A. Edward Newton is at home in London and Lichfield. When he travels he prefers to follow the footsteps of Dr. Johnson. But — ‘I don’t think we could do better than to go to Norway and Sweden this summer,’ said Mrs. Newton. And so to Scandinavia they went.Governor Albert C. Ritchie of Maryland, in addressing himself so frankly to business men, had in mind, as he tells us, ‘ the tremendous power which the relatively new and almost unregulated forces of credit have placed in the hands of the banker, the political danger both to finance itself and to the nation if this power is not wisely and beneficently exercised, and the duty of the banker to recognize the political responsibilities which this great power has imposed upon him.’ ¶Head of an advertising agency of national prominence, Theodore F. MacManus of Detroit has received high honor from the Pope for his civic achievements. The recent discussion of Catholic policy in our columns prompted him to send us his article, which has long been in preparation. Paul Shorey, for over thirty years head of the Greek Department at the University of Chicago, is known wherever the classics still linger. His present paper is derived from an address delivered at the University of Colorado. Maristan Chapman makes his first appearance in the Atlantic with a story written in and about his homelands, the Tennessee mountains. Largely self-disciplined, he tells us in a letter of the principles which guide his work: —

I try to get soundness and sureness into simple stories of the mountain people as they are. They have strength and simplicity and much fun, selfreliance, and complete lack of self-pity. Mostly they have fun, and no happening of life can disturb them. My object is to show a class of people, too long looked upon only as a class, to be live and knowing individuals; to make their eyes the eyes through which the outlander may see their world, and, thus seeing, experience an understanding kinship with them, and at the same time feel a sense of adventure for himself in seeing an unexplored corner of life. My only effort has been to get the idea across to the outland, and to do this I have only the language we use. This I have bent to the pattern of stories to give voice to a people yet unheard. We have been looked at and talked over, and brave tries have been made to put words into our mouths; but we have never yet spoken.

Edwin Muir is Scotch, of course. A versatile man of letters, he has to his credit a volume of verse, two volumes of critical studies, and a novel, while in company with his wife he has translated from the German several popular books, among them Power, by Lion Feuchtwanger. ¶Apart from her teaching at Smith College, Mary Ellen Chase is, as she says, ‘willfully reminiscent ’ about the Maine uplands, the scene of her recent novel and essays. Alfred North Whitehead, eminent in philosophy as he is in mathematics, has transferred his sphere of influence from the old Cambridge to the new. ¶Walter de la Mare says that what he admires most in Henry Williamson’s work ‘is his intense love of the English country, and all things closely bound up with it—its people, their customs, its wild things, weather, scenery, and mysterious life.’ Rear Admiral Cary T. Grayson was personal physician and friend to Presidents Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson during their days in the White House. ¶From the demands of a busy household Rosalie Hickler saves a portion of the night or day for her verse. ¶More than a generation of Atlantic readers have loved the Reverend Samuel McChord Crothers. He is gone now, but fortunately a few essays remain which he planned to publish and which, through the kindness of Mrs. Crothers, we shall print during the summer and fall. It chances that this first paper in the series is very short, but it is much to the point. ¶The author of the articles on ‘ The Catholic Church and the Modern Mind ’ has already been described in earlier issues.

Morton Harrison has witnessed the scenes whereof he writes. Stephen Cabot, formerly headmaster of St. George’s School, Newport, is organizing trustee of the new Avon School, Connecticut. ¶As Russian correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor, William Henry Chamberlin has had six years of atmospheric contact with the more stormy figures of modern times. Ivor Brown is an English journalist of distinction, following the arts in the interests of the Manchester Guardian.

A friend has sent us for our readers this letter from a Moro chieftain, which has been translated from the Arabic, and which tells its own remarkable story. It should be explained that the Maharaja was taken sick while at work with his men on an American plantation, far from his home.

From Maharaja Jandi to Lieutenant Commander Price of the U. S. N. Aviation Corps, ZAMBOANGA, MINDANAO, P. I.

