woman engrossed in a volume. When I did, and, through an old habit of mine, refused to pass until I had got the title of the book, I was struck by the lightness of the story. People nowadays seem to prefer an evanescent fiction to solid biography and history. It may be a reaction of the war-surely, it can be explained in some way. Or it may be due to the inroads of the movies, which make little or no demands upon the intellect, and owe their tremendous and appalling popularity to that very fact. Give people something that amuses them, and does not make them think deeply, and you have won them, inevitably, to your cause. The success of the baby's rattle is based on a complete understanding of the infant mind; and the picture houses, with their perpetual grinding out of nothing at all, are packed by audiences who are seeking an escape from all but the most primitive emotions. They are not necessarily dull people; but mostly they are people without imagination. The movies rather glorify life for them, and the onlookers are released from opaque and drab surroundings through the magic of animated pictures that tell some sort of tale, no matter how trivial.

"We read and write nowadays a sort of shorthand. We are too busy, most of us, for the delicate and beautiful things of life. We are anxious to reach any intellectual destination, as any physical destination, at the highest possible speed; and we take short cuts whenever we can. The swiftness of modern life has swept us all on in a sort of blind frenzy, until leisure is now only a word and a moment's idleness an undreamedof event. We forget those little sidetrails off the main highway that are perhaps more crowded with glamour and delight; and we lose, through our vain wish for momentary money-making, the very essence and sweetness of the rushing days. We spend what leisure we accidentally have in a dark cavern looking at a picture which has little relation to life as it is, forgetting the books on our shelves which came out of the hearts and souls of men and women who studied humanity and crystallized it enduringly on paper.

"There is a curious delusion that the classics are dull. They contain, as a matter of fact, more movement and genuine thrills than the most lurid movie. But the thrills are an integral part of any legend of ancient Greece or Rome, or even of latter-day London and Paris; and there they lie in our libraries for all to get acquainted with who will. Is the coming generation to miss the rich opportunities which you and I enjoyed? Are the glorious stories of Ulysses and the Iliad and Penelope and Nero and Alexander the Great and a thousand

others to be lost in the clash and roar

of these demon days? Are they to be superseded by the tale of 'Somebody's Terrible Vengeance' or 'Anybody's Amazing Murder'?

"I think things will readjust themselves. I am not one to deplore every new movement, every fresh enterprise, that comes along. Instead, I look for the good in each young development, and pray that that, and that alone, will last, and the evil accompanying it may perish to make way for other crusaders."

NOT WHAT BUT WHOM

Dear Dr. Abbott:

I am deeply impressed with the thought that out of the fullness of your experience and faith you could (and should) prepare a formula of belief for the incurably religious, for whom the Apostles' Creed has become meaningless, to say the least.

Something as concise as the Ten Commandments, or the Lord's Prayer, which could be the outspeaking of the human heart and bind men (i. e., believers) in a brotherhood hitherto unattained. A. A. T.

E

DITORIAL reports in The Outlook have informed our readers that recent attempts have been made in two Protestant denominations to frame some brief formulas of faith, though these efforts were apparently inspired by a desire not to provide some new formula expressive of the results of modern thinking, but to restate in new formulas old opinions to check the propagation of new opinions. In this respect they differed widely from the proposal of my correspondent; in two respects they differed from each other. In the Presbyterian Assembly the proposal for a new creed was allowed to die in committee; in the Baptist National Convention the proposed creed, apparently a compromise between two wings, was carried by a large majority. The Presbyterian Assembly is a legislative body, and any creed adopted by that body would have had something of the moral force of law and might in time, by proper constitutional methods, become a law; if the Baptists still retain, as we presume they do, their historic spirit of independence, any creed which the National Convention adopts has no force, moral ecclesiastical, on the Baptists. It is simply an expression of the opinion of those who voted for it.

or

There is, however, in all three proposals one common element: all express a common but, in my judgment, a mistaken opinion that uniformity of belief and teaching is desirable. I think that uniformity of belief and of teaching is very undesirable. What humanity needs, what is necessary to human progress and real intellectual spiritual life, is not uniformity, but liberty and

variety. The unity must be, to use the words of my correspondent, "the outspeaking of the human heart;" it must be a unity of emotion and purpose, not a unity of intellectual opinion; it must be found in the prayers and hymns of the Church, not in the sermons of the ministers nor in creeds ancient or mod

ern.

