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umphs in diplomacy-all by one man.

In the natural course of things Downing would have been haled to Tyburn and hanged by the neck until dead, but he won his way into the favor of King Charles by claiming that the King must forgive his past backslidings because of the vicious principles he had sucked in in his early New England education. [Laughter.] Finally he died, and by his will he devised his mansion and estates and farm at Westminster to his children, and now they are gone, leaving no rack behind except a little bit of ground one hundred yards long and twenty yards wide, sometimes narrowing to ten, which bears still his illustrious name. It is the smallest, and at the same time the greatest, street in the world because it lies at the hub of the gigantic wheel which encircles the globe under the name of the British Empire. . . . I have heard it called a cul de sac-a place where you can get in but cannot get out. How, however, other nations may find it, we Americans, by reason of our prescriptive rights in the premises, find it to be a thoroughfare. [Laughter.] We feel entirely at home in it. Our feet are on our native heath. We can go in and go out, and give and take on equal terms.

Whatever may have been the diplomatic morals of the Anglo-American Downing in the seventeenth century, at the opening of the nineteenth century the ideas of the ambassadorial function -at least in Anglo-American relationsbegan to undergo a radical change. It It gradually dawned both on the official and the popular mind that the real work of an ambassador is to promote the mutual friendship and welfare of the two countries with which he is officially related. Americans may modestly congratulate themselves that their representatives have had no small part in effecting this change of attitude. Among the distinguished names on this ambassadorial roll of honor are those of John Jay, Edward Everett, Charles Francis Adams, James Russell Lowell, Edward J. Phelps, Joseph H. Choate, and Walter Hines Page. Two of these saved us from the imminent danger of war with Great Britain-Adams, by his famous note to Earl Russell during the Civil War, in which he said, referring to the building of ironclads for the Confederacy in an English shipyard, "It would be superfluous for me to point out to your lordship that this is war;" and Page, by suggesting to Sir Edward Grey that a French cruiser instead of a British cruiser be despatched to capture the American contraband steamer Dacia, thus calming

American irritation with Great Britain, which was at the breaking-point.

Ambassadors do not often have international problems of this magnitude to solve. Their duties are largely social. But the important influence of social tact on international relations is proved

Wide World

Dwight W. Morrow, who has just been
appointed Ambassador to Mexico

conclusively, if it needed any proof, by the historic achievement of Colonel Lindbergh in France. Lord Cromer, one of the great diplomatists of modern times, in discussing the social aspect of ambassadorial functions employs the following entertaining anecdote to illustrate the qualifications demanded of an ideal ambassador:

It is related that a lady once asked Madame de Staël to recommend a tutor for her boy. She described the sort of man she wished to find. He was to be a gentleman with perfect manners and a thorough knowledge of the world; it was essential that he should be a classical scholar and an accomplished linguist; he was to exercise supreme authority over his pupil, and at the same time he was to show such a degree of tact that his authority was to be unfelt; in fact, he was to possess every moral attribute and intellectual faculty which it is possible to depict, and, lastly, he was to place all these qualities at the service of Madame de Staël's friend for a very low salary. The witty Frenchwoman listened with attention to her friend's list of indispensable qualifications and eventually replied: Ma chère, je comprends parfaitement bien le caractère

The Outlook f

de l'homme qu'il vous faut, mais j dois vous dire que si je le trouve, l'épouse. dear, I know exactly the kind of man you are looking for, but I think I ought to tell you that if I find him I shall marry him!]

England-for Lord Cromer was speaking of the English diplomatic serviceis not the only country that expects to get ideal ambassadors "at a very low salary." We have been and still are parsimonious in this respect. Our first, and probably most famous, ambassador to England, Benjamin Franklin (I am using the term ambassador in its generic sense of legate, representative, commissioner, envoy), paid a large part of his necessary expenses out of his own pocket, and so have all his successors. Dr. Andrew D. White, one of the best of our Ambassadors to Germany, said about twenty years ago that his office cost him nearly twenty thousand dollars annually in addition to his salary, and he was not a rich man nor did he entertain socially beyond the actual requirements to maintain the dignity of his office. What, then, the American people -or, at least, those who are publicspirited enough to think about it at all -desire in their ambassadorial representatives is a combination of wisdom, learning, tact, a high sense of public and private honor, a knowledge of political problems, and some private means to maintain the dignity of the office.