In the last part of the month of Rabbil Awal, as I lay in a friend’s house at Pundung on Darmdung Islands, I was very sad, for I felt that my days were numbered, and it is hard even for a strong man to die of sickness, far from his home and from his wife and sons. For a moon and a half my sickness had grown upon me until my body had become like that of a child, and so great was my weakness that my legs would not bear me and my mind was often clouded. The hadji had told me that he could not cure my sickness and I had sent for my wife and oldest son in order that they might be with me when my day came. But it would take three days by vinta and five if the wind was not good, and they had not yet come.

While I was thinking these things, I heard far away a little sound. ‘It is a motor boat,’ my friends who were in the house said. But after listening I, who had lived in Zamboanga, said, ‘No, it is an aeroplane.’ The sound grew louder and everyone except my cousin ran out of the house. And then I heard the people shout, ‘ They turn, they turn!’ and out of the sky two aeroplanes came down to the water and stopped there, near the house where I was, like white birds of the sea resting from the storm.

When you and Mr. Worcester came into my house you saw my tears. They came because I was happy to know that I had American friends who were so strong.

But when Mr. Worcester told me that you would take me back to my home in Recodo with the aeroplane I was afraid. I am not ashamed to tell you this for it was only because my body was very weak, and my mind also. It is true that I was with Jikiri before, and if you ask any American officers who knew about him they will tell you that he had brave men only.

Mr. Worcester told me that you were the first of those who drove the aeroplanes and that with you there would be less jumping than in an auto. So I went. And what he said was true. And by the time that a sapit would go with a light wind from Recodo to the dock in Zamboanga we came to Caldera Bay. To me it was like a dream. And the people at Recodo would not believe that we had come from Pundung that morning. But that was true also.

I am in the hospital now. I cannot walk, but the doctor says that I am better. If I get well now I owe my life to you and Mr. Worcester. If I die it will be at home with my wife and children. Money cannot buy these things.

I will remember what you have done until my day comes. My four oldest sons, Talbang, Majili, Sabturani, and Abdurasa, will remember it also because they saw. And they will tell their children: ‘Your grandfather was the first Moro who flew from Jolo to Zamboanga, and it was the American officer, Mr. Price, who took him.’

So that you also will remember, I am sending you for a present a barong which belonged to my family in Jolo. This barong is old and it is known as a lucky weapon. It has never fallen from the hand of a dead man. I hope you will take it with you to America when you go and keep it always. I think it will be lucky for you.

I regard you as my son.

That you may have a long and happy life is the wish of

MAHARAJA JANDI

‘I like the Atlantic,’ writes Mr. William H. Holliday of Philadelphia. ‘Its articles are swept often with the same terrible storms as its great vis-ô-vis and namesake.’ No storm has ever poured in upon us so steady and striking a stream of correspondence as our recent articles on ‘The Catholic Church and the Modern Mind.’ This month we have space for but these two contrasting statements: —

FALLSTON, MARYLAND
To THE EDITOR OF THE ATLANTIC: —
’I’he significance of your Catholic symposium, which you shrewdly entitle ‘What Is Catholic Opinion?’ is, I suspect, far greater than may at first appear. It is not that your temerity has ruffled the Bishop of North Dakota, though it brought the priceless suggestion that ‘our Catholic Church has her diocesan synods, her provincial councils, and, most of all, has the Holy See — that is, the Pope with his counselors — to discuss and decide matters of religion.’ It is not that you have thrown a humorous light on the Catholic attitude toward anonymity. It is not even that you have demonstrated the loyalty and devotion of intelligent Catholics toward their Church. It is that you have proved beyond a doubt that there exists in the Catholic Church, unknown to the majority of its members, even to so well informed a man as Michael Williams, a potent leaven of Modernism. It is that this American Catholic Modernism, inarticulate till now, has found its voice in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly. It is the assurance that — some day — the Catholic Church of America will be American.
But that day is, I fear, more distant than the ardent priest imagines. In the Protestant churches, where every opinion may be freely expressed if one chooses the right church, the forces of reaction seem to be gaining some ground. What chance, then, has a young priest, however ardent, against diocesan synods, provincial councils, and the Holy See!
The only hope of the Catholic Church in America would seem to be the education of its laymen — from without. It is commonly said by Catholics, and with justice, that Protestants are absurdly ignorant of things Catholic. It may also be said, with equal justice, that even intelligent Catholics are extraordinarily ignorant of what is going on in their own Church.
What is commonly known as the Catholic Modernist Movement is a case in point. That movement was embraced by the choicest spirits of the Catholic Church in England, France, Italy, Germany. It reached articulate expression in George Tyrrell, Albert Houtin, Antonio Fogazzaro, Baron von Hügel. It was ruthlessly suppressed by Pius X before the end of our first decade, and it seems to have had little effect upon Catholic opinion in America. How many American Catholics have read Tyrrell’s Christianity at the Cross Roads or his impassioned appeal to Cardinal Mercier called Medievalism? How many American Catholic priests have read Houtin’s L’Américanisme? The cause of religious toleration in America would be incalculably advanced if both Protestants and Catholics knew more of the literature of that movement. No Protestant would fear the bright vision of Catholicism that led Tyrrell on through disillusionment and despair; no Catholic would tolerate the language of the Bishop of North Dakota. Would it not be possible for one of the ‘younger clergy’ — anonymously, of course — to give us the true history of that movement, show us what manner of men these were that feared neither diocesan synod nor provincial council nor even the Holy See, deeming Truth more sacred than them all?
RAYMOND D. MILLER

