IN Death in the Afternoon, Ernest Hemingway had this to say about Juan Belmonte (p. 129): ‘The decadent, the impossible, the almost depraved, si vie of Belmonte was grafted and grown into the great healthy, intuitive genius of Joselito and in his competition with Juan Belmonte, bullfighting for seven years had a golden age in spite of the fact that it was in the process of being destroyed. They bred the bulls down in size; they bred down the length of horn; they bred them for suavity in their charges as well as fierceness because Joselito and Belmonte could do finer things with these smaller, easier bulls. They could do fne enough things with any bulls that came out of the torils; they were not helpless with any of them but, with the smaller, easier bulls they were certain to do the wonderful things that the public wanted to see. The big bulls were easy for Joselito although they were difficult for Belmonte. All bulls were easy for Joselito and he had to make his own difficulties. The competition ended when Joselito was killed in the ring on May 16, 1920. Belmonte went on one more year, then retired, and bullfighting was left with the new decadent method, the almost impossible technique, the bred down bulls and, as bullfighters, only the bad ones, the hardy, tough ones who had not been able to learn the new method and so no longer pleased, and a crop of new ones, decadent, sad and sickly enough, who had the method but no knowledge of bulls, no apprenticeship, none of the male courage, faculties or genius of Joselito, and none of the beautiful unhealthy mystery of Belmonte.’

Bertrand Russell (p. 149) knows by experience those ulterior motives which lead philosophers afield. His own thoughts have felt the summons to explore mathematics, and China, the theories of Bolshevism, marriage, and education.

When Gertrude Stein (p. 156) is moved to send the Atlantic a contribution (’to tease them’) we think it fair game to share the problem with our readers. By way of possible clues we might, add that Miss Stein has a cook of singular loyalty: she calls him ‘Trac’ and he is by birth an Annamite from French Indo-China. In her reply to our letter of acceptance Miss Stein wrote: ’I am pleased that you like “Butter Will Melt.” One does do a quite perfect tiling once in a while. I read it at a talk I gave the other day to some french law and medical students in the mountains near here, and it went well. I am interested in their interest in William James. They wanted to hear more and more about him. He is the one American that means a lot to french students and he meant as much to me and I like it.’

Mildred Boie (p. 157), who makes her début in the Atlantic, is a teacher of English Composition at Smith College.

It is stimulating to hear from a clear-spoken, even if anonymous clergyman (p. 158) and to appreciate as seldom before the trials of a Parson in the twentieth century.

Born in the Netherlands in 1905, David Cornel DeJong (p. 164) spent his first thirteen years within hail of the canals. He completed his education in the United States at Duke and Brown universities and is now the author of two American novels.

William March (p. 170) will be remembered for his war novel, Company K, which was published a few years ago. This winter his more recent volume, The Tallons, a story about Alabama, is being subjected to that close scrutiny which we give to all of our regional literature.

We wager that since their marriage Francis and Katharine Drake (p. 178) have flown more

miles than any other couple — under forty — in the United States. Their honeymoon was spent on the Pan-American Airways of South America, and they have been on the go ever since. Any takers?

For eleven years George E. Sokolsky (p. 185) lived in China. During that period he was editor of the Far Eastern Review, and political correspondent of the North China Daily News. He knew intimately the members of the Soong family and Marshal Chiang Kai-shek. At our request, Mr. Sokolsky has written a thumbnail description of his old friend, W. H. Donald, the press correspondent who acted as a go-between in the battle of wills between Chiang Kai-shek and Chang Hsueh-liang.

W. H. Donald is an Australian newspaper man who was picked up by James Gordon Bennett and given the New York Herald job in China. The revolution of 1911 brought him in contact with Roy Anderson, a Chinese-boru American who was a power in the Nanking region. Anderson had the revolutionists appoint Donald censor, so that all foreign dispatches passed through his hands.

After the revolution he went to live in Peking, where he and Anderson set up a partnership and served as advisors to the Chinese Government and also to foreign firms doing business in China. Later he went up to Manchuria arid became the advisor to Chang Hsueh-liang. in 1933, Chang Hsueh-liang came back from exile with Donald and settled down to be a subordinate of Chiang Kai-shek. Such a subordinate does need a foreign advisor, so Donald joined the personal stall’ of Chiang Kai-shek and Madame Chiang Kai-shek.