If there had been uniformity of belief in pure science, we should still believe that the world is flat and that the sun revolves around it and we should still be studying stars in order to discover the destiny of man. When astronomy was born astrology died.

If there had been uniformity of belief in applied science, we should have no steamboats, no railways, no telegraphs, no telephones, no airplanes. Each of these inventions has had to make its way by the enthusiasm of its advocates in spite of hostile criticism and often of bitter opposition.

If there had been uniformity of belief and of teaching in medicine, we should not believe in the circulation of the blood; nor in the germ theory of disease; nor in the use of anæsthetics; and we should still be subject to annual visitations of cholera and yellow fever.

If there had been uniformity of belief in religion, there would never have been Wesleyanism; nor Puritanism; nor Protestantism; nor even Christianity. Nero believed in uniformity of teaching. Paul, Peter, James, and John believed in liberty and variety of teaching. Their motto was, "Prove all things, hold fast that which is good." The only way to prove all things is to subject everything to free and fearless discussion.

Dogmatism and agnosticism are of kin. The one declares that we can know nothing about the invisible world beyond what the Church tells us; the other, that we can know nothing about the invisible world. In fact, the invisible world is an infinite and unknown continent. The more there are to explore it and bring back the results of their explorations, the more rapid will be the progress in the higher life of the human race. The unity of the Christian Church must be secured by loyalty to a Person, not by loyalty to what others have thought about that Person.

This is well said by John Oxenham in his volume of verse entitled "Bees in Amber," published by the American Tract Society:

Not what, but Whom, I do believe,
That, in my darkest hour of need,
Hath comfort that no mortal creed
To mortal man may give;—
Not what, but Whom!

For Christ is more than all the
creeds,

And His full life of gentle deeds
Shall all the creeds outlive.

LYMAN ABBOTT,

Ꮤ

(C) Keystone

BY RICHARD BARRY

WHICH is the biggest job in the Cabinet, that of the Secretary of State or of the Treasury? Tradition and the Constitution accord it to the Secretary of State, but it would be easy to make out a good case for the Treasury.

Especially now. Without going too much into details, which would fill a large volume, here are a few of his duties: To find five billions a year with which to run the Government, to handle a public debt of twenty billions, to look after ten billions of foreign loans on which there is due half a billion interest with no pay in sight, to enforce the Prohibition Act, collect the income tax, administer the War Risk Insurance, oversee the Secret Service, and look after half the Federal buildings in the United States.

Quite a job. One would say, offhand, it required a business man. Yet Mr. Harding is the first President who has ever conceived and put into execution the novel idea of having a business man in it.

Finding a Secretary of the Treasury ought to be a simple matter. The President ought to have to ask only one question-Who is the most successful finan

cier in America? Then he should be commandeered. But it has never been done that way. Even now, having a practical financier in the Treasury is only an accident-a sort of happy chance.

One might think that Mr. Harding said to himself: "Because I have promised to make mine a sound business Administration I'll ask the most successful financier in America to take the Treasury. Who is he? John D. Rockefeller of course, but Mr. Rockefeller is too old. Who next? Mr. Morgan or Mr. Baker. Well, Mr. Baker is also very old, and Mr. Morgan is too thoroughly identified with Wall Street both actually and in public consciousness to establish the proper confidence, for confidence is about half the battle, and capable administration the other half. Who, then? I'll ask the boys who is the next best financier. Ah, Mr. Andrew W. Mellon, of Pittsburgh. Never heard of him. But he is the third or fourth richest man in America, is self-made, is independent of Wall Street-and a wizard, a genius in finance. I'll appoint him."