VALPARAISO, INDIANA
To THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY: —
If the Mississippi River were all printer’s ink and the Rocky Mountains all roll paper and you ran your presses day and night till Boston became a suburb of Chicago, you could n’t get ahead of us ‘ good ’ Catholics: we are the damnedest prevaricators this side of Hell; you can’t catch us.
Our ‘major premise’ is of reënforced granite: ‘The Catholic Church is the only true church; outside its pale there is no salvation.’ ‘He who is not with me is against me.’ Then we have the most complete arsenal of defense: ‘He was a bad pope,’ or ‘a bad priest,’ or ‘an unfrocked priest,’ or ‘a bad Catholic,’ or ‘he left the Church,’ or ‘that’s the human side of the Church,’ or ‘that’s not an article of faith,’ or ‘that’s a bad book,’ or ‘some infidel said that,’ or ‘half Catholic, half Protestant.’
Of course your articles on ‘The Catholic Church and the Modern Mind’ give us food for thought, and you are to be commended and will be commended by some Catholics for ‘giving us a look in on our own affairs,’ a gospel preached by Wilson, a man dearly loved by ‘bad’ Catholics. Personally I did n’t know there was so much ‘infidelity going on.’ Like my having ‘bad thoughts’ years ago, I thought I was about the only kid so afflicted until a blessed (and to me the first consoling) missionary drew me to his knee (it was one of those out-in-the-open confessionals, prie-dieu, Mr. Michael Williams) and said, ‘My child, that’s just as natural as sleep — don’t worry about them.’ And now, like this good missionary, the Atlantic is consoling: I realize I have ‘queer ideas’ in common with a vast number of truth-loving souls, ‘hell bent for election,’ if you may, but sustaining company. I’d rather go to confession to that unknown priest who knows more than his breviary or to good Ben Lindsey than make newspaper clippings with Mr. Williams.
You may do as you like about running your presses: it is probably true that nothing is really lost or wasted, and yet also probably true that everyone must find out the truth of things for himself. Many searchers for truth, like Renan, Anatole France, Dean Inge, and George Bernard Shaw, all ‘renegades,’ went crazy trying to get from us a straight out-and-out answer to some one aspect of the Catholic Church. A man can go ‘dippy’ searching for truth as he can searching for work. Or, as the Chinaman said to me, ‘Same tea, different company.’ And to discover that ‘our enemies’ are ‘a little off’ is one of our best ways of confounding them before the world. If not this, then to show that they ‘lost their faith,’ or had some sex complex (either sex). So we are not overly interested in any statement of apparent facts that your anonymous priest sets forth. But we are religiously curious to know about him personally: who his ancestors were; whether he did n’t have ‘some trouble with the bishop’; or whether he did n’t have ‘a weakness for women.’ If we can get him along one of these lines, his facts and arguments go for naught, and ‘his name is Dennis.’
A. LAYMAN

(What’s sauce for the goose looks good to me.)

A postscript to ‘Pop’s Ploughing.’

