village civilization making its last stand against what looks to it like an alien invasion. The alien invasion is in fact the new America produced by the growth and the prosperity of America.

The evil which the old-fashioned preachers ascribe to the Pope, to Babylon, to atheists, and to the Devil is simply the new urban civilization, with its irresistible economic and scientific and mass power. The Pope, the Devil, jazz, the bootleggers, are a mythology which expresses symbolically the impact of a vast and dreaded social change. The change is real enough. The language in which it is discussed is preposterous only as all mythology is preposterous if you accept it literally. The mythology of the Ku Klux Klan is a kind of primitive science, an animistic and dramatized projection of the fears of a large section of our people who have yet to accommodate themselves to the strange new social order which has arisen in their midst.

This new social order is dominated by metropolitan cities of which New York is the largest and most highly developed. Therefore New York has become the symbol of all that is most wicked and of all that is most alluring in modern America. But New York to-day is only what Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit, Cleveland, Jacksonville, and Miami expect to be to-morrow. It is the seat of a vast population, mixed in its origins, uncertain of its social status, rather vague about the moral code. In these metropolitan centres the ancient social bonds are loosened. The patriarchal family, the well-established social hierarchy, the old roots of belief, and the grooves of custom are all obscured by new human relationships based on a certain kind of personal independence, on individual experiment and adventure, which are yet somehow deeply controlled by fads and fashions and great mass movements.

The campaign in certain localities to forbid the teaching of 'Darwinism' is an attempt to stem the tide of the metropolitan spirit, to erect a spiritual tariff against an alien rationalism which threatens to dissolve the mores of the village civilization. To many of us the effort seems quixotic, as indeed it is, judged by the intellectual standards of metropolitan life. But if we look at the matter objectively, disregarding the petty mannerisms of the movement, there is a pathos about it which always adheres to the last struggle of an authentic type of human living. The anti-evolutionists are usually less charming than Don Quixote. Perhaps that is because they have not been transfigured by an artist. They are at any rate fighting for the memory of a civilization which in its own heyday, and by its own criteria, was as valid as any other.

The anti-evolution bills are, of course, a comparatively trivial symptom of this profound maladjustment. The overt struggle turns politically on two questions: on the Eighteenth Amendment and on the nomination of Governor Alfred E. Smith. The struggle over these two issues implicates all the antagonisms between the older America and the new. The Eighteenth Amendment is a piece of legislation embodied in the Constitution which attempts to impose the moral ideals of the villages upon the whole nation. The force behind the Eighteenth Amendment is the Anti-Saloon League, which is the political arm of the evangelical churches in the small communities. The financial and political strength of the Anti-Saloon League is derived from the members of these churches, chiefly Methodist and Baptist, with other denominations divided but following these militant sects. And the strength of these sects in the last analysis arises from the spiritual

isolation of communities which have not yet been radically invaded by the metropolitan spirit.

The defense of the Eighteenth Amendment has, therefore, become much more than a mere question of regulating the liquor traffic. It involves a test of strength between social orders, and when that test is concluded, and if, as seems probable, the Amendment breaks down, the fall will bring down with it the dominion of the older civilization. The Eighteenth Amendment is the rock on which the evangelical church militant is founded, and with it are involved a whole way of life and an ancient tradition. The overcoming of the Eighteenth Amendment would mean the emergence of the cities as the dominant force in America, dominant politically and socially as they are already dominant economically.

V

The alignment of the new cities against the older villages traverses the nominal political alignment of the two great parties. In New York State, for example, it has divided and broken the Republican Party as a state organization. There is much more community of thought and feeling between Republicans and Democrats in New York City, in Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and Albany, than there is between the urban and the rural Republicans. The unity of the Republican Party in New York is like the unity of the Democrats in the nation: a unity of politicians interested in offices supplemented by the prestige of a name and a tradition. There is no unity of interest, of principle, or of programme.

A similar condition exists in almost every state where there are powerful cities in Massachusetts for Boston, in Pennsylvania for Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, in Ohio for Cleveland

and Cincinnati, in Illinois for Chicago, in New Jersey for that urban conglomeration known as Hudson County, in Missouri for St. Louis. Both parties are cracking under the strain. Both maintain the appearance of unity by political deals and the compromise of principles. The well-known fact that parties have become meaningless is due to this internal division. They dare not take definite positions for fear of alienating one or the other of their irreconcilable factions.

