The Contributors' Column

E. T. Raymond, editor of the London Outlook, as readers of his Uncensored Celebrities know, makes a likeness when he draws a character. A diverting artist, he is a fair-minded critic. E. Barrington, an accomplished scholar, has read Pepys to some purpose. There is nothing in this charming comedy that pretty Mistress Pepys might not actually have entrusted to the sympathetic pages of her own Diary. Please do not spoil it by writing to ask whether it is genuine. Simeon Strunsky is the chief editorial writer of the New York Evening Post.

T. Walter Gilkyson is an attorney of Philadelphia. In August, 191!), when he was a major in the Ordnance Department of the A.E.F., the Atlantic printed a description, from his pen, of a trip through the Pyrenees, under the title of ‘French Leave.’ For the present story the same experience provides the attractive background. Grace Fallow Norton is an American poet, known best, perhaps, by the poignant Little Grey Songs from St. Joseph’s, which were first presented through these pages. Frances Lester Warner is Assistant Professor of English at Wellesley College.

Sisley Huddleston is an English journalist of high professional standing, who represented the Westminster Gazette at the Peace Conference. He was a constant attendant at the Geneva meeting of the League — an experience which forms the groundwork of the present article. Donald Grey Barnhouse is Director of the École Biblique de Belgique, a trainingschool for Continental and Congo missionaries, at Brussels. Cary Gamble Lowndes is a banker of Baltimore, a sportsman, and an adventurer in letters. Grace E. Polk is a Probation officer of the Juvenile Court of Minneapolis. Edward Yeomans is about to publish through the Atlantic Monthly Press a collection of his essays on Education. Many of them are quite new to the public, and all have in them the tonic freshness of contagious enthusiasm.

Flora Shufelt Rivola, a new contributor, sends us these verses from South Dakota. The Reverend John Cole McKim sends this thoughtful little paper from Wakamatsu Iwashiro, Japan. Familiar as are her poetry and her prose, Fannie Stearns Gifford has not, unless we are mistaken, published a story before this. Gamaliel Bradford’s present series is drawn from American types flourishing between 1875 and 1900. Louis Graves, a graduate of the University of North Carolina, lives part of the year in his native town of Chapel Hill, the seat of the University, and the rest of the time in New York.

X. X. X. is a serious student of foreign affairs, whose name is a dead secret. Payson J. Treat has been Professor of History at Stanford University since 1915, and is a member of many learned societies. L. F. Rushbrook-Williams, Fellow of All Souls, Oxford (1914), has been for several years University Professor of Modern Indian History at the University of Allahabad, India. He had a distinguished career at Oxford, and has written much on historical subjects. Harold V. V. Fay and a companion are the only Americans who have crossed Siberia from East to West since the spring of 1918.

There are nine new contributors this month.

Mr. Frederic R. Kellogg, a New York lawyer, whose connection with oil interests in Mexico is very extensive and of long standing, requests us to publish the following interesting statement.

In an article in the December Atlantic, entitled ‘The Two Mexicos,’ the writer speaks of the position and rights of American petroleum producers iu Mexico. Two statements that he makes are so unfounded as to require correction. He says: — ‘ The older constitutions had nothing to say about petroleum. . . . Californians coming to Mexico have brought with them their own juridical theory of wealth extracted from the ground. . . . They do not realize the historical ground of the juridical theory native to Mexico.’

The facts are that the laws of Mexico which were in force when the American producers acquired their properties covered the subject completely; and it was upon these laws that the producers relied in going into Mexico. The earliest law — that of 1884 — is as follows: —

‘ART. 10. — The following substances are the exclusive property of the owner of the land.’ (No. IV of these substances is Petroleum.)

The laws of 1892 and 1909 continued the same ‘juridical theory.’ But the Constitution of 1917, as interpreted by tire Carranza decrees of 1918, purported retroactively to annul the earlier laws, to establish the doctrine that petroleum belonged, not to the landowner, but to the nation, and thus to confiscate, without compensation, the rights that the producers had theretofore acquired, not by governmental concession, but from private owners.

The objections of the producers to such a consummation certainly do not need to be based upon any ‘juridical theory’ other than the one explicitly contained in Mexico’s own laws.

Nor are the confiscatory clauses of the Carranza decrees justifiable as a reassertion of any former Spanish Crown rights; for no such right existed as to petroleum — and even had it existed, it could not be revived after its abandonment for thirty-four years, to the prejudice of those who had invested hundreds of millions of dollars on the faith of such declared abandonment.

The other point is that ‘Article 27 asserts the doctrine of eminent domain.’

This has no bearing on the petroleum situation; for by the language of the article, eminent domain can be asserted only if the private individual is justly compensated for property taken, and if the taking be for public purposes. The Carranza decrees have never contemplated one cent of compensation to the owner of any petroleum property that they purported to take over, and there has been no suggestion of a public purpose.