MODESTO, CALIFORNIA DEAR ATLANTIC, —
A strange coincidence that I should just have picked up the February Atlantic to read the story of ‘Pop’s Ploughing’ of forty years ago.
A mile and a half from my home is a little white farmhouse with a green roof. It stands a hundred feet or so back from the road, in front of it two large far-spreading pepper trees and behind it a tall and wide acacia. The acacia is in full flower. One scents the fragrance of its blossoms from far off.
Until lately I have passed the little farmhouse every day while taking my morning walk. Who the man is I don’t know. I’ve never seen him. Nor have I ever seen the woman. But often, when I have passed by, two small girls have run out to watch me. With them there was always a large black-and-white mongrel dog. Less shy than the children, he often came out to the road, and sometimes nosed my hand. When the elder child called to him he always left me at once and bounded back to the end of the driveway where they stood.
Owing to rainy weather, my daily walks were discontinued a week ago. Three days ago I passed the house again. The children were not there to see me. The dog came out alone and followed me for a little distance, till I bade him go home.
Two days ago I passed the farmhouse again. The children were not there. The dog came to the edge of the road and sat down to watch me by. I wondered why he took no notice when I spoke to him. A mile up the road I met an old thin woman hurrying.
‘Did y’ hear about them children?’ she asked.
‘What children?’
’Down there to the white house wi’ the green roof,’she answered. ‘The one of ’em died last evenin’.’
’Died?' I exclaimed, ‘llow? What from?'
‘ ’T looks like the dipthery to me,’ she replied.
‘T’other one’s sick, too. I’m a-goin’ down there now.’ And she hurried on.
Yesterday I passed the farmhouse again. The dog was sitting on the front step. He took no notice of me as I went by. A mile and a half up the road I stopped at the house where lives the thin old woman.
‘How’s that sick child?’ I inquired.
‘They’re a-buryin’ of her this afternoon.’
‘What doctoring did they have?’
‘They did n’t have none,’ she answered me.
‘Their folks’ religion’s agin’ doctorin’.’
This morning I passed the green-roofed house again. The dog was lying on the front step, his nose between his paws. A mocking bird was singing, as a mocking bird is often singing, in the top of the acacia tree.
A little way up the road from the green-roofed house I stopped. A dog was howling. A little way farther on again I met the thin old woman. ‘How are the folks at the green house?’
‘They’re a-movin’ out to-day,’ she answered. To-morrow morning I am going to walk a different road.
B. G. A.

To meddle or be comfortable.

NEw BEDFORD COUNCIL OF CHURCHES NEW BEDFORD, MASSACHUSETTS

DEAR ATLANTIC, —
With very much that the Reverend Lloyd C. Douglas writes in the March Atlantic Monthly on ‘Nonconformity, the Protestant Kaleidoscope,’ some of us who are in steady contact with churches of all grades in many denominations find ourselves in thorough agreement. What is said in this article about drifts in the direction of what is purely outward and mechanical among leaders in Protestant churches is none too severe. The noisiness about which just complaint is made also may be a more or less natural corollary of the mechanics.
Only, when Mr. Douglas comes to talk about meddlesomeness, we pause. Curiously enough, within a few months the Right Reverend Charles Fiske, Episcopal Bishop of Central New York, in an outpouring called ‘The Confessions of a Troubled Parson,’ sounds the same alarm in strikingly similar terms.
Unfortunately there are meddlesome societies, meddlesome secretaries, meddlesome ministers, and meddlesome churches. Very often it seems as if the degree of meddlesomeness were in inverse ratio to the importance of the matters pressed. The latest arrival upon my desk is a ten-page appeal to redeem St. Valentine’s day by making it an occasion for sound instruction in social hygiene!
But it looks as if wholesome reaction against all this may have led the Bishop and our Nonconformist of the article into rather too sweeping banishment of social thinking and social endeavor from the sphere of the church and of the minister.
Forever the Christian Church is on the side of the great human values and must defend these under all conditions to the end, or the Church’s position of spiritual leadership is forfeit. It is perfectly true that Jesus upheld the claims of God over against those of Cæsar, as he refused to accept a retainer in a case where covetousness was involved. But it is equally true that without hesitation and with some show of vehemence he condemned those who devoured widows’ houses.
Following this example, there is not a line in the recent joint report of Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant commissions on labor conditions as they prevailed a few years ago on the Western Maryland Railroad that should stir the Bishop’s fears or that justifies Mr. Douglas’s misgiving and strictures. Seasoned opinion is likely to accept the pioneer report of the Federal Council of Churches on the Twelve Hour Day in Industry as both epoch-making and liberating. The very wide-flung education of our generation through the churches concerning the real forces and motives back of armaments would appear to be a refreshing return to the spirit of the Nazarene. If efforts such as these and many more that might be mentioned are open to the charge of meddling, perhaps the Church would do well to accept the epithet. That would be better than to lay herself open to the counter charge of undue timidity or even cowardice.
As much as we admire the straightforwardness and vigor of the Nonconformist, there remains the lingering fear that in his thinking he has not quite escaped that unfortunate separation between the earth and religion, between the State and the Church, between God and the world, that we call dualism, which inflicted so many grievous wounds and left so many rough scars on the life of the nineteenth and preceding centuries.
And it must never be forgotten that social issues are troublesome issues, not to be adjusted without those unpleasant reactions always aroused by creative thinking and constructive endeavor. So far as his own peace of mind is concerned, happy is the man who can keep away from such issues! So there is always a very subtle temptation, often almost completely concealed, to seek refuge in cloisters of our own making and to magnify the importance of what is congenial — in other words, as it has been rather strikingly put, to escape trouble ’by joining the Cult of the Comfortable.’
JOHN MOORE TROUT