Donald is at his best as a secret, clandestine riegotiator. Although he has lived in China perhaps thirty years, he does not speak a single dialect of the Chinese language. Yet, most men with whom he has worked respect and in some cases even have affection for him. Everybody trusts him.

The most incandescent of nature writers in or about the United States. Donald Culross Peattie (p. 189) continually reminds us of our need of wilderness and its embracing peace.

The manuscript by Henry G. Lamond (p. 191) came to us from the Molle Islands, Proserpine, Queensland, Australia. Member of a family that has been in Australia for five generations, Mr. Lamond has worked the length and breadth of his state, following various jobs. For thirty years he has not known what it is to live in a city or town.

From the United States Department of Agriculture in Washington Arthur P. Chew (p. 194) sends us the warning that if we do not conquer our American deserts they will conquer us.

Mr. Pennyfeather reminds his progenitor, Donald Moffat (p. 201), of those citizen’sduties which we lake so lightly and ignore so promptly.

A fortnight on the West Coast was all that Robert Dean Frishie (p. 21 1) could endure on his last visit to this country in 1935. Then nostalgia shook him like an ague and sent him home by the next steamer to Danger Island in the South Seas.

Poet and scholar, George Allen (p. 225) is still on the sunny s’de of thirty. An Englishman, be was educated at Rugby and Oxford. Then followed a year of lecturing at Hamburg University, and thereafter a Commonwealth Fellowship in Literature which took him first to Western Reserve in Cleveland and thence to Harvard. For the moment he is catching his breath and renewing his friendships in Surrey, England.

Whether as economist, interpreter, or referee, Walter Lippmann (p. 228) has the extraordinary faculty of sitting at the centre of affairs and of foretelling the eventual effect upon the periphery of the circle. In the September Atlantic Mr. Lippmarm began a series of articles which will be sustained through successive issues. Each chapter is an entity in itself; taken together in a forthcoming book, The Good Society (the latter half of which will not be serialized), they compose a masterly survey of modern government.

Henry C. Wolfe (p. 239), a native Ohioan and graduate of Ohio State Universify, spent last summer sitting on the lid of the powder barrel in Central Europe. He visited Danzig, Kovno, Warsaw, Bucharest. Belgrade, Vienna, Berlin, and Budapest, holding private audiences in each place with those in authority. He knows the smell and meaning of dynamite.

In the letter accompanying his manuscript, Earnest Elmo Calkins (p. 247) — the delightful author of Louder Please!—wrote us as follows: ‘It occurs to me it might interest a large number of readers like myself who had “Gospel Hymns" dinned into them ad lib. and ad nans. I, unfortunately, know more than one hundred of those religious ditties by heart, the effect of unconscious education in the days of my youth when I could hear better than I can now.‘

By Way of Apology

Through an oversight the name of George E. Sokolsky was omitted from the Atlantic’s announcement for l937. This is regrettable, as Mr. Sokolsky is one of the most able and reliable contributors on our active list. Readers may be assured that we shall rely on him for those penetrating and carefully measured surveys of American Labor for which there will be increasing need in the year ahead.

Reece Stuart’s article, ‘Yes, Ruth Is Wonderful,’ which appeared in theAtlanticfor December, has kindled the sympathies of many readers. Not for months has there been so large and spontaneous a response. The paper itself came straight from the heart — and so do the replies, only a few of which have we space to reproduce.