The American petroleum producers are desirous that their fellow citizens shall know the exact facts regarding this struggle, which involves no acts of aggression committed by the producers, but solely a defense against unwarrantable and confiscatory attacks commenced under the Carranza decrees, which decrees have never been repudiated by any subsequent government. Should the confiscatory programme be consummated, a blow will have been dealt, not merely to the petroleum producers but to American prestige and American foreign commerce, the effects of which will be far-reaching and disastrous.

Mr. Clyde Langston Eddy of New York deserves our readers’ thanks and our own for these pertinent and engaging verses.

I WONDER WHY

A word of thanks seems to be owing to Boston waiters, who, several of our correspondents aver, are the chief disseminators of that city’s reputation for culture of a peculiar degree, both of polish and of resonance. Witness the testimony of a West Virginian lady, Miss Sue B. Snodgrass, who writes that, while eating in a hotel overlooking the Common, her party was overcome by a penetrating odor. One diner turned to the waiter. ‘What is that smell?’ — ‘That smell, sir?’ returned the educated servitor; ‘I do not know. My olfactory nerves, sir, are somewhat blunted.'

And another,—a Bostonian descendant of Ham, this, — who, in his attendance on several tables, had conspicuously avoided one customer. ‘ Look here,’said the latter, ‘ why don’t you bring me something?’—‘Because, sir,’came the Chesterfieldian reply, ‘unfortunately, I am not ubiquitous.'

Mr. Bouton’s insistent question, ‘What is the Reason?' — to which a reply is printed in this issue of the Atlantic, — continues to provoke discussion. Most of the letters that we receive, however, are merely emphatic statements of the writers’ opinions. It is, perhaps, worth while to print, as a footnote to the discussion, this discriminating testimony of personal experience.

To THE EDITOR OF THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY,-

I was very much struck with the article published in your magazine some time ago, giving the experience of the writer with some 700 Scandinavians who were leaving the United States.

The unanimity with which all of them declared that they never intended to come back, should give food for thought to all Americans who have the future of their country at heart.

I, too, am going back, not to Scandinavia, but to another neutral country, after more than fifty years’ residence in America. Not so much for myself, but for the sake of my family. I do not wish that my children shall be made to undergo the hardships that are required from one of foreign birth, and be subjected to the prejudices that appear to have become prevalent to-day in all walks of life against those whose parents happened to be born abroad. I was brought over at the age of one year. I know nothing but America. I have been successful in a material way, but I have longed for music, and art, and drama, and the finer things of life, in vain. For fifty years I have stood it, but I do not feel that I am doing justice to my children to bring them up further in this sordid atmosphere. I shall give them the chance to choose. Later they may come back, but I doubt it. The lure of free America is disappearing rapidly in all parts of the world. The last six years have been six years of disillusionment and sad disappointment over the turn of events. Nothing can be sadder than the contemplation of the wreck of our cherished Constitution and traditions. With what pride did we read the history of our country, the speeches of our prominent statesmen, those open and broad-minded lovers of liberty. How hollow and vain it all appears to-day! Is it not a pity? Is it not terrible?

How many are there like me? Hundreds upon hundreds of thousands in this broad land of plenty.

On Saturday next, when my ship shall pass the Statue of Liberty, I shall bare my head to this fickle goddess as I say farewell, but I shall utter the silent wish that some day America may come into her own again.

JEAN MONTIFIORE.

Literary conversations nowadays are pretty apt to turn the corner into Main Street. This clipping from a letter postmarked with the name of a small Western town will interest many readers.

You told me that you were going to read Main Street. I am in the country of Main Streets, and I disagree with Sinclair Lewis at every step. It is all true — but there is much more. The Atlantic says that no one need ever again write a story of these towns. The Atlantic is mistaken. This town is larger in numbers than the story town, but it is the same thing. You would find all of the story true, but so much more sticking out — among other things, the effort to make the High-School building as fine as any in the land. You could n’t ask a better place to speak in than its auditorium for 1600. And such lively youngsters in the faculty, everybody young in the town, no gray heads. It is great fun to hear the Non-Partisan League discussion. Even if it does fail and run them in debt, it will pay in the forcing of them to think. There is no end of ugliness, if you will, but there is no end of desire for beauty. They have begun a park system, this town of 8000, and their streets are wide and paved. And the country! It is full of wonders. Don’t let Lewis make you believe that his Main Street is all that there is of it! Many of our readers clipped, to keep for many readings, Bishop Doane’s poignant verses on a dog he loved, which the Atlantic reprinted last November. To Miss Juliet C. Smith, of Denver, we are indebted for a copy of these companion lines.

CLUNY

BY WILLIAM CROSWELL DOANE

May 24,-25, 1902

Dr. A. McGill, chief analyst of the Canadian Department of Health, sends this suggestive gloss on the recent Allantic paper, ‘Women and Machines.’

This is a very thoughtful and suggestive treatment of one of the most important problems of our time, and could not have been better handled by a man.

