James Truslow Adams (‘Shadow of the Man on Horseback ’) is a student and critic of American life and a historian of wide note. His most recent volume was The Epic of America. ∆ ‘Judgment Day in the Hills’ is a page out ol the life of Louis Reed, a lawyer whose clients are the gnarled and knotty folk of the West Virginia mountains. ∆ ‘I am Exhibit A,’ writes John R. Tunis, ‘in the “Play Hard” idea. Competed in several sports in college twenty years ago and have played tournament tennis in this country and abroad. For the last ten years I have been on the sports staff of the New York Evening Post.’

Bradford K. Daniels (‘In the Way They Should Go’) is a pioneer of our time who has carved a thriving ranch out of the virgin forest in the Puget Sound country. Francis Vivian Drake (‘Spring Morning’) served in the British Royal Flying Corps during the war, was wounded in 1917, came to America as an instructor in various U. S. Army Flying Schools, and remained here at the close of the war. He is now a banker in Wall Street, but aviation is still his hobby.

Phillips Russell (‘A Resurrection-Day Dinner Party’) has published biographies of Emerson and Benjamin Franklin. He lectures at the University of North Carolina. ∆ Born in China, the daughter of American missionaries, Ida Pruitt (‘A New Year’s Eve in Peking’) has lived a large part of her life in the land of her adoption. She is head of the Social Service Department of Peking Union Medical College. ∆ After serving for many fruitful years on the staff of the Atlantic,Florence Converse (‘Bread Line’) retired last spring, to our everlasting regret. Charles D. Stewart (‘Tools of Thought’) is known as ‘the Wisconsin philosopher.’ He is that genuine American so universally praised, so rarely met with — a staunch individualist, self-taught and self-reliant. Claude M. Fuess (’The Biographer and His Victims’) knows whereof he speaks: he has lately published a biography of Webster and is now at work upon a definitive life of Henry Cabot Lodge. F. Lyman Windolph (‘A Letter to My Father’) likes to identify himself as a country lawyer. Michael Taaffe (‘The Passing of Tunapu’) has spent the past ten years in Central Africa, where he has been studying the natives and their customs.

Reinhold Niebuhr (‘Perils of American Power’) is editor of the World Tomorrow and a member of the faculty of the Union Theological Seminary. Robert M. Gay (‘The Boojum in Europe’) is Professor of English at Simmons College, Boston. Van V. Alderman (‘Mr. Lever’) is a chemist for a large candy company in Chicago. William Rothenstein (‘PostImpressionism’) is an artist of international reputation whose paintings and drawings have found their way into many great museums and collections here and abroad. He is Principal of the Royal College of Art, South Kensington. ∆ A leader of the American bar, John W. Davis (‘The World Court Settles the Question’) was Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s from 1918 to 1921 and Democratic candidate for the Presidency in 1924.

Senator Costigan answers Mr, Thorpe.

Polemics is not an Atlantic predilection, but we should take our responsibilities more casually than is our custom were we to pass over a serious charge made against Senator Costigan’s article, ’ A National Political Armistice,’ publicly at the meeting of the National Publishers Association by Mr. Merle Thorpe, editor of the Nation’s Business. We quote from the official record of Mr. Thorpe’s speech: —

‘The papers all carried the statement of a preacher in Cincinnati that this is the time to make a change in our industrial system, because, he asserted, there were 500 men who had an aggregate income of $1,185,000,000 a year. Senator Costigan used the same figures in a leading magazine [the Atlantic] and repeated them in a speech before the Texas Legislature. That figure is false. Of that $1,185,000,000 three quarters were in capital gains extending over ten years, and yet we publishers put this stuff out without any check on it and add fuel to the flames. That is spreading a great deal of discontent all over the country about a few men who are making such fabulous incomes.

‘Senator Costigan also stated that there were 2,000,000 children employed in industry in this country. That figure is likewise false. The census of 1920 gave the number as 1,060,000. The reports from the census on eight States in 1930 showed a 37 per cent decrease in child labor since 1920.’