Dear Atlantic, —
Mr. Reece Stuart’s article in your December number is so challenging that, I can imagine a respectable pile of letters already gathering on your table in reply, trying in some way to assure him and his brave Ruth of a positive answer to that last question, ‘How not to be afraid?’
That too has been ray problem—one of my problems during these last months; when I have seen one-child bitterly suffering and was powerless to help or to foresee the outcome, and when I at last returned home in joy with that child only to find a call to dash to the bedside of another child, most, seriously injured and hanging between life and death. And sometimes w hen my friends too were saying, ‘Is n’t Marie brave?’ there was a heavy, leaden weight at my heart and I knew that I was not victorious.
But let me tell of one or two things which I learned at this time, some of them things which I had known before but now became more real to me.
One was that faith in God is not believing that He will surely save my child, from suffering or from death. Prayer is not asking Him to change His mind, but it is put ting myself in line with His will, believing that His will is splendid, for me and mine. ‘Thy will be done’ does not imply resignation to the designs of a tyrant, but trust in the kindness of a father.
One evening I shall always remember, when l sat with a dear friend, confessing that I was burdened with great, tears, that I felt it, was a sin against God to trust Him so little, and I did then give up these fears in surrender. In a few minutes the fears which had pressed upon me with such unbearable weight that I felt I should yield in illness passed from me and I was kept in calmness and trust.
If Ted and Ruth could learn these things, of which I have learned a small part, then perhaps the boy’s suffering and theirs would have realized its mission.
MARIE DE GERNON

Dear Atlanlic,—
I wish that Mr. Reece Stuart, Jr. and some of the Atlantic readers who believe that young people, these days, have no interest in Christianity might have listened to the discussion in my classroom, yesterday afternoon, on ‘Yes, Ruth Is Wonderful.’ The former would, perhaps, have been given a new angle of thought, and the latter would have been convinced that some college students have pretty definite ideas about God.
The class consists of the thirty freshmen who rated highest in the Purdue Placement Test in English, out of a class of one hundred and fifty-three. Since the thirty come from New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Montana, and from communities ranging in size from country villages to the cities of Detroit, Chicago, and New York, the class seems to be fairly representative of American youth. Certainly the students are representative in intelligence, for, in the psychological placement test which they took, together with freshmen in three hundred other colleges and universities, their class average was two per cent above the average of the three hundred freshman groups.
The discussion on Mr. Stuart’s article was as informal as a family tea party. It began with the question as to why anyone should publish such an article. There was some talk about wearing one’s heart, on one’s sleeve, then they concluded that only a great need would prompt a father to write as Mr. Stuart had done. So it was agreed that the key to the article lay in the last line,: ‘How not to be afraid?’
Then there followed such a discussion of God and His relation to man as lew people would believe possible in a college class. Remembering the talk of students in the universities, I was amazed, even after ten years at Hope. Their conclusions ran like this: —
Mr. Stuart and his wife obviously had no faith in God to start with, since they began attending church only after learning of the calamity which had befallen them. Hence, they were merely trying to bargain with God. ’And that,’ concluded one young man, ‘is showing God that you have a pretty poor opinion of Him.’
‘Yes,’ added another. ‘They didn’t have any faith when they asked for help, so how could they expect to get anything? Even Christ could n’t work miracles unless the person who asked for help believed in Him.’
‘ As I see it.’ said a bright-eyed young woman from Chicago, ‘the reason why these parents found themselves so crushed and bewildered was that they did not believe in immortality — they could not look forward to seeing their son again.’
‘That’s itexclaimed a blonde miss from Detroit. ‘Had they seen death as William Allen White did, this article would have been a beautiful eulogy of the boy they have lost.’
‘They forget,’ added a lad from Grand Rapids, ‘that God’s law of compensation always works.’
Confronted with the question as to whether Ruth and Ted would be likely to find comfort in the religion of Sir Francis Younghusband, they were less sure of their ground. His religion was hard to understand, They were, however, quite sure that Sir Francis, lacing the same issue, would have found in his God-in-Nature-and-in-Man compensations which would have satisfied him.
METTA J. ROSS
Hope College, Holland, Michigan

