and set near the fireplace, a young man, little more than a skeleton, was watching them with burning eyes. Huddled on another pallet sat an old, old man, his back turned toward them.

"Tell them who I am, Taoufa, and why I have come," said Father Flanagan, speaking so every one in the room could hear. Taoufa shook her head without uttering a word. Then she pointed to the old man and whispered:

"He-Who-Sees-the-Gods!"
The priest repeated:

"Tell him I have come to show him the one true God, Taoufa."

He laid a hand on the crucifix in the pocket of his ulster; but Timmy stopped him short with a gesture and shook his head.

Then Father Flanagan leaned over to look at the man's face, and he knew not what to say.

Whether the vision the old man carried within him revealed the gods of stone of his island or the gods of flame forged by his own heart, he would never have the vision of any other. The God of ivory, the God carved on the good priest's crucifix, he would never see; for He-Who-Sees-the-Gods was blind.

T

HE way to take in a play or a picture or a mountain peak is to go and look, listen and, without conviction, let it tell us what it has to say. If we know already all about everything, if we know what art is, and the true and the beautiful- But we don't; so we lend our eyes, ears, and mind with all our heart. That is the way to hear music, read poetry, history, science, and the news of the day. That is the way to meet men, women, and the gods. Stop! Look! Listen! That's how to keep from being run over by the cars. Safe, polite, and artistic, this is likewise the scientific attitude; and it is ethical; it is truly pious. There is humility in it; there is reverence, there is humor, in it. Stop judging! Look afresh! Listen anew! That's the way to live, learn, and enjoy life. It is the only way to take in a continent in the throes of resurrection: Europe, for example.

Europe is a spectacle; the whole world is. We are riders on a planet that has just struck the fourth dimension and discovered the relativity of all things to everything else: time and space; war, peace, and oil; cause and effect. There is no absolute. Nothing is fixed except some good human minds, and these, we begin to realize, are being moved with the speed of the fixed stars and the agitation of the indivisible atom. It is awful. Nature God-is hurrying us up, lest we

kill one another off before our time, and the haste is making a show of us and our fourteen points—all of us, Europeans, Asiatics, Africans, and Americans. But the leading show on earth to-day is Europe.

Behind Asia in the process of evolution, Europe is ahead of us, and Africa, but we backward peoples are on the way; we are traveling along the same old road, and so, some day, we shall be where Egypt, Greece, Rome, and poor old Europe are now, if we don't watch out. And if we do watch out, we may not only avoid the fate of the Old World; we shall see a wonderful drama, a four-ringed miracle-mystery-movie: a great play by a great Author; a series of sermons by the Prophet of prophets; a laboratory of experiments by the First Scientist; a broad strip of jokes by the Divine Comedian. The critics of it, melodramatic correspondents with inspired policies, dub it a problem play, dull, confused, and a tragedy without end. Business men, with their workers and their wives, afraid to think and be tired, believe what they themselves call "the lying press," and turn from this Divine Comedy to go to the movies. A mistake. They are missing the real show.

And they are missing it because, having convictions, they will not see Europe first, then judge. No, they know what is right,-that knowledge is, they think, inborn, final, fixed,—so

they stand upon their certain sense of what is right, jump from that to who is wrong, and having picked the personal devil and condemned him, they will not look and they cannot listen to man or God. Public opinion is a lynching bee out to avoid thought.

This year it is France that is the villain. Every year I leave Europe between the acts to come home to get in touch with American public opinion, and I listen to the questions put to me by the people I meet. Professionally I listen and professionally I hereby report: that every year the demand is for judgment, not for news, but for editorials, not for information, but for a short, sharp decision, and always the verdict expected is the verdict that will confirm the questioner's own prejudgment. First the Germans were the villains of the show, then the Russians, now it is the French. All the questions asked me this year-all-carried a conviction of France and the French policy in the Ruhr, and most of the questioners were ready intellectually to lynch the French people, who, of course, know as little of the French Government's purposes as the American people do.

"What are the French up to, anyhow? Are they crazy? Have we got to go over and lick them next?" So speaks the American judge.

"No," I say quietly, "the French are not crazy. They are rational, and for that reason they cannot be licked just now. They did not join in the Washington agreement to cut land, air, and sub-sea forces. They reasoned about it. They reasoned that, since peace had not been made and the causes of war remained, there might be some more fighting and the French would better be prepared for it. And

prepared they are. Next to the Bolsheviki, the French are the best-armed government in the world to-day. And they are that precisely because they are sane, logical, and, taking the world as it is, they are right. If we would listen to them, we would hear that the French are trying to carry out consistently a perfectly logical policy."

"Impossible!" exclaims the judge.

"Yes," I admit, "that is what the experts say. American, English, German, the financiers on the reparations job, tell us the French course in the Ruhr and generally is not a practical policy. And they may be right. Perhaps the French policy won't work. But what of that? It's logical. It is not 'all wrong.' On the contrary, if treaties are not 'scraps of paper,' then it is 'right' for the French to stand fast upon the Treaty of Versailles, close the mortgage, and exact their pound of reparations, etc."