We may pardon a certain heat in Senator Costigan reply: —

Dear Atlantic, —
His glowing commercial optimism chilled by unpleasant truth, Mr. Merle Thorpe, editor of the Nation’s Business, closes his eyes, lowers his head, and recklessly charges the disturbing barrier. Better judgment is expected from men of lesser reputation.
Mr. Thorpe’s hasty accusations may be speedily dismissed. The critic should be accurate. Yet Mr. Thorpe is flatly mistaken in asserting that, either in the February 1931 Atlantic or in my subsequent address to the Legislature of Texas, I specified an ‘aggregate income of $1,185,000,000 a year’ of ‘500 men.’ The precise facts about concentrated wealth are worthy of public analysis, but this particular quarrel must be with another adversary.
Mr. Thorpe’s resentment of my reference to child labor in the United States is also remarkable. In the February Atlantic, having in view the obvious desirability of substituting adult for child labor in modern industry, I attributed to statisticians the generalization that in the United States ‘during the years after 1920 . . . child laborers numbered nearly two million.’ That figure, which is declared unqualifiedly ‘false’ by Mr. Thorpe, is well within the truth. It might, of course, have been made smaller or larger according to the years of childhood embraced.
Mr. Thorpe leaps over this elementary fact and, on the assumption that he is not ignorant, exposes his bias. In effect he charges exaggeration and appeals to the census figures of 1920 with respect to child workers from ten to fifteen (Mr. Thorpe says ‘sixteen’) years of age.
Some limitations of the census data have been explained by the Census Bureau; others are commonly recognized. Mr. Thorpe disregards the army of children, less fortunate than his own, wherein are embraced not only boys and girls sixteen and seventeen years of age but also the untabulated unlawfully employed, and thousands of known workers in the sensitive dawn of life under the age of ten. If, however, we adopt Mr. Thorpe’s method, we need not look beyond the census. On page 64 of the report published in 1924 by the Census Bureau, entitled Children in Gainful Occupations, will be found the summarized census results of 1920, our latest available nation-wide record. Although it is there reported for 1920 that children ten to fifteen years of age inclusive, engaged in gainful occupations, numbered 1,060,058, it is added that in the same year boys and girls in the United States ten to seventeen years of age, engaged in such occupations, totaled 2,773,506.
Leaving Mr. Thorpe in the company of these figures, I affirm the temperate soundness of my original Atlantic generalizalion. Nor may I stop there. I feel bound to express regret that any citizen of Mr. Thorpe’s influence should herald, without heart-stirred sympathy or a plea for correction, even the minimized child-labor figures to which he clings.
EDWARD P. COSTIGAN
Washington, D. C.

Little things in a sailor’s life.

Dear Atlantic, —
Here I am a thousand miles off the coast of Chile bound for Capetown from San Francisco via the Straits of Magellan, and, being off watch, found an Atlantic Monthly. It was the issue of September 1928. The first article I turned to was called ‘A Lonely Log’ by Captain Maude. In his story-article Captain Maude mentions speaking only one ship during his ninety or so days at sea. Of all the ships to speak, it had to be the Mauna Ala of the Matson Steamship Company.
I just came off her to join my present ship. I was quartermaster of the Mauna Ala, and naturally during the night watches all manner of conversation goes on between the q.m. and the mate on watch. The mate told me about meeting the Half Moon and of their amazement at seeing such a small vessel so far from land. Such trivial things of all sorts help to break the long days at sea, and the seeing of the name of my last ship in the Atlantic will of course furnish a lot of material for fo’c’sle stories in the future.
A. CLEMENT
At Sea

Mrs. Swiss Family Robinson.