Dear Atlantic,—
My deepest wells of sympathy were stirred for Ruth and Ted as with tears I read of their sorrow; for I passed through a parallel experience, doubted, since only two years after the boy’s death his mother died in the grip of the dread octopus.
With us every mental reaction was different because our view of life was different. No ‘god’ to be entreated or cajoled into interfere rice with natural law figured in our categories. Our religion was of the spirit, our prayers for spiritual strength, for calmness of mind, for power to face life bravely and happily, for comfort and for cheerful endurance. No spirit of divination was invoked in behalf of the miraculous. No movie was needed after the burial to distract us. Just a quiet companionship, and thankfulness for a life, — too short, alas! — but for all its brevity full and rich and beautiful; a golden memory we would not put from us, but which we loved to keep bright and warm as we shouldered the burden of life again. No darkness of silence on birthdays. His name was spoken at breakfast; a few fresh flowers were placed somewhere, and in the evening Milton’s immortal Lycidas was read aloud.
There were the same comments of ‘wonderful,’ but there was nothing wonderful about it. Just the endeavor to ‘see life steadily, and see it whole.’ and so to live.
ARTHUR CHASE
New Haven, Connecticut

It was to be expected that readers would take issue with J. B. Matthews and his criticism of the Coöperatives which appeared in the December issue. Such proponents will have their innings when they read the formal reply to Mr. Matthews in the March Atlantic.

Dear Atlantic, —
In the article on consumers’ coöperatives in your December issue Mr. Matthews has presented some interesting and provocative facts. The introductory survey which he made of the coöperative movement was much more accurate than one finds in most of the contentious literature on the subject, and there were several shrewd observations at other points. From his factual material to his final conclusions, however, was a long and audacious leap.
A large part of the article was devoted to examples of patent medicines and other spurious goods sold by European coöperatives and of extravagant advertising in which they have indulged. Mr. Matthews asserted that ‘most of the European coöperatives’ medicinal products would have difficulty with the Federal Trade Commission or the Food and Drug Administration in the United Stales.’ He said nothing about the practices of private business in Europe. He then cited two or three examples of inferior quality in the wares of American coöperatives. These were apparently though he mentioned no names — confined to a single association, Coöperative Distributors of New York City , which he mistakenly declared to he a Rochdale coöperative. This material constituted the principal factual support for Mr. Matthews’s final statement: ‘On the record to date, private competitive enterprise, with all of its faults, appears to he the best available servant of consumers’ interests.’
Early in the article the author pointed out that ‘the consumer’s inf crest, in the marketing of his goods is not concerned exclusively with price considerations.’ Unfortunately, after this discriminating start, he himself fell into the error of assuming that the interest of the consumer is exclusively concerned with considerations of quality and truth-inadvertising. It is true that workingmen’s coöperatives — he advisedly ignored the large American farmers’ associations — have not been much interested in quality and have not set high technical standards for their goods. But it was a long jump beyond to assert that they have not served consumers’ interests as a whole.
Mr. Matthews did not display any profound understanding of the nature of consumers’ coöperation. Indeed, he even implied at one point that it involved a totalitarian system of production and distribution. It is, after all, merely a free, democratic device by which a group of people endeavor jointly to supply their wants; as such, it is handicapped by the defects of democracy and it is limited by the purposes of those people. Mr. Matthews seemed to expect a panacea.
H. HAINES TURNER
West Nyack, New York

Dear Atlantic, —
In your issue for December there is an article on ‘The Coöperatives’by J. B. Matthews which shows a serious error of omission. I am reminded that many generations ago Bacon said, ’If you know what to put in and what to leave out, you can prove anything you please quite conclusively.’
His comparison between the efficiency of coöperatives and private business shows a lower rating for the former than for the latter, but which private business is he talking about? If I shoot ten times at a target, hit the bull’s-eye twice, but my other eight shots miss the target entirely, on what basis will you rate my skill? Will you choose my two bull’s-eyes and ignore my eight failures? That is what Mr. Matthews does. Dun and Bradstreet, show that over 80 per cent of all private, businesses fail. If, in physics research, we drew a smooth curve of probability through two points and ignored eight other points, then, if it was discovered, we should be ostracized by scientists.
Under our private-ownership-profits system, buying power tends to flow downhill right into the laps of fewer and fewer owners, who soon have more | buying power than they can possibly use for consumers’ goods and they then create producers’ goods as an investment. But now they have much trouble to find a market for the new consumers’ | goods created by their new producers’ goods. Producers’ goods do not create income for owners. It is the labor of consumers with buying power which creates owners’ income. We Americans seem to be blind to this simple truth.
A. A. MERRILL
Pasadena, California

A bouquet for Benedict Thielen!

