The Contributors' Column

ONE might almost say that James Milton was predestined to write ‘Good-bye, Mr. Chips! ’ Born at the turn of the century, with his first. breath he began to soak up the atmosphere of that small world-within-a-world which is the English public school, for his father was a schoolmaster. By the time he was seventeen he had already had his first literary work printed in the Manchester Guardian; before he was twenty he was the author of a novel, written while he was an undergraduate at Christ’s College, Cambridge. Since then he has published half a dozen books—‘with varying degrees of success,’ he says. The present short novel or long story—call it what you will — reveals a mature talent that looks as if it had definitely ‘arrived.’ ▵ When a distinguished British journalist recently remarked that Frank H. Simonds (‘Austria, the Powder Barrel of Europe’) was one American who really understood the intricacies of European politics, he voiced a judgment that cannot be challenged. In Mr. Simonds’s long career as a newspaper man he rose to the top rank in his profession, during the World War becoming associate editor of the New York Tribune. Of military tactics, his hobby since boyhood, he says: ‘ When I followed the French armies into Alsace-Lorraine soon after the Armistice, it was the realization of a dream cherished since the days when, on the top of a shelf covering the flour barrel in a kitchen in Bedford, Massachusetts, I refought Bazaine’s campaign about Metz with my lead soldiers to give it a happier ending.’ ▵ The realization of another cherished dream was James Norman Hall’s voyage in the wake of the Bounty mutineers (‘The Ghosts of Pitcairn’). The sequel, which turned out to be something of a nightmare, will follow next month. ▵ There are two remarkable facts to be noted about the young Middle-Westerner. Glanville Smith. The first the reader may discover for himself if he observes the style of ‘My Winter in the Woods’ and remembers a certain American author living in Paris about, whom it has been said: ‘Few people read her in the original, but everybody reads her at second hand, for she has left her mark on all the new writers.’ The second fact is even more of a conundrum. ’ My trade,’ writes Mr. Smith, ’is the designing of tombstones.’

Elizabeth Morrow (‘Three Poems’) is the widow of the statesman whose early death was a national, perhaps an international, calamity. ▵ A few years ago André Siegfried wrote a book to announce that America had come of age. Since then there has been increasing evidence on many hands that as a nation we have really outgrown our care-free youth and have had sober maturity thrust upon us. Straws in the wind, perhaps, are the signs of longing for ‘the good old days’ which Earnest Elmo Calkins ticks off in ‘Homesick America.’ The clue to our nostalgic mood he discovers in the new-old fashions of current advertisements. On this subject he is a court of last, resort, for he has devoted more than a quarter of a century to the presidency of the Calkins and Holden Advertising Agency in New 4 ork, from which he has but lately retired.

The ‘Personal Letters’ of Gamaliel Bradford took for their text any topic that his far-ranging mind chanced to light upon; but, like aJl good letters, however much they n ay illuminate this subject or that, they play their central beam upon the author himself. By the time of his death, two years ago, Bradford had earned a deservedly high reputation as a biographer and essayist. Now the reader is privileged to know him as a man, with the intimacy that was reserved for a few selected friends. ▵ An engineer by profession, Major R. Baven-Hart (’Odyssey of a Sixty-Per-Center’) served with the British army during the war, was wounded, and as a result returned to civilian life with what the doctors describe as ‘a physical disability of 40 per cent.’ Though not ill, he is an invalid in the French sense of the word, and, having always been an active man. he stood in need of exercise that would not overtax his strength.

Canoeing met his requirements exactly. Every suimner now he goes exploring about Europe in his collapsible boat, preferring the littleknown backwaters to the large rivers and lakes. Incidentally, he was a pioneer in developing short-wave radio transmission, and is a master of half a dozen languages. This last he does not mention in his article, but one gathers that a linguistic aptitude must be a very handy thing for an international paddler to carry in his baggage. Henrietta Ripperger has long been interested in problems of the colleges. Here (‘The kept Student’) she interprets the findings of a nationally known foundation which has had wide experience in making loans to indigent students. ▵ Among younger writers Edmund Wilson( ’The Canons of Poetry’) is probably the leading literary critic. Since 1922 lie lias published a variety of volumes, among them plays, verse, and a novel. His most recent works include Axel’s Castle, a book on certain aspects of modern literature, and another of ‘social-political reporting’ called The American Jitters.

George Ellery Hale (‘ Deeper into Space’) is a distinguished astronomer. He was the organizer. and is now honorary director, of the Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena. Alan Devoe (‘ A Literary Experiment’) is a free-lance writer and an ingenious fellow. Another of his experiments was described three months ago in ’Books by the Roadside.

A Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Central New York, the Right Reverend Charles Fiske (‘My Religion— Retrospect and Arrival’) is fond of a good joke, even when it is on himself. Thus he likes to tell that his English mail usually comes addressed to ‘The Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of New York Central.’ ▵ Old-timers will welcome the return of Herbert Ravenel Sass (‘ A Young King’), whose last appearance in these pages was in 1922. Author of books on two kinds of history, — Southern and natural, he writes that Charleston still ‘has’ him both physically and spiritually. Those who have visited Charleston will understand and envy him.