But it didn't happen that way, or at least only partially that way. If Mr.

Knox had been made Secretary of State, as it was one time thought he would be, Mr. Mellon would not have been Secretary of the Treasury, for both come from Pennsylvania. The old Keystone State, being the richest jewel in the Republican diadem, always rates at least one member in a Republican Cabinet-but no more than one.

So Providence seems to have been looking after the United States when the President asked a man from New York, Mr. Hughes, to be Secretary of State, thus displacing the obvious Cabinet possibility from Pennsylvania, Mr. Knox, and making the inevitable place for a simon-pure business man, a practically successful financier of the first grade, Mr. Mellon.

Do I anticipate events and the verdict of time in asserting that Mr. Mellon is the proper Secretary of the Treasury? Not entirely. The point is that he is the kind of man for the job, and nearly everybody in Washington knows it.

A little incident of a recent Cabinet meeting will explain just why he is the right kind of man. The President brought up one of the many new problems that had been thrust at him for solution. It concerned the possible scrapping or further operation of one of the Government's war plants. The President asked one after another of the men about the table their opinion in the matter. The opinions were this and that, but all were theoretical. No one had positive data to go on until the question was passed to the shyest, quietest, most retiring of the group of twelve. "And what is your opinion, Mr. Mellon?" asked the President.

"I haven't looked into it thoroughly yet," replied the new Secretary of the Treasury, with his accustomed modesty, "but I had a similar case recently in one of my own plants to deal with. The amount involved was the same$12,000,000. I scrapped mine."

That was all. Except that for an instant a sort of shocked silence descended over the Board.

Certainly this is the kind of man we have not had in that job, but which we do need now. It should be said here that Mr. McAdoo was the kind of man we needed in war time as Secretary of the Treasury-a beau sabreur of finance, a dashing leader of unconquerable audacity, who, when Congress said it needed one billion, replied, "I'll get you five billion."

The opposite type is required for the present era of reconstruction, and Mr. Mellon looks like the proper person. I asked him not long ago if he had read Alexander Hamilton's notes on the founding of the Bank of the United States, or if he knew the history of the Treasury Department. He replied no to both questions. I then asked him what

theories he held for the administration of his new office. He had none.

He approached Washington, as it were, with a blank mind. He hadn't a thing with which to grapple with the problems of the Treasury except an incomparable practical experience in big business and an uncanny financial instinct. He was extremely wary of politics and politicians. It was his first public office. Sixty-nine years old, his active constructive career practically finished, he had nothing to win and peace of mind as well as a good reputation to lose. The law had required him to resign the presidency of his banks and the directorates of corporations, so that his personal money loss per annum would run into six figures.

Yet his equipment was really unique for governmental office. You see it partially in his countenance. The profile, in bony structure, is not unlike that of C. J. Cæsar as depicted on Roman coins. The fleshy contour, however, is melting, the eyes are soft, and a drooping mustache conceals the firmness of the mouth, while his delicate nostrils and

finely chiseled lips are as sensitive as those of a high-born woman. Thus is produced an impression not so much of dynamic as of static imperial force. You feel that here is a born ruler, but of an ancient line in which breeding has developed finesse with power.

Mr. Mellon himself is the last to admit that he is a practical business man. He permits himself as little credit as possible for the many startling successes which have risen under the ægis of the capital he has advanced. The mere names of these many enterprises have filled the column of a newspaper and extend through coke, coal, steel, banking, oil, real estate, and transportation to chemical research. Yet he always points to the other man-to the promoter, the executive, or the deft salesmanas the one entitled to the glory of the achievement.