Dear Atlantic, —
Please allow me to comment with actual joy upon your publication of such a fine story as ‘Peacock in the Snow’ in the December number of your magazine. I should like to congratulate Mr. Thielen on his technique and all the delicate marks of craftsmanship his story contains.
But more than anything else the piece proves to me that an excellent story can be built upon a theme other than a catastrophe. Too often to suit me the older magazines use the old plot stories involving a murder, suicide, or insanity case.
MRS. CONSTANCE G. HILLS
Detroit, Michigan

’It Can’t Happen Here!’

Dear At lantic, —
It is interesting that President Hutchins’s answer to Professor Whitehead in the November Atlantic should itself have been so completely answered by Walter Lippmann’s article in the same number on the Government of Posterity. For colleges and universities are the very prototypes of Fascist states, and if, as Mr. Lippmann points out, there are no supermen available to govern states there are certainly none at present visible on the governing faculties of universities, where men without much common cultural background (as Dr. Hutchins shows) and without any special training in the Science of Education (which he does not mention in his articles) do not hesitate to define in their own way the aims or ‘task’ of a college or university and then to lay down corresponding rules for the governance of students. The Duce-Führer articles of Dr. Hutchins are not exactly dripping with respect for his colleagues, but he does not dream of questioning this way of settling things. He knows that the task of a university is intellectual leadership, he knows the kind of curriculum that will produce it, he proposes that such a curriculum be put in force.
One might imagine that the aims of an educational institution should have some relation to the aims of those that pay good money to attend it, and that the task of a college or university might at least include an effort to discover these aims of its students, to help each individual to clarify his own and assess their values, and then to pursue them all in sane relationship to each other and to the reasonable aims of other people.
Whether this way of settling things is fair to students or to the founding fathers that put their good money into endowments is not discussed.
As to the ‘intellectual leadership’ which Dr Hutchins agrees or assumes that it is the task of a university to produce, his words may mean nothing more than informed and intelligent helpfulness in solving the innumerable problems that life presents. But they suggest the Adlerian contrast of leader and led, and may make a consequent unhealthy appeal to every neurotic who has to prove that he is the one and not the other, and so encourage a tendency to regard other people as means for the achievement of some grand external purpose of his own rather than as ends in themselves. In abstract discussions of the Paris of the past, the Harvard of the present, and the Podunk of the future, one is liable to forget that what Tom, Dick, and Harriet want and came to get to-day really matters.
The tragedy is that our educational institutions really might become important if we could take democracy seriously and profit by the simile of the good shepherd whose sheep don’t have to be driven but follow him gladly because they know his voice. ‘Child-centred schools’ don’t fit a Fascist programme, but at least they start with people where they are.
Dr. Hutchins docs not hesitate to refer to the ignorance of his faculty about things outside of their individual specialties. But there is nothing in what he writes to indicate that his own thinking about education is deeply influenced by contemporary studies of personality or even by long-standing educational investigations into the value of formal discipline. His language is for the most part that of the old faculty psychology with all its discarded abstractions, and his thought seems to run that, way also. Once upon a time there was a splendid grocer who emblazoned on his window ‘Purveyor to His Majesty the King’ — and the little man next door could only write on his, ‘God Save the King.’
H. AUSTIN AIKINS
Western Reserve University
Cleveland, Ohio

Here is a Manhattan reader who speaks for a part — but only for a part — of our audience. Her good-natured request we shall take seriously, but before we decide we should like other readers to ask themselves which comes closest to their hearts: Pollyanna, or what the Greeks used to call catharsis.

Dear Atlantic, —
This coming year, 1937, can’t you turn over a new leaf and bring a bit of cheer to your already depressed readers? Just because I am fond of you I make this suggestion.
So many constant readers of the Atlantic feel as I do and could hear less of tales of fortitude under death sentences, loss of wife and children, the frank young woman having her baby in a God-forsaken country, not to mention the continued story of the woman who would marry the Ancient One and freeze and starve too near the Arctic Circle. This is a résumé of the cheerful bits you have published the past two years.
Let us have more tales of the joy of living, of hopeful living, so one does not need to reach for a handkerchief when opening the Atlantic.
R. B.