cessful farmers, owners of large tracts of land with tractors and machinery and day laborers to man them: such men earn somewhat more than their pay-rolls and the taxesmen who hold on to the homes of their forebears or men who, having made fortunes in industry, have retired to broad acres in the country, like English business men of the eighteenth century. But these are not the farmers who made the United States, the self-sufficing, self-sufficing, home-owning folk who shouted and roared and drank bad whisky in the days of Jackson and Clay. They are business men, masters of fortunes and the labors of others, not unlike the lords of plantations put down in the Civil War. Why a great war to put them down? If one turns to the city. There is so much wealth and refinement that twenty-year old houses must be torn down to make room for more fashionable houses; new styles in apart ments cause old apartments to be abandoned after ten or fifteen years; a fancy for antique furniture sets everybody seeking antiques and starts fresh manufacturies for the making of ancient furniture at top prices. In the loop of Chicago or on Manhattan Island great business houses built in the days of Cleveland and McKinley are torn down to make room for sky-scrapers, land selling at five hundred dollars a square foot. Nothing is stable, neither ancient landmarks nor ancient families make any appeal. Wealth is so vast, income so great that anything can be ventured. It is a marvelous picture; and who blames the farmer's son if he aban dons the holdings of his father, the farmer's daughter if she hurries to the slavery of clerkships and waitresses' jobs in the city? Two million farmer folk have abandoned the land since 1920, six hundred thousand in the year 1926. The city and not the wilderness is now the appeal, the ancient longing for a freehold, a place where one is one's own master no longer exists. Land values are high although immigrating Europeans no longer wish to be landowners; they prefer to crowd the streets of the city, looking to industry for wages, for cottages on long, dreary dirty streets. It is a new United States that now lifts its head in the great world, ready to lend money, to lead in new ways or to conquer a weary or a backward world. The farmer is on the way to peasantry. Is there a desire to deflect his course? Do the powerful in the United States wish to deflect it? I doubt it. But if they do, the remedy is not an easy one. A declining rate of tariff taxation would give the greatest relief. But a steadily falling tariff would lead to violent business protests. A reclassification of freight rates would assist; but railroad managers and their army of workers would resist to the extreme-there might be nation-wide strikes. A decentralization of accumulated capital, already dangerous in its greatest center, would take some money from imperialistic ventures in foreign lands and make money easier in farm loan banks; but financiers would make their powerful opposition felt in a moment. More important, the city markets might be opened to farmers, but an army of distributors and middlemen would resent the first move that was made and denounce it as socialism. Some governmental assistance might be given to the organization of the farmers and to the seasonal warehousing of their surplus; and this would mean much. And a statesmanlike flood control in the Mississippi Valley would mean even more, to future generations of farmers. But no one of these remedies would be sufficient; all of them, duly applied, would halt for a time the rapid pace of farmers toward tenantry, merely halt the pace. At any rate, a people with an annual income of ninety billions ought to be able to lend some assistance to its farmers with the lowest average effective income since the inauguration of George Washington. But there is little serious thought in the capital. The President glibly vetoes farm bills without offering better ones. The Secretary of the Treasury is bent upon lowering the income tax in the higher brackets by $225,000,000; the Democratic leaders would go him one better and reduce the tax by $290,000,000— hardly a thought here of the misery and the squalor in Alabama or Dakota farmsteads. Nobody thinks of accumulating a surplus, in these years of surpassing abundance in business, to finance remedies for agricultural ills; and many able men even declare there are no ills, and bid the farmer "keep out of politics," keep out of the house of his fathers! Two million farmer folk abandoned their lands between 1920 and 1926. No farm problem? The present vast industrial privilege is the result of a hundred years of business men in politics. The railway leaders have been in politics since 1850, and they operate now under the protecting law of 1920. There has never been a time when bankers were not in politics, and the great army of financial men are now protected and guided to steady and increasing profits by positive law. Even the labor organizations are shielded by State and national law. "Let the farmer keep out of politics." Everybody but the maker of the country has a right to governmental assistance. The victim of every deflation for a hundred and fifty years, the tough-fibered, red-necked tiller of the soil, with no wilderness left him as an asylum, must, like the Indian "march on," or reverse his course and hasten to the city, seek a place under the labor roof and endeavor to exploit his fellows left behind; or he must stick to his dunghill, grip his peasant's hoe and doff his dirty cap to superiors who command him-the rôle that twenty generations of his forebears played on the ancient hills and plains of Europe. A marvelous evolution, devolution of the American farmer. "For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath." FTER hearing Mr. Hughes at Havana, we would define diploAFTER macy as the art of convening statesmen for the purpose of avoiding the issue for which they were convened. WHAT 23 THAT has become of the old-fashioned murder jury that used to be able to return a verdict of "guilty"? As well inquire for the chap who used to play a "sweet potato" when he went calling on the girl who wore white cotton stockings and kept a diary. C 23 OMPETITION may be the life of trade, but nothing can jack up the annual dividend like a good tight merger. Newspapers, banks, chain-stores