Previous to the 4th of last March Mr. Mellon's position in the financial world was different from that of any other banker of the present day. He was the survival of an era of individualists. For many years he relied on his own judg

ment solely in arriving at decisions involving many millions. For twenty-five years his was a one-man bank, without a board of directors among whom to apportion responsibility.

Carnegie came to him for help as Frick had come to his father. Scores of lesser men did likewise. With none of them was it ever a case of consulting the directors. Mr. Mellon himself said yes or no, and it was usually said with great promptness.

Thus the self-effacing Pittsburgh man quietly built up a chain of successful businesses, challenging the United States Steel Company, on the one hand, and the Standard Oil Company, on the other, afraid of neither and respected by both.

It is the engineer of such a structure that Uncle Sam has called to superintend a more extended field at a moment when there is required a constructive genius with an exquisite instinct for values and a dauntless courage in confronting billions.

We have now only to observe if the right kind of a man can proceed unhampered in the biggest kind of a public job.

I

HAVE here the figures-I am sorry to add, the disquieting figures of the increased consumption of alcoholic liquors in the United Kingdom since the armistice, as collected from official sources by Mr. George B. Wilson, the leading statistician of the temperance parties in London. No friend of England, studying these figures, can be other than anxious for her social welfare, and no friend of the United States, estimating the success or failure of prohibition, should ignore comparisons with the British alternative.

In 1914-seven years ago—the drink bill for the United Kingdom was £164,500,000, or, at $5 to the pound sterling, $822,500,000. In 1920 that drink bill was £469,700,000, or nearly three times as great, amounting to $2,348,500,000. Approximately, a sum of £10 a head was spent on drink for every man, woman, and child in the country, or for the average family of five persons £50. Such a household thus pays £1 a week for drink, or, at a normal rate of exchange, nearly $5, which is more than the total average wage of the agricultural laborer in many English counties before the war. In certain areas even to-day the miners lately on strike were only offered £2 5s. a week, or $11.

In the main, this huge drink bill is paid by the poor. Out of £469,713,000, which is the total, only £30,318,000, or one-fifteenth, was spent on wine, the beverage of the rich; and of drink taxes amounting to £133,500,000, wine only furnished a revenue of £2,235,000, or onesixtieth.

On the other hand, it is true that

BY P. W. WILSON

much of the drink bill goes to the state. The actual figures are:

Year Drink Bill 1914....£164,500,000 1920.... 469,700,000

Taxation Net Drink Bill £39,900,000 £124,600,000 197,000,000 272,700,000 (includes excess profits tax)

It will thus be seen that, even after allowing for the excess profits tax, the net expenditure, accruing to the trade, has risen from £124,600,000 to £272,700,000, or has more than doubled. And even of the taxation, it must be said that practically the whole of this revenue is drawn from wages and small salaries.

I shall next be asked what actual consumption of alcohol this expenditure represents. First, take beer. The United Kingdom drank in recent years as follows:

These figures show that in the year 1918 Britain had reduced her consumption of beer from over 26 gallons per head to under 10 gallons. This result was achieved, not by shutting public houses or saloons, but by stopping manufacture at the source. All the beer brewed was drunk, but there was only about one-third the brewing allowed. Since then there has been a "let up" on brewing, and in two years consumption has doubled. This is despite the fact that the war boom in trade had become in 1920 a slump, now so serious that more than ten per cent of wage-earners

33 gallons of beer were drunk every year per head. But the present allowance of 20.61 gallons is serious. It means 103.05 gallons per household, or fully 2 gallons per week, in addition to wine and spirits as diluted.