For reasons which are not altogether clear the conflict has first become overt in the Democratic Party. The convention of 1924 was the scene of the first great, though inconclusive, phase of the struggle. All the signs indicate that the next phase, in 1928, will be at least as sharp and perhaps more decisive. In 1924 the urban democracy rallied around Governor Smith of New York, the village democracy around Mr. McAdoo. The urban Democrats in 1924 controlled a little more than one third of that convention. Since 1924 they have gained in strength and by 1928 they should control at least half of the convention. This change of their position from a minority to a majority faction is not due to the personality or to the leadership of Governor Smith. It is due to a growth of self-consciousness which is developing the latent strength of the city electorates. They are beginning to feel their oats. They are throwing off their sense of inferiority. They are beginning to demand the recognition which is due their intrinsic importance.

The outcome of the struggle within the Democratic Party is, of course, obscure. One can be certain of nothing except that the rapid growth of the cities at the expense of the countryside is bound at last to result in the political domination of the cities. This may

come soon. It may be somewhat delayed. It will come. The first great result may be the disunion of the Democratic Party and perhaps even the rupture of the Solid South. If that is the result the ascendancy of the Republicans may be temporarily confirmed, but it will be followed almost certainly by a realignment of Republicans as well as of Democrats.

For the two parties live by taking in each other's washing. The unity of the one is dependent upon the unity of the other. The grip of the Eastern industrial Republicans on the national organization rests at last on the fact that in the South there is a Republican machine but no Republican electorate. If ever the South should break away from the Democrats, a Republican

Party would appear in the South. The appearance of a Republican Party in the South would make the South as unmanageable to the Republicans of the Northeast as the Republican Party of the West now is.

These prospects are not alluring to men whose lives are bound up with the existing party system. They promise nothing but trouble for them personally. They call for an effort of thought which is distressing, and they open up issues for which political leaders, trained between 1890 and 1910, are not prepared. It is not surprising, then, that our political leaders are greatly occupied in dampening down interest, in obscuring issues, and in attempting to distract attention from the realities of American life.

SOUTH AFRICA has been called a "Two Miles an Hour Country.' Its early history was made on springless wagons, behind countless spans of oxen, trekking, generation after generation, into the veldt.

Two miles an hour is excessive speed for an ox wagon. I discovered that during a week's visit with an American friend in an out-of-the-way corner of Africa. My host had an automobile. But roads were only in the making, and his garage was four hours and a half of hard travel from his house-four hours and a half, that is, by ox wagon; nine miles as a geographer would reckon it.

I

We did the distance behind two spans of oxen through a fog of red dust. Our teams required a driver for each ox, and a pilot in addition, who broke trail for us and pulled, rather uselessly, on a thin leather strap tied to the horns of the lead oxen. The road was a succession of ruts and stumps and forest shrubbery. A canopy, built for a sunshade, was brought crashing down on us by the limb of a tree before we had gone a quarter of a mile. We bounced and jolted over the landscape like an army tank. But always at two miles an hour.

There is progress in South Africa.

But gold and diamonds, labor unions and chambers of commerce, mark only the pace of the cities. Beyond electricity and paved streets, the ox wagon is still supreme. Progress there is ponderous, clumsy, rough, and never more rapid than the dust-clouded caravans of its settlers. However its influence may be waning before the rise of modern industrial centres, much of the foundation of modern South Africa has been laid in this back-veldt country of the ox wagon.

In the back veldt it is the Boer who rules. The society, which is of his making, is patriarchal, and like a patriarch he dominates it. His religion is more of the law than the prophets. The justice which he metes out is harsh, but Scriptural. And when he can no longer rule his strip of 'blue' the Boer inspans his oxen again and treks through the sand and the heat to some farther hinterland. That, at any rate, is the past in South Africa. If the present has invaded his realm with trains and tractors, the Boer scorns the tractors, rides on the trains, and still moves, in spirit, with the oxcarts.

To-day's history in South Africa is being made out of a conflict between town and country; between the pace of the back veldt and the pace of the cities. And that struggle, when the lines are drawn, finds the back-veldt Boer in contest with the Briton for the domination of the Union: the Briton hustling for trade; the Boer never hustling, with no mind for trade, desiring to be left alone, with elbowroom.

