McAndrew, on trial for insubordination and lack of patriotism, remarks that "boards of education form the chief obstacle to education in America today."

On the other side of the water there also seems to be a sense of humor in discussing relations between the United States and Great Britain. A debater in Balliol College, Oxford, declared that the danger from America was greater than from Russia with its bombs, for, said he, "the first real danger from America is Americanism, by which I mean hustle, chewing-gum, extreme egotism, and disrespect for law and tradition." But this debater's opponent protested that there is no danger of war from America, for, said he, "Americans are peaceful. They are always marching under somebody else's triumphal arch." And a newspaper, the London

"Evening News," has discovered another

source of danger from America; for, he says, "American pie breeds dyspepsia, dyspepsia breeds restlessness, and restlessness begets a feverish but none the less formidable material progress." Cannot Mayor Thompson take a cue from this and in defense of his country cultivate the consumption of pie in Chicago?

The Unending War for Humanity

Irving Fisher

He should read Herbert Hoover's words: "Even so late as eight years ago we regarded the Red Cross as the signal of mercy and protection from the disaster of war; but today it has become a new symbol, the banner of mercy and skilled protection from the disaster of flood, fire, and storm." Let him and those who have the same notion read also in the latest official statement that "nearly a million persons, victims of ninety-eight disasters, have received

assistance from the American Red Cross during the organization's last fiscal year. Throughout the civilized world, and especially in this country, floods raging over thousands of miles, fires destroying whole villages, tornadoes and hurricanes sweeping over entire States. and death-dealing explosions, combined to make the year one of unprecedented calamities."

Every one knows what the Red Cross did in the Mississippi Valley; but how many remember that, for instance, it helped a hundred people in a railway