I should here make it plain that these barrels are "standard"-that is, of a certain legal strength of alcohol-and the standard barrel is usually diluted before it reaches the consumer. This explains why, with a reduced "standard" barrelage, the brewers are receiving more money for themselves. They have sold weaker or lighter beers at a higher price per glass, and have so reaped a rare harvest. It may be well from one standpoint to have lighter beer, but from another standpoint it means that the trade has become more powerful financially and able to demand a higher price as compensation for disturbance. It is no longer a dying industry, but an industry resurrected, with large reserves, debentures paid off, and a handsome surplus for propaganda. Experience has shown that immensely increased taxation is no remedy for the drink evil and that restricted hours of sale in saloons may only mean brisker business while sale is permitted. →

For spirits the figures are similar. Consumption fell from 31,790,000 gallons in 1914 to 15,110 gallons in 1918, but have since risen again to 22,147,000 gallons. As for wines, they have so fluctuated that whereas 10,630,000 gallons were drunk in 1914, no less than 15 Government were drunk last year,

figures, I will give the comparison in gallons per head between consumption of liquor in the United States for the year 1917, when this country was wet, and British consumption in 1920: Spirits Beer Wine United States 1.16 14.9 .34 United Kingdom.......... .47 20.61 .32 It will thus be seen that before adopting prohibition the United States consumed per head as much wine as the United Kingdom, twice as much spirits, and two-thirds as much beer.

For the year 1919 the British expenditure on drink and food compared thus:

It is surely a startling fact that on alcoholic beverages there was spent more money than upon meat and bread. Indeed, you could nearly throw the item of butter into the scale. And yet the drink bill for 1919 was only £8 8s., whereas in 1920 it had risen further to £10.

As to social effects, we have the plain tale of convictions for drunkenness. The following table is, once more, for the three years 1914, 1918, and 1919. It applies to England and Wales. We have:

It will thus be seen that as the drink consumption fell, so did drunkenness among both men and women. As the consumption rose again, so again did the evils multiply which follow drink. It is a case of cause and effect, and when the criminal statistics for 1920 are available they will show, I am afraid, a further large increase in proved intemperance.

The truth about Britain is that she is a country where the liquor trade enjoys exceptional advantages. In the long battle between the Established Church and the Nonconformists liquor supported the Church, and so divided on this issue the religious forces of the nation. Similarly, liquor financed the Conservative party, on which Mr. Lloyd George-personally a prohibitionist-depends for power. Not only has he found it impossible to proceed with temperance legislation, but he has been compelled to release the trade from limitations imposed during the war. Six years ago Britain was at least one hundred thousand working-class dwellings. in arrears, and she now needs double that number. From the old homes the people, with war money in their pockets but their war morale almost exhausted, have flocked to theaters, picture palaces, and the public-house or saloon.

If there had been no war, the grip of the traffic would still have been severe. Possibly, the United St~-~

Island, which were among the last to remain wet. In England the home counties adjacent to London and much of Lancashire, Yorkshire, South Scotland, and the Midlands are continuously urban in character-the most difficult of battlefields against "the trade." Also, it is unfortunately the fact that among women in England there is not as yet the strong etiquette which kept American women out of the saloon. The woman's vote has not been mobilized as yet against the brewers; the excitement of victory over "the Hun," the memory of the slain, has prevented a clear vision on the matter.

Also, the full effect of prohibition in the United States has still to be realized in Britain. With all his sportsmanship, Pussyfoot Johnson is still in the invidious position of the good boy who wants the rest of the family to be as good as himself. Europeans visiting the United States usually spend most of their time in areas once scheduled as wet and in homes and hotels where money and hospitable intent do produce the pleasant cocktail for a thirsty guest. These visitors go away saying that anybody can get liquor at any time in the United States, which, in a sense, is true at a price.

Newspapers, anxious for the unusual, tell of rum-running along the Canadian border, moonshining, bootlegging, and carpets spoiled by home-brewed froth. On every radiator cider is secretly fermenting. At Christmas, the mincemeat kicks. Watermelons are converted by plugs of yeast into ten per cent alcohol. One realizes why the apple in Eden was forbidden and warehouses full of spirits leak badly.