Willis E. Collins, of Asheville, N. C., sends us this tale of the poor mountain blacks, told in their own vernacular.

‘No suh, ah’s a city nigga, ah is. Ah doan want no kentry in mine. Dey’s too many ghoses an’ hanted houses in de kentry. Hit’s a maghty lonesome place — de kentry.’

‘How come? What yo’ know ’bout de kentry? You ain’t fotch up no pints yit agin it. Ah nebber seed no ghoses dere. Whatcha talkin’ ’bout?’

‘Well, ah knows what ah’s talkin’ ’bout all right. Ah seed a daid man come to life one night in de kentry an’ ah ain’t been back since. Hit were dis-a-way. Dey were a man pilin’ logs back in de woods and a big log rolled ober him an’ mashed him right smart. Dey put him in baid an’ fotched de doctor, but hit wa’n’t no use. He got wusser an’ wusser, an’ atter a while he died. Den dey ax me eff’n ah would set up wid him an’ ah says no, but a yaller gal says she would, so ah says we bof would. I gib her a little poke full o’ goobers and we wuz settin’ afore de far eatin’ um when all of a sudden de daid man jump out o’ baid an’ yell like he wuz seein’ de debbil affer him. Ah high-balled right outen dat place an’ ah ain’t been back an’ ah ain’t goin’ back.’

‘You fool nigga, dat wa’n’t de daid man wot jump outen de baid. Dat wuz anoder man. He tole all about hit hissef. He come to dat house lookin’ fur a place to sleep. Dey tole him dey wuz full up, but he say he’s obleeged to stay caze dey ain’t nary house fur miles aroun’ and he’s skeered to be out atter dark anyhow. So de boss man say eff’n he wants to bunk wid anoder man hit’s all right wid him. Den he tuk him to a room an’ dere wuz a baid wid de oder man in hit, but dere wan’t no light in de room cep’ in de farplace. So he crawls in de baid an wuz jes’ res’n easy when in walks you an’ de yaller gal. He seed you-uns a-settin’ ’fore de far eatin’ goobers outen de poke, but you want bodderin’ him, so why should he worry? Purty soon he seed you wuz co’tin de gal an’ den he tinks he better stay awake an’ git some pinters. He says you wuz a fas’ worker an’ wuz enjoyin’ hissef a heap, so he jes’ gib de oder nigga a dig wid his elbow so’s he could holp him enjoy de fun, but he could n’t wake him up data-way. Den he kotch him by de han,’an bress Peter, hit were as col’ as ice. Den he seed he were snugglin’ up to a daid man an’ hit kinda skeered him. He jump outen dat baid an’ yell like de debbil, but hit wa’n’t de daid man what jumped up an’ you is entirely mistook ’bout dat. An’ doan you go runnin’ down de kentry. Hit’s all right. Eff’n you fool city niggas would ’have yousefs you wouldn’ git skeered so quick.’