This answer seeming to mystify, I add that maybe treaties are scraps of paper-when they convey an uneconomic contract. Maybe it is not the French, but logic, theirs and ours, that is wrong. Maybe consistency is a fault. In a syllogism the premises are very important; more so even than the conclusion, which is often nothing but a purpose in disguise. Maybe it is not right to apply pure reason to an impure international, social, political, economic problem on the basis of premises which, however widely accepted as axiomatic, are not really tested and may possibly be false. In brief, it may just be that our mode of "thinking" is mad, ours and the French, the European and the American. Maybe it's what we call right that's wrong.

That settles it usually. The mind

in the making, being pretty well made up, gives one look of horrid doubt, turns away from me and poor old Europe and, swinging back up into the tree of knowledge, wraps its intellectual tail around a thick, smooth branch and pelts me and the French (or the Huns or the Bolsheviki or Mussolini or the unspoken Turks) with green or rotten fruit plucked from the good old tree.

And it is the educated man I am aiming at. His are the certainties, his the mental processes and the moral influences that play the part of the devil in the world drama. And he has a tail, too. A biologist in London once trepanned a living monkey for some students, and he showed us that by touching parts of the raw brain he could move at will either hand or any finger on either hand of the unconscious little animal. He stirred the tail, which stirred me. Deeply moved, I asked him what would happen if he pricked the point on the brain of a man that moved the monkey's tail. He did not answer; he asked me what I was driving at, and I said that, though we had lost our bodily tail, the rudimentary appendage must still be hanging down from our rudimentary brain, and I believed that this was the hardened part we clung to our convictions with. demonstration suggested a way to move it, and so, breaking its grip, set our minds free again. The scientist The scientist was an Englishman, but he laughed, and walked away from me as my intellectual American friends do. Why?

8 2

His

In Berlin, one day, I called on Einstein and, coming straight from the peace conference at Paris with the fixed minds of the delegates in mind,

I wondered how the astronomermathematician had moved his tail. I asked him how he happened to make his revolutionary discovery. He replied in half a sentence.

"By challenging an axiom," he said.

He broke through a conviction. He questioned a settled, universally agreed-upon truth. The astronomerphysicist-mathematicians had been working on a problem in light motion, and they could not make it come out right, according to our axiomatic assumptions. Several great men tried it in vain. Einstein tackled it, and he got the same result till he remembered that we don't really know anything. Even our boasted axioms are only "working hypotheses"; and that, if they don't work, they are as "wrong" as the unemployed. He challenged: he reversed an axiom, that light is not subject to gravitation. Einstein assumed that the opposite was true; that light is subject to gravitation. And the problem was solved-theoretically. He was not through.

Einstein and the other astronomermathematicians did not accept this reasoned solution as final. They took it up, tentatively, as a theory, and they made an experiment; or, since they could not arrange the stars for an artificial test in the laboratory of the heavens, they waited for one to be set up for them. They watched for the next eclipse and, when it occurred, they looked at it. Without any conviction, with nothing but their theory in mind, they looked again, and they saw that Einstein was "right" and that one of the oldest and most sacred dogmas of "exact science" was "wrong."

This is a model example of the scientific method of experimentation by which science proceeds. It has not

yet been applied to the social sciences for several bad reasons. The worst of these is that "we cannot set up experiments in human relations." We cannot try out socialism, for example, by turning a country into a laboratory where Marx's theories may be experimentally tested on a people. But we can do as the astronomers do: we can watchfully wait for an eclipse or a war or a peace conference or a revolution, and when the Allies apply force to the Germans and the Bolsheviki apply Marx to the Russians, we can turn our telescopes and our microscopes on the experiment and make observations which would correct some of our theories and might change some of our minds, which is human progress.

And the eclipse is here. The war has happened, the Germans are defeated, the peace conferences are on, and the revolution. Our theories are being put to the proof by the inexorable workings of God's natural laws, and all that is needed now is for us, the onlookers and victims, to see that that is so and to see it scientifically.

The Bolsheviki are making an experiment in Russia with the theory of socialism, which some minds believe in as a conviction, and the experimenters, Lenine and his oligarchy, are the most determined, orthodox, and able Marxians in the world. They cannot be stopped. They might as well be watched, as the astronomers watched the stars, for they are pretty sure to confirm or correct the socialist theory that the cure for the evils summed up in the social problem is for the state to seize, own, and administer all properties and all tools.

The Germans are coming to the opposite theory-anarchism. Stinnes, a business man and a great one, holds

that what we need is a business government by business men. He hates the state. A trust-builder, he has been hindered by the politicians; so he proposes to make a trust of all his trusts, horizontal and vertical, and combining his with others' trusts, finally unite in one big union all the great key industries of Germany, a business organization of all business, which shall own and run everything, and finally abolish the political state. The I. W. W.'s had that theory; the anarchists did not mean to have capitalists do it, but that's anarchism, really. And business men everywhere are anarchists; unconscious, but actually.

The English are coming to a labor government. That is an old theory, and it has been tried out in Germany, partly in France and Italy, completely in San Francisco and in Australia. These experiments seemed to show that, unless the causes which have corrupted all governments are not removed, a labor government will be bought over just as governments by kings, priests, aristocrats, and business men have been. The English labor experiment looks like a repetition, therefore, of experiments that have failed; but the theory of it persists, and there is one new element in the British plan. The British Labor party is guided by a council of intellectuals, literary and scientific men, who are acquainted with the scientific method and the theory of the relation of effects to their causes.

The Italians are making an experiment with a political dictatorship for business. Mussolini came to his theory scientifically. He watched the Russian revolution as an experiment with a familiar red theory in mind;