It assumes, tacitly, the complete failure of the spiritual element in life to dominate the material; in other words, the failure, not only of the religion of Jesus, but of all other religions, so far as their spiritual concepts are concerned; and in thus accepting present failure, we must acknowledge that it merely acts in accord with what every careful observer must concede. But it remains to question whether the failure of those spiritual forces which have striven to make unselfishness and love the governing motives of human conduct must be accepted as a final defeat.

Twenty centuries is a brief period of time since the advent of the Neanderthal man, who naturally brought his ‘ape and tiger’ instincts with him. Perhaps we must regard the dislocations, treated so fully by Mary Van Kleeck, as an inevitable episode in the progress of the battle between brutehood and manhood; and in this light they call for patient and intelligent study, and need not compel pessimism on the part of those of us who would regard anything less than the absolute triumph of spirituality as virtual defeat. Machinery and the material organizations implied by it, must never dominate man’s world. It may be that the narrowing conceptions associated with, and fostered by, family may have to be scrapped, — as clanship has been, and as nationality is being, relegated to the junk-heap, — in order that man’s spirit may become truly free.

Many considerations point to such a possibility; but that is in the womb of the future. Meantime, it is our duty to keep our eyes fixed on a goal far removed from mere material well-being; a state of manhood in which the material environment shall adjust itself to harmony with the supremacy and over-lordship of universal brotherhood, and every man shall be his ‘ brother’s keeper.’ I cannot imagine that, in such a future, there shall cease to be other than sex-differences between man and woman, or that man and woman shall be mutually capable of replacing each other.

Man and woman are not rivals, but complementary, the one to the other; and the perfected human being is a blend of both. The physical sex-distinction is but one of a thousand points of diversity, each of which must be accentuated and emphasized, to bring into existence a perfected humanity. In our effort to give woman and man social and legal equality, as well as equality in the operating of machines, let us not lose sight of the yet distant vision, when all we dream and hope for humanity shall be ‘flower and fruit’ in the Superman of the future, the race yet to be.

To lose sight of the essential differences of sex and its congeners carries the danger of losing our way and being side-tracked. If this view is regarded as Ruskinesque, such description should prove its value. The world cannot afford to lose woman qua woman.

PLEASE READ THIS

DEAR ATLANTIC, —

You are the only publication which I consider almost a human being, and I am wondering if you could insert this advertisement, unusual as it may be, in your pages.

MOTHERLESS CHILDREN

Well-educated, earnest young woman wants to mother 3 or 4 very small children, who are in actual need of a mother’s care.

The explanation of it is this.

‘Although a woman of almost thirty’ (to quote your own Contributors’ Column), ‘the spring of youth is still in my step,’ and the only thing I really love to do is to take care of little children. The natural solution would be to get married; but, like ever so many other college girls around the country, there’s no man who wants me. And it’s so dreary, waiting and waiting and waiting — I don’t want to waste ten more years. While I am young and have so much to give children, I want to be giving it, instead of just waiting around and feeling bitter.

If you can only connect me with some children who are also waiting, you would make for a good deal of happiness. I don’t want to teach, or do children’s library work; I’ve tried both, and when one deals with children en masse, one gets to be a machine and hates them.

Very sincerely and earnestly yours.

Surely there is a way of meeting such an appeal, that great good may come of it. Think of the motherless children for whom the writer of this letter might supply an otherwise measureless loss. If our readers know any such, for whom some financial provision could be made (our correspondent is obliged to support herself), will they not communicate direct with the editor, who would be very glad indeed to be of service.

As a sequel to a dire paper in the Atlantic on ‘What College Students Know,’ we print the following excerpts from an examination paper in a large Freshman course recently given in a well-known college. To us such questions as are here asked suggest that, if students know little, instructors often teach less.

How the motive of colloquial standards is momentariness.

Explain congeniality of poetry.

Discuss the correlative nature of spirit and matter.

Explain the beauty of the works of God as correlations of spirit and matter.

Discuss the elements of synthesis that contribute toward unity.

It is something to be thankful for, that we don’t have to answer these questions. And perhaps, Reader, you will share our satisfaction when we tell you just how you must answer question number 4 to be marked perfect.

The correlative nature of spirit and matter makes the union possible. Spirit is the active element, matter the passive element; matter is a natural, elementary medium of spiritual expression. Spirit and matter are abstract terms, naming the two kinds of reality as distinct, elemental conceptions. The correlative aspect of spirit and matter is expressed in the terms soul and body. The particular relation of soul and body is beauty, and beauty is the subject of poetry.

In the name of the Prophet, figs!

For the response made by our readers to the Atlantic’s appeal on behalf of suffering and silent China, we are profoundly and enduringly grateful. Not money only, but letters of encouragement, offers of aid, expressions of confidence, have poured into the office in a never-slowing stream. There is still abundant truth in that conviction of one of the best loved of the Atlantic’s earlier contributors, with which he writes,—