The Contributors' Column

FROM time to time inquiries reach this office concerning the sale of the Atlantic. In any and every case we should like to state that such rumors are utterly without foundation. We ask our readers to deny upon our authority that there is a vestige of truth in any such report.

IT is only an occasional leader of men who is able to tell simply and with power the story of his own life. And in America few lives of labor leaders have been so told. Fifty-eight years ago, James H. Maurer was born, of Pennsylvania Dutch parentage, in Reading, Pennsylvania. When six years of age he became a bread-winner as a newsboy. He went to live on a farm at eight; at ten, he became a factory worker; at fifteen, a machinist’s apprentice; at sixteen, he joined the Knights of Labor and has ever since held membership in the ranks of organized labor. With less than a year and a half of his life spent in school, he rose to the presidency of the Pennsylvania Federation of Labor, which he has held for the past eleven years. He is one of the founders and the president of the orkers’ Education Bureau of America, a director of Brookwood College, and has served three two-year terms as assemblyman in the Pennsylvania Legislature.

The ‘Experience of Dying’ was written while the author, J. D. MacKenzie, was on his way to the hospital for a serious operation from which he was fully aware he might never recover. He was a member of the staff of the Geological Survey of Canada. ¶ The very well known author of the Amenities of Book-Collecting,A. Edward Newton, introduces himself to Atlantic readers this month in a new genre, the dialogue — in which a Father talks and a Son listens. Mr. Newton’s play, Dr. Johnson, is to be published by the Atlantic Monthly Press in the autumn. ¶ The quality of an American college town of forty years ago gives color to the paper by Carroll Perry, a son of Arthur Latham Perry, who for long years was professor of political economy at Williams College. It is one chapter from a volume called A Professor of Life, soon to be published by the Houghton Mifflin Company.

At a time when the work of the Quaker Relief workers in the war-wracked countries of Europe is attracting the widest attention, we are glad to discuss non-resistance, in theory and practice, through two complementary papers submitted to us quite independently of one another by Edward Thomas and Edward Richards. Edward Thomas is an American Quaker, who has devoted himself to Quaker relief and reconstruction work in Europe. He writes us that the Quaker Central Executive Office has revised the story of the facts for accuracy, but that the lessons drawn are his own. Edward Richards, unwilling to shirk the dangers endured by his military friends, did relief service in Urumiah, Persia, during the war, because he learned that famine, plague, and invasion had made that the most dangerous spot in Europe. He is by profession a forester, with an office in New York City which makes up logging reports and timber estimates. By creed he is a Quaker who has put his faith to the test.

Lawrence Shaw Mayo is known to Atlantic readers as the editor of that epitome of American yesterdays, the Diary of John Davis Long. ¶ Of the many short stories which Margaret Prescott Montague has contributed to the Atlantic Monthly, many readers have remembered most vividly her ‘England to America,’ which appeared in September 1919. Her new novel, Deep Channel, will be an autumn publication of the Atlantic Monthly Press. About her present contribution, she writes: ‘In the lumber camps all over the country there is a tradition of a mythical character who can perform deeds of superhuman strength. In New England and the Northwest, he is generally known as Paul Bunyan, but in West Virginia he goes by the name of Tony Beaver, and lives up Eel River, where everything impossible may happen.’ Archibald MacLeish, lawyer and poet, is the author of a volume of poems, Tower of Ivory, and many essays and poems in periodicals. Readers will recall how Robert M. Gay, professor of English at Simmons College, rescued from undeserved obscurity Noah’s Wife, in the July 1922 Atlantic.George McLean Harper is professor of English literature at Princeton University, and author of many books on English and French literature, among them William Wordsworth, His Life, Works, and Influence and Wordsworth’s French Daughter.

A member of the faculty of science of the Institut de Zoologie, Bordeaux, Louis Boutan is a French authority on artificial and cultivated pearls. Fannie Stearns Gifford, poet, essayist, and occasional writer of short stories, has been for many years an Atlantic contributor. Frank C. Eve is a British physician and physiologist who has recently attracted wide attention by his original views upon life and energy and the remarkably lucid and striking manner in which they have been expressed. Hitherto his papers have been prepared solely for British associations, and have received no expression through a general periodical. ¶ The story of ‘Art and Tony’ is from life, and came to Katharine Gibson in her work with children at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Sir Frederick Maurice, a grandson of Frederick Denison Maurice, the eminent English theologian, is a major-general in the British Army, was military adviser to the Cabinet during the war, and director of military operations of the Imperial General Staff in 1915-16. He is the author of the RussoTurkish War, 1877-78, and Sir Frederick Maurice: A Record.Arthur Moore has served as correspondent of the Times in the Balkans, in Russia, in Mesopotamia, in Palestine, and in Persia. He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and the author of The Orient Express, a brilliant book of Eastern travel. William Howard Gardiner is well known in naval circles as a serious and thoroughgoing student of naval problems, and foreign affairs. He is author of the paper, ‘A Naval View of the Conference,’ which appeared in the Atlantic for April 1922.