Dear Atlantic, —
I am very much interested in Herr Ritter’s account of his life on a tropic island — the more so because I lived for several months down-coast in Venezuela in a mud-hut village, which, being almost completely isolated from civilization. paralleled his island in many ways. We did not have to hew and dig our way to comparative comfort, but many of the difficulties he describes so vividly were ours also. I am therefore taking the liberty of offering him some suggestions which may prove valuable.
The best way to keep sugar is in big sodabiscuit tins with tight-fitting lids. If ants manage to gel into the sugar, they can always be got rid of by placing the tins in the sun till they are warmed through. The ants then depart in a hurry. Beds and tables should have their legs set in cans of water or kerosene. Mosquito nets can be hung on four posts, nailed to the corners of the bed, to keep ants from climbing them.
Everything in the storeroom must be shifted at least once a week, so that scorpions and tarantulas cannot breed among them. Coconut water is excellent for the digestion; if a little brandy is mixed with it, it is a stimulant as well as a refreshment. We used soda crackers at first for bread; when they were all gone, we made a kind of shortbread of flour, salt, oil, water or milk. This was bated in the ashes or on a zinc sheet over the fire.
Parrot must be cooked about six hours to be tender; it has a most agreeable taste, either in soup or fricasseed. Turtle eggs must be fresh to be palatable. Shark meat is strong, but better than nothing if dried or boiled with rice. For ant and other insect bites, ammonia. For the acidosis that comes of restricted diet and makes itchy welts on the body, bicarbonate of soda, taken internally and also rubbed on the body when it is wet. And a dose of fruit salts at least, once a week!
MBS. J. A. F.
Baltimore, Maryland

Those misunderstood Puritans.

Dear Atlantic, —
Reading Norman Thomas’s ‘Puritan Fathers’ brought to mind a passage in Hume’s History of England concerning the Puritans, which, in view of the tenets of that philosophic historian, is a remarkable tribute to their influence and his impartiality at once. ‘So absolute, indeed,’ says Hume, ‘was the authority of the Crown, that the precious spark of liberty had been kindled, and was preserved, by the Puritans alone: and it was to this sect, whose principles appear so frivolous, and habits so ridiculous, that the English owe the whole freedom of their constitution.’
Such an achievement should be a sufficient apology, although not a justification, for all of their subsequent follies and iniquities, which are related with such entertaining realism in Scott’s Old Mortality.
Yours very truly,
ARTHUR N. SHELDON
Providence, Rhode Island

A stickler for accuracy.

Dear Atlantic,—
Realizing with what passionate zeal our frontline magazine editors must invoice their con-

tributed copy in the interest of absolute truth. I thought you might enjoy a story which is going the rounds here.
A very conservative old Scotch Presbyterian parson, somewhat of a stickler for facts, and uncompromising as Jehovah, was offering a prayer at an Armistice Day service. ‘Lord,’ quoth Brother MacDonald, ‘we stand with bowed heads, grateful for the sacrifices of our valiant dead, conscious that at this moment our beloved kinsmen across the sea are also reverent in prayer — though, Lord, thou knowest there is a difference of five hours in the time.’
LLOYD C. DOUGLAS
Montreal, Canada

Bill Adams recognized.

Dear Atlantic, —
The other day an acquaintance of mine handed me a copy of the Atlantic Monthly and said, ‘There’s a yarn in that magazine written by a fellow named Bill Adams, and I think that an old sea dog like you might enjoy reading it.’
Well, sir, I thanked him, took the magazine, and read the yarn. The author’s name intrigued me, as I knew a Bill Adams when I followed the sea. Now, after reading that Sailmaker’s story, I’m inclined to believe that the author of that yarn and the Bill Adams I knew are one and the same person. You see, Bill and I were shipmates, and I still have a very keen memory.
He was always in the limelight when I knew him, wherever deep-water sailormen of thirty and thirty-five years ago forgathered. As I remember him, he was an upstanding lad, well over six feet in height, red-headed, and weighed somewhere around 190 pounds. Half English and hall Irish. He was always a leader and very much respected by sailors of that day.
It would take me too long to tell you of things that Bill pulled off, but here are one or two instances, Right here in Frisco, I knew of him entering the den of a crimp to get some of his crew who had overstayed their leave and were in danger of being shanghaied. Single-handed he wrecked that joint, beat up the crimp and his bullies, and took all his men back to their ship.
Another time he and a couple of apprentice boys off the ship Silberhorn had been taking in the sights of Frisco, and on their way back to the ship were jumped on by a gang of plug-uglies, who had the idea, evidently, that Bill and the boys were easy pickings. This gang was led by the toughest boarding-house master on the San Francisco front. That gang and their leader were found lying on the dock at daylight, all neatly tied up hand and foot, and Bill and the boys did it.
A friend of mine, now dead, once passed a remark that has stuck with me. It’s about Bill. A bunch of us, shipmasters all, were having a drink and discussing our troubles about getting our ships’ crews here during the winter of 1901. We knew that we each stood a mighty poor show of getting a full complement of real seamen, and Captain John Anderson, who was going to sea next day, said, ‘Well, they can send me as many “Farmers” as they like. I ain’t worryin’. I’ve got a mate who’s as good as any six men on board of any ship. You men all know him, Bill Adams. As soon as I get my gang on board. I’m bound out the Golden Gate.’
There were plenty of good men, both for’ard and aft, in those days, but only one Bill Adams. Yours very respectfully,
CAPTAIN ANDREW M. TURNER
Berkeley, Califournia