It went to his glabrous head.

Dear Atlantic, —
Alter reading Johnson O’Connors article in your February number, a major executive addressed his staff as follows: —

FREDERICK W. HENIUCI
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Securities and common sense.

Dear Atlantic, —
I do not believe there is any substitute in the purchase of sec urities for the principle of Caveat Emptor. Securities, by the nature of our evershifting economic life on which they are based, cannot be labeled and sold, as Mr. Bernard Flexner intimates, certified as to contents and guaranteed as to performance. Everyone familiar with the history of investments knows there is no certainty but uncertainty, and that the blue chips’ of one decade are often the ‘cats and dogs’ of the next .
It would seem that whenever misfortune befalls the American public the baying of the pack on the trail of the villain inevitably resounds. At the present time it is the banker, and this is no attempt to minimize his culpability in the sorry spectacle of the boom years; but it the people persist in the delusion that theirs was merely the part of the injured and innocent victim, the bitter experience of those years will have taught them nothing.
BERTRAM S. BOOTH
Oakland. California

‘Everybody knows . . .‘

The following comes from a correspondent who wrote to the Atlantic at ‘No. 2 Arlington Street,’ and was chided for his thrift:

Dear Atlantic, —
Here are my apologies for giving you only one quarter of your correct street number. The remaining 75 per cent will be cheerfully made up to you anytime, if you will let me know how you want it shipped!
So simple a point is briefly made; still, maybe you have never heard about the signpost in Maine that fell over because a ledge of granite made the soil too shallow to hold it firmly.
The story relates how a motorist relied on this sign to guide him on his way to Bangor. Twenty miles or so of driving convinced him that he must be on the wrong road, so he returned to the fork where the signpost stood, and was fortunate enough to encounter a man of the region. In the ensuing dialogue it transpired that, for the sake of getting a suitably deep hole, the signpost had been reset on the other side of the road, with the natural result that its arrow pointed in the opposite direction.
The expostulating motorist demanded why any such fool procedure should have been followed, but was met by the drawling twang of the native, ‘Oh, everybody knows how to get to Bangor.’
ARTHURt BALDWIN
Paris, Prance

NordliolF and Hall Appreciated

The plight of ihe rural teacher.

Dear Atlantic, —
The ‘Spasmodic Diary of a Chicago SchoolTeacher’ published in your November issue suggests a comparison between the urban and rural school situations. Although the financial distress of rural teachers is not so actual as that of instructors in the metropolitan area, except in communities crushed by bank failures, the present economic crisis has caused the teaching profession to lose prestige in rural localities.
Because school board members are allowing themselves to be influenced by the more illiterate persons in rural communities, the saving of tax money has become the ultimate criterion for the adoption of all school policies and expenditures. With the appearance of many more candidates for leaching positions than can be assimilated into the public schools, the practice of underbidding has grown up. Candidates themselves often submit bids to teach for lower ‘wages’ than those paid the present teacher. In Central Illinois rural school-teachers receive as low as $40 a month. Village high-school teachers sign contracts at $90 a month. In one region of Southern Illinois a man reputed to he a school inspector was informing members of high-school boards with whom he came in contact that he could secure for them teachers with master’s degrees who would be willing to ‘work’ for $600 a year.
The words ‘wages’ and ‘work’ have purposely been substituted for ‘salary’ and ‘teach’ in order to indicate that, the system of underbidding called forth by the present rural screech for economy is sinking the status of teaching from that of a profession to that of a trade.
HELEN HORA
Bondville, Illinois

Is this gentleman ‘all wet’?

Dear Atlantic, —
I am not entirely sure what an Age of Plenty is; it sounds enough like a New Era or a New Deal to make me suspicious. At any rate, David Cushman Coyle’s article in the December issue impressed me mainly by the utter inadequacy of the solution it proposes for our plight. If is perfectly obvious that the only real escape is for the Federal Government to begin at once building tremendous whiskey distilleries, and strictly require every citizen to drink his per capita share of the output. Not merely buy it or throw it away, but actually drink it, you notice. The advantages of this plan are so multitudinous that I mention only a few: —
1. It looks productive. This helps get the scheme into popular favor.
2. it uses mainly farm products, thereby remedying the disproportion between farm prices and industrial profits. The railroads will benefit, too.
3. The increased consumption of alcohol will have directly beneficial effects as follows: — (a) It will lower our productive capacity, because of headaches.
(b) Many people will gel drunk and break things, such as automobiles and chairs, which must be replaced. Stationary and locomotive engineers will blow things up, thus helping the capital goods industries.
(c) Many more doctors and nurses will be needed, and they will thus he automatically removed from ‘productive’ works. More hospitals will help the building industry.
This brief sketch will be enough to indicate the tremendous potentialities of the plan.
FREDERICK W. MORRIS
New York City