We have been sending Carl Sandburg some of the letters we have received describing ‘Poetry Considered’ in the March Atlantic as ‘dangerously modern.’ He replies : —

DEAR ATLANTIC, —
These tentative definitions of poetry may be dangerously modern,’as you say some of your readers write. But having just returned from a three weeks’ trip in the course of which I read those notations to large audiences at the state universities of Montana, Washington, Oregon, California, the Southern Methodist University at Dallas, Texas, besides other somewhat scholastic audiences at San Francisco, Topeka, and Kearney, Nebraska (a state normal college), I could write a book on what America, between Mississippi and the west coast, thinks poetry is — and I believe I could summon as much specific data, having value as scientific evidence, as any who would put the adverb ‘dangerously’ before the word ‘modern.’
CARL SANDBURG.

Will the Roman Catholic Church convert the Anglo-Saxon, or the Anglo-Saxon the Catholic? Out of many letters following Hilaire Belloc’s paper in the March Atlantic we select the following: —

DEAR ATLANTIC,—
You will be flooded with paper and ink after the article by Mr. Belloc. In their darkened rooms, lodge members who would not read the Atlantic in a lifetime, will have anathemas upon it ritualized for them in this moment of fanatical undercurrents of animus against Mr. Belloc’s church. The battle is not between faiths but between cultures to which faiths are to be subordinate, and with which every race may in time endue itself unless it discovers a better.
It is interesting to note that the English gentry seems to be the objective of the propaganda of which Mr. Belloc is the engaging spokesman. The objective was once the English nobility. In the youth of those who are now grandfathers, Disraeli punctured that propaganda with his Lothair. Why the change of objective? Was the game not worth the hunt? The real England is not where Mr. Belloc and those whose spokesman he is look for it. It is elsewhere. I wonder if Wesley and the Booths and their spiritual forbears ‘beat them to it.’ Mr. Belloc and those for whom he speaks think one Henry protestantized England. They must be left to think so, for they will never understand Tyndale.
JOHN McCARTHY,—
Pastor, Immanuel Methodist Church.

DEAR ATLANTIC, —
Several of my friends and I have been reading with some interest, Hilaire Belloc’s ‘The AngloSaxon and the Catholic Church.’
I do not think the term Catholic as applied to the title and contents of the article is an undisputed or even legitimate word to use. Of course the author is speaking of the Roman Catholic Church, as it is named properly and so called across the Pond, and of course I suppose it is only fair to admit that most writers on religious matters are a;it to beg the question, and to use terms which they think best suit the arguments.
This is only to explain some of my interest in the article. I like your ‘Catholic’ programme. The Atlantic is always the one cherished and valued monthly on my table. More power to you, and the constant satisfaction of work well done.
S. R. S. G.

We plunged deep into metaphysics, if you remember, in February, in a little paper called ‘The Cow Jumped over the Moon.’ It was about ‘the present having no duration, and nothing, therefore, having ever been able to happen.’ Mark that! It was said that the present is nothing but ‘a line drawn between past and future.’ But now comes a philosophic contributor who clears the whole thing up, brings in Einstein, and proves to our unspeakable relief that things can happen!

DEAR ATLANTIC, —
Your contributor from a distant corner of the world throws down a challenge in the February number that is hard to resist.
I accept his postulate that the present is a line, but he is altogether wrong in his hypothesis that the line is parallel with the past and future. Oh, no! No! It extends from the grave of the past to the birthplace of the future. Who can determine its length? As the past is deader’n a doornail and the future is not yet born, there is only the ever living present. Therefore, anything — everything has been able to happen. Who doubts the cow jumped over the moon? Most assuredly not Einstein.
E. S. SMITH.