There have been those in South Africa who dreamed of union between the two. Cecil Rhodes dreamed and blundered. General Botha dreamed and sacrificed. Jan Christian Smuts, in his tangled old house at Doornkloof, still dreams, and he too has sacrificed. And the stuff for these dreams was real enough. English troops were hardly

welcomed by the Dutch when they landed in Table Bay in 1806 and possessed the land. But once British authority was established in South Africa the ultimate fusion of the two peoples, as Dutch and English were fused in New York, was confidently expected. The race history of both was rooted in the same Low-German stock. Both loved freedom and fought for it with spirit. Both professed Protestantism, and the language differences were so insignificant that an Englishman soon acquired Dutch and a Dutchman quickly learned English. Moreover England, benefiting perhaps by disastrous blunders in the New World, retained the Roman-Dutch law already in force, established the Dutch language as official, altered few of the established institutions, and initiated an administration that was genuinely beneficent.

But fusion did not result. The character of the South African Dutchman contained elements which could not amalgamate. He was a farmer, the word 'Boer' means 'farmer,'

as different from the Hollanders who came with Van Riebeck in 1652 as South Africa is vaster than the Holland from which they came. Hospitality was his greatest virtue, but distances were so great between farms that neighbors, in the ordinary sense, did not exist. Town life, where intercourse with the British would have been possible, was utterly unknown to him and shunned for the lonely freedom of the bush. He loved liberty, but understood it only in terms of solitude. When the British came they neither understood him nor left him alone.

After the first decade of British administration, official wisdom seems to have run its course and a new policy was inaugurated in the Cape. There were readjustments in the local selfgovernment and a subsequent reduction

of the rights of the citizens. English was substituted for Dutch as the official language. Worst of all, from the point of view of the Dutch settler, the British Government suddenly appeared as the aggressive sponsor of the native, and, in 1834, abolished slavery in the Colony. The Boers resented bitterly every infringement of their traditions. Many of them, in fact, shrugged their shoulders at the British overlord and moved out beyond the reach of his authority. But the abolition of slavery and the confusion that resulted were intolerable. There had been other treks. Now came the Great Trek. Rumors of good grazing lands had come down from the unexplored north, and into this region the exodus began. By day, long winding lines of wagons with a cloud of dust billowing over them; by night, clusters of camp fires in the bush, suppers of maize and biltong, evening

prayers.

More than a little of the bitterness of the back-veldt Boer of the present toward the Englishman dates from the Great Trek, from the sacrifices and the suffering that it involved, the bitter heat of the karoo, the sickness that ran among women and children, the ceaseless skirmishing with Bushmen, the war with Mosilikatze and his Matabele. And more than a little of the uncompromising nationalism that dominates the present Boer Government of the Union finds its source in the traditions of that epic time when Dutch pioneers conquered the vast territory that lay between the Orange and the Limpopo rivers and set up a government there of their own fashioning.

But still the British interfered. They sought by devious methods to reclaim the territories of these vortrekkers for the Empire. But in 1880 the last vestiges of Britain's authority were destroyed at the battle of Majuba Hill, and the Transvaal Republic was pro

claimed. There were six years of comparative security, and then, in 1886, a gold reef was discovered on the Witwatersrand; prospectors poured in to profane the veldt, and hostility to the British found new support. A decade later came the Jameson Raid, when Rhodes, irked by the limits which Paul Kruger - Oom Paul, President of the Transvaal Republic-placed upon Britain's African dominions, permitted a freebooting expedition against the authority of the Boers. And, the Raid failing, the Boer War followed, and final annexation by Great Britain of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Thus, again, British ambition thwarted the dreams of the vortrekkers.

For that last chapter the Dutch of South Africa, despite such notable converts to English rule as Smuts and Botha, will not soon forgive Great Britain. Life in the Transvaal and the Orange Free State - before the British came was paced to suit the Boers, as it had been in the Cape- before the British came. Oom Paul, four times President, governed from his front porch and welcomed there any who came that way, rich and poor, wise and foolish; and served them coffee after the custom of the veldt. Authority came from the bush and was administered on behalf of the back veldt. Settlers, who had come by ox wagon and for certain definite reasons, founded the country. And Paul Kruger, himself a vortrekker, governed along lines that those pioneers approved and at a pace that they could understand.

There were towns in the Transvaal before Johannesburg, but they were small and unimportant. Town dwellers, who finally made up a clear majority of the population, received little consideration from the Government and had an even smaller share in the governing. The back-veldt Boer then, as now, looked upon the towns with dislike