Another New Year’s Day in Peking.

In the ordinary affairs of life we like to think of China as a land of changeless customs. To test this notion it may be interesting to set beside Miss Ida Pruitt’s colorful picture of a New Year’s celebration in Peking, published in this issue, another equally authentic description of the same occasion back in the thirteenth century. Marco Polo has left us this sketch of a New Year’s festival in kanbalu (Peking) at the court of Kublai Khan: —

‘The Tartars date the commencement of their year from the month of February, and on that occasion it is customary for the Great khan, as well as all who are subject to him, in their several countries, to clothe themselves in while garments, which, according to their ideas, are the emblem of good fortune. This is done in the hope that during the whole course of the year nothing but what is fortunate may happen to them, and that they may enjoy pleasure and comfort.

‘Upon this day the inhabitants of all the provinces and kingdoms who hold lands or rights of jurisdiction under the Great khan send him valuable presents of gold, silver, and precious stones, together with many pieces of while doth, which they add with the intent that His Majesty may experience throughout the year uninterrupted enjoyment, and possess treasures adequate to all his expenses. With the same view the nobles, princes, and all ranks of the community make reciprocal presents, at their respective houses, of white articles; embracing each other with demonstrations of joy and festivity, and saying, “May good fortune attend you through the coming year, and may everything you undertake succeed to your wish.” . . .

‘On the morning of the festival, before the tables are spread, all the princes, the nobility of various ranks, the cavaliers, astrologers, physicians, and falconers, with many others holding public offices, the prefects of the people and of the lands, together with the officers of the army, make their entry into the grand hall, in front of the Emperor. Those who cannot find room within stand on the outside of the building, in such a situation as to be within sight, of their sovereign. . . .

‘When all have been disposed in the places appointed for them, a person of high dignity, or, as we should express it, a great prelate, rises and says with a loud voice, “Bow down and do reverence,” when instantly all bend their bodies until their foreheads touch the floor. And this adoration they repeal four times. . . .

‘This ceremony being concluded, they then make the presentation of their respective gifts, such as have been mentioned. When a display has been made of these, and the Great khan has cast his eyes upon them, the tables are prepared for the feast, and the company, including women as well as men, arrange, themselves (in rank). . . . After dinner the musicians and theatrical performers exhibit for the amusement of the court.

. . . On this occasion a lion is conducted into the presence of His Majesty, so tame that it is taught to lay itself down at his feet. The sports being finished, everyone returns to his own home.’

If we compare Kublai Khan’s New Year party with the modern one described by Miss Pruitt, it may appear at first glance that the interval of six centuries and a half has wiped out all traces of the old court ceremonial. But let us look more closely. In both accounts the new year begins in February and is marked by lavish feasting. The modern celebration is a family reunion, and something of the same sort seems to have been true of the ancient one, for the whole court is brought together on this day and Marco Polo mentions it as a fact. which struck him with peculiar force that the company at table included ‘women as well as men.’ Both descriptions indicate that the oreasion is one of great solemnity, but not without comic relief, for diversion comes upon both scenes in the form of minstrel shows and displays of trained animals. In each picture, cloth of a distinctive color figures prominently as a symbol of good fortune; with the ancients it was white, with the moderns, red. In both festivals we observe a kowtow ceremony performed in unison, and in both the grand climax is reached when the assembled company offers its homage and its gifts to the person or persons held in highest honor; the ancients made these offerings to the Emperor, the moderns to their ancestors.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

THE EDITORS