To print a paper on Russia is to court contradiction. Dr. John Haynes Holmes, the well known Unitarian and leader of the Community Church Movement, referring to Mr. Urch’s article, ‘Bolshevism and Religion in Russia,’ presents certain details of the Congress of the Living Church Party in Moscow from another angle of vision. Dr. Holmes writes: —

I was present at this Congress. So far as I know, with the single exception of my guide and interpreter, I was the only non-Russian who was present. I was admitted through a personal interview with Krasnitsky who gave me a card of admission written and signed with his own hand.
Mr. Urch says (page 403, second column), ‘The priest, Krasnitsky, installed himself in the chair and opened the first meeting with a notable speech.’ Krasnitsky did not install himself in the chair, but was placed there by the delegates who composed the Congress. He presided by the same right and in the same way that any chairman presides over an assembly of this kind. So far as I remember or as my notes indicate, he did not open the first meeting with a notable speech or any kind of a speech. He did not make any speech at all throughout the session, excepting as a chairman recognizes speakers and here and there comments upon their remarks — in other words, keeps the meeting going.
Mr. Urch says (page 403, second column), ‘Bishop Antonin . . . was present; but, strange as it may seem, he was allowed there only as an observer, without the right to speak or vote. He petitioned his subordinates and at last was allowed to address the gathering. Bishop Antonin was present at the Congress, but not ‘only as an observer.’ On the contrary, as a most active and popular participant! He was the centre of interest and attention before the session began and throughout its continuance. He sat well forward, side by side with Krasnitsky and the other officials who had charge of the meeting. He was the only priest in the assembly who addressed it twice. Once he rose and spoke on recognition of the chairman, Krasnitsky; the second time, so far as I was able to judge, he spoke at the request of certain members of the gathering. Both times when he finished speaking, the whole assembly rose, as though in rapturous acclaim, and burst into song, which seemed to be the Russian equivalent for applause.
Mr. Urch says (page 403, second column), ‘Antonin began . . . But he was not allowed to proceed: the chairman, Krasnitsky, cut him short by fiercely declaring, “ We have thrown off the yoke of Episcopal monks; shall we be bayed by this remnant, this Bishop Antonin?”’ No such scene as this took place while I was present. I saw the two men together in frequent conference and each treated the other, so far as I could judge, with respect and admiration. As regards the utterance with which Krasnitsky is said to have interrupted Antonin’s speech, I can only say that my notebook seems to indicate that the sentence, ‘ We have thrown off the yoke of Episcopal monks’ was spoken by Antonin in his first speech and not by Krasnitsky at all. In this speech, he declared that the Living Church was prepared to rid itself of Bishops. Pulling his robe dramatically, he made a gesture of stripping it off and exclaimed, ‘What is this? Nothing. It is only the heart within that counts.’ On leaving the assembly, I was told by a priest who witnessed the episode that at a meeting, the day before, of the officers of the Congress, one of the younger men addressed Antonin with the title, ‘My Lord Bishop,’ and was rebuked by the old man with the word, ‘Have you not learned to drop that title? I am no Bishop, and we have no Bishops.’
Mr. Urch says (page 404, first column), ‘This man (V.N.Lvoff, former Procurator of the Holy Synod) was present and made one of the most violent speeches.’ Lvoff was present and made a speech which was violent only in the sense that it was a speech of great eloquence delivered with impressive fervor. It moved the assembly profoundly, and reached even me, who cannot understand the Russian tongue. He declared frankly that the church should be cleared of its reactionary elements, that the spirit of progress and enlightenment might control the reformation now under way. The speech, as it was interpreted to me, had none of the spirit indicated by the alleged quotation which Mr. Urch presents. On the evening before the assembling of the Congress, I witnessed a great service of dedication held in the Moscow cathedral church, the Church of Christ the Saviour. The ceremony, which was one of the most gorgeous, impressive, and solemn services that I have ever witnessed in my life, was conducted by Krasnitsky and participated in by some thirty or forty priests. He conducted the service with profound reverence and with a sincerity of spirit which seemed to make a deep impression upon the congregation present. If it is this man’s task ‘to destroy religion,’ he certainly is going about it in a strange way, and this spectacle in the cathedral is one of the most unaccountable that I can imagine.
The scenes of uproar and violence which Mr. Urch describes in his article may have taken place at later sessions of the Congress which I was not able to attend. I cannot dispute them but can only say that no report of them was brought to me before I left Moscow for the west. I have not a doubt that there were disputes and contention, for the Living Church seems to be engaged in a work of reform which inevitably stirs up difference of opinion. Such a phenomenon is understandable, and does not bear any such necessary interpretation as that placed upon it by Mr. Urch.
JOHN HAYNES HOLMES.

Dr. Holmes is careful to state that he does not understand Russian and that his guide and interpreter was also a non-Russian. Mr. Urch is an Englishman, the Latvian correspondent of the Times, and the author of a number of textbooks on English and Russian literature which were used as standard books in Russian schools. The Soviet Government has decided that his books are of State importance, and is reprinting them in large numbers.

To all persons who have been troubled by the orthography of the English language, we recommend these ‘Meditations by a Teacher of English.’