and railroads seem to be leading the way toward a new alinement of big business. But the merger is only the penultimate stage of development. The last phase will be reached when the Big Mergers (fill in your own names here) after absorbing everything in sight, begin to absorb each other. Then the real Emperor of America will arise and take his place on the throne of a completely merged and submerged nation. C 22 ALVIN COOLIDGE certainly has a flair for amiable and misleading language. If posterity ever gets around to read his speeches it will think the United States was chin-deep in clover along about 1928. But perhaps by that time, posterity will be clever enough to paraphrase the Queen's reply to Hamlet: "The gentleman doth protest too much." Some industries do have a way of looking to the President for an encouraging nod. Twice now he has kept the stock-market from slipping, merely by giving it the go-ahead bell. But it takes more than an optimistic paragraph to clear up the bituminous miners' misery, or put the Mississippi refugees back on their farms. 23 get the necessary $150 to pay for his college fraternity pin, a Massachusetts freshman held up a cigar-store and is now taking a semester's work in the county jail. Apparently, what this country needs is a good five-cent fraternity pin. 22 LL no one speak a harsh word against the Boy Scouts? W Doesn't the sight of so many youngsters, drilled and regi mented before they know enough to protest, fan the wrath in some Constant Reader's bosom? Isn't sand-lot baseball, duck-on-the rock, the noble game of Pirates, and in short, all forms of spontaneous play, jeopardized by the boy-exploitation ideals of Supervised Activity, good-deedism, and right by squads? 23 TORKED Five Jobs while at College, Kentucky Legislator, 26, "W Dies." Benjamin Franklin would have shaken his head gravely and remarked that the young man probably paid too much for his whistle. To wait on table, tend furnace, sell papers, jerk sodas and at the same time study toward a college degree is a life that many Americans will defend, for perverse reasons, as ambitious and deserving of credit. But quite bluntly it is a life both vicious and absurd, a life quite unworthy of a free man's interest or devotion. Even Theodore Roosevelt, most strenuous of modern livers, inveighed against the folly of trying to work one's way through college. His advice to the intellectually ambitious young man was: "Take a job for a couple of years, save enough money to allow you to study leisurely until your funds are gone, then repeat the process." And until every impecunious student can get a fat scholarship, Roosevelt's counsel will be the soundest advice a young man can heed. College authorities know that the part-time student is a poor risk, and that a high per cent of undergraduate mediocrity and failure is due directly to the strain and worry of budgetary difficulties. Why not put a little frankness into the college entrance questionnaire by asking, "Have you enough money to carry you through the rigors of one academic year? No? Have you any money at all? No? Then go to work and get some. We shall honor your persistence and good faith when you come back with enough money to support yourself decently for one college year." Any one who has drudged through college for his board and room knows that under such conditions, life, study, food, youth and happiness are sorry myths. One job is enough for any man; two means a thinning-out somewhere; three means slavery, and as the young Kentucky legislator shows us, five can result in death. PROHIB 22 ROHIBITION agents are now busily defending in the Supreme Court their constitutional right to tap private telephone wires, without judicial warrant, to secure evidence against suspected violators of the Eighteenth Amendment. Somewhere hidden away in the Constitution is a guarantee of personal liberty known (or forgotten, rather) as the Fourth Amendment. It runs quaintly enough: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated; and no warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." True, the word "telephone" does not occur in the article, but it is difficult to see how wire-tapping for purposes of securing evidence does not violate the spirit of the Fourth Amendment. At any rate, the sanctities of private conversation are now thrown upon the mercies of the Court. The spectacle of the two ends of the Constitution fighting each other, shows the wide circle we have traveled in our philosophy of government. Formerly we posited a constitutional amendment as a guarantee of personal liberty; now we invoke a later amendment to assail those same liberties. Messrs. T. Jefferson, P. Henry and A. Hamilton may with perfect propriety turn over in their graves as the anomaly becomes more and more apparent. 22 IXTY per cent of all Protestant churches made not a single convert in 1927. And in the same year Will Durant's publishers sold nearly 200,000 copies of his "Story of Philosophy." It seems that Americans would rather know the definition and history of God than praise him in his temples. 23 BRIAND speaks with his wonted eloquence at Geneva, and while he is not first among the doves of peace, he is delivering more than his share of mouth-filling rodomontade. "Abandonment of war as an instrument of policy" is his contribution to the recent congress, and one almost believes he is anxious for peace until one hears about the $64,000,000 military railroad France is throwing across the Sahara. The Associated Press newsnote declares that the railroad will never earn its expenses, but when it is completed France will have 10,000,000 native African troops within easy hauling distance. Hereafter it won't be so easy to talk about France being "bled white." But why all the verbifuge and obfuscation at Geneva? THE 22 HE late Charles P. Steinmetz, the electrical genius, was visiting at the home of Roger Babson. He had been discussing the future of aeronautics, radio and power transmission, when his host asked him what line of human activity would see the greatest development during the next fifty years. Mr. Steinmetz replied: "I think the greatest development will be made along spiritual lines. Here is a force which history clearly shows has been the greatest power in the development of mankind," |