Assume that all this is as true as it is picturesque. The broad fact emerges that drink in the United States is doomed. On no public occasion can it be seen. The banquets are dry. Young people, even when given to dancing, grow up unconscious of alcohol. Following David Belasco, the theaters and movies find that prohibition helps the box office. Entertainment is now a vested interest against "booze." Great hotels and restaurants which depended on drink are disappearing, and this again weakens the wets. The cabarets and follies cannot alone fight the battle for the wets, and they are surrendering. And the Nation, while still drinking a good deal, is for this very reason drinking itself dry. There is none save homebrewed beer. There is little import of wine and spirits. And spirits in bond are disappearing.

The fears entertained in respect of prohibition are unrealized. Despite General Bramwell Booth's statement that the drug habit is growing, I can find no authoritative proof that this is the case. And if it had been the case, assuredly the evidence would have been there. Salutary sentences appear to have quashed any general danger of wood alcohol. Apparently, the cessation beer and substitution of spirits, inhin

to the initial period of prohibiButed to a more acute type of

alcoholism arising among inebriates,

but the total of drunkenness has dropped
to a fraction of what it was.
The re-
turns of the luxury taxes show that pro-
hibition has been accompanied by a
great increase in funds available for
life's minor comforts and adornments;
and the returns of Ellis Island dispose
of the notion that immigration is
thereby retarded. No one can now as-
sert that the wage-earners of Britain
are more content with alcohol than the
wage-earners of the United States are
without it, and the bugbear of industrial
unrest arising out of "the drought" has
been laid forever.

It seems to me also, as a detached spectator, that politics in the United States is now far from being the somewhat dubious game which twenty years ago it was supposed to be by people living in England. The saloon has gone, and in its place we have the woman voter, eager, ready to learn, and intolerant of duplicity or graft. In so far as liquor assisted the electoral ambitions of certain hyphenates it tended to split up and depreciate American citizenship, and from this angle also its suppression is a good thing, tending, as it does, to a deeper unity in the Nation. On the other hand, so marked a difference of social custom between the United States and other nations of European origin must result in a certain isolation of sentiment. If the United States is right, then it follows that many others are wrong. And with science internationalized and tables of mortality and industrial output available for the whole world, it is obvious that the enforcement of prohibition in any one country must in the end compel its serious consideration everywhere else.

Prohibition is, however, a law only, not a gospel. It is Mosaic rather than Christian-Mosaic and of Islam. It is derived from Mount Sinai, and not from the Mount of Olives. It says, Thou shalt not; it does not say, Thou shalt. In itself, the advantage of prohibition is physical only-better health, more money, fewer temptations. There is much to be said for the British theory that true temperance means the control of self by self and not the control of self by others. In accepting prohibition a nation returns to a former dispensation, a childhood in which orders are obeyed and the will is relieved of exercise. The only reason why, in Britain, prohibition is to-day the one fighting policy must be sought in the folly of "the trade" itself. Not only do the brewers and publicans resist all real amendment of their business, but they have this year promoted legislation which is an insult to the moral sense of moderate men everywhere. One speech by Lady Astor killed this measure. By refusing all compromise and pushing their triumphs to the utmost lengths of indifference to the national well-being the brewers will force on Britain ultimately the choice between all or none, which the United States has recently decided in favor of none.

T

HERE are bright and dark sides to a load

on your back. If it is an outing-hurrah! If it is for daily bread-ah, that is different. Our soldier boys in the war learned to carry sixty pounds or so, under "full marching orders," but the Americans are strangers to the back load as a business. Its development comes with density of population. So China easily takes the lead in volume and variety of back burdens. A Chinaman stopped to sell some vegetables, and I placed the slim stick on my shoulder and

started to lift the two full baskets attached by a rope to either end. I could not raise them; yet he, no stronger than I, knew how and started off on a little trot.

Europe has always carried on-on the back; but the war has destroyed a portion of the animal supply, and more loads loom on the shoulders than ever before. This is especially true in the devastated regions of France, and the city of Vienna, where the Socialistic Government has destroyed the value of their currency, and many people