Judged by these qualifications, the latest ambassadorial appointment is an eminently good and satisfactory one. Mr. Dwight Morrow, who has just been appointed Ambassador to Mexico to succeed Mr. Sheffield, meets the requirements in a peculiarly happy fashion. President Coolidge and Mr. Morrow were classmates at Amherst in the class of 1895. Mr. Coolidge knows, more intimately probably than any other man, that Mr. Morrow's prime interest and motive in life is public and civic service, and not private gain. The fact that he has been for thirteen years a partner in the firm of Messrs. J. P. Morgan & Co., from which he has now resigned, is of no significance whatever except in two respects which have a direct bearing on his new office he has had thirteen years of notable experience in cling with men and affairs and with international problems of both economics and politics; and he has presumably acquired sufficient means so that he can perform his ambassadorial duties without fear or favor or without any anxiety about their effect on his private welfare.

This is excellent so far as it goes, but it is not enough. An ambassador must

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have some personal gifts and qualities as well as economic freedom. Does Mr. Morrow meet this test? Those who know him believe that he does.

The new Ambassador was born in West Virginia fifty-four years ago. His parents, or he himself, I do not know which, chose a small New England college for his education, and ever since he has been a believer that the small college has a special function in the scheme of education. Culture is a much-abused and therefore a somewhat unpleasant word, but I think that Mr. Morrow subscribes to Matthew Arnold's definition of culture as "knowing the best that has been thought and said in the world." The small college cannot give a technical education; it cannot maintain great research laboratories; but it can promote the Matthew Arnold kind of culture better, perhaps, than the big university. It was the little college of William and Mary that produced John Marshall and Dartmouth that developed Daniel Webster. All that the small college needs for this purpose is a well-chosen library and a few teachers of sound scholarship, wholesome critical judgment, human sympathies, and enthusiasm.

As a

trustee of Amherst Mr. Morrow has been a leader in the movement to make the American small college a center of this kind of intellectual life. At heart I should say that he is not primarily financier or industrialist, but an intellectual liberal, believing that the future of the United States depends upon how it

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nurtures and sustains its intellectual life. With a few rare exceptions, like Abraham Lincoln, national history has been made by intellectuals-Plato and Aristotle in Greece, Henry VIII and Oliver Cromwell in England, Cavour and Mazzini in Italy, and our own great Revolutionary group, which, included John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Marshall, and Alexander Hamilton, are names that come to mind.

I remember dining and spending the evening, a few years ago, at Mr. Morrow's home with a group of men, some of them distinguished men of affairs, whom he had asked to meet an Oxford professor on a visit to this country. The professor's visit had been made on Mr. Morrow's invitation for the purpose of delivering a series of lectures in his specialty Greek literature, if I remember correctly at Amherst. What gave the evening special interest was that the professor, quiet, cultivated, and charming, was the son of a coal miner and a member of the radical wing of the Labor Party. In England they are not afraid of having radicals in their universities or rich men in their Government. The trouble with us is that so many of our radicals are of half-baked culture and so many of our rich men have a slight intellectual background.

After graduating from Amherst Mr. Morrow got his technical education at the Columbia Law School and practiced his profession for ten years before entering banking. The Distinguished Ser

vice Medal was conferred upon him by General Pershing in 1919 for his work in connection with military shipping and supplies. It appears, therefore, that he is familiar with not only the theory but the practice of international law and relations.

There is one other thing of interest to be noted in connection with the appointment of the new Ambassador to Mexico. Mr. Morrow's older brother, Colonel Jay J. Morrow, a graduate of West Point in 1891, was Engineer of Maintenance, Acting Governor, and Governor of the Panama Canal from 1916 to 1924 except when serving in the World War. Thus a talent for administrative work seems to be a family trait.

It is intimated by the daily press that there may be some opposition in the Senate to the confirmation of Mr. Morrow's appointment on account of his former connection with Messrs. J. P. Morgan & Co. If there are any Senators who are sincerely anxious on this account, they may take courage by remembering that Robert Bacon, a partner of J. P. Morgan, was appointed Secretary of State by President Roosevelt and Ambassador to France by President Taft, and the Republic still lives!

Mr. Morrow is the type of man we need in our political administration, and I, for one, hope that his acceptance of the President's appointment is the beginning of a public career as useful and disinterested as his private career has been.

S

What's Wrong With

the

the Ring?

An Interview by Dixon Merritt

OLDIERS' FIELD had folded it

self around the mightiest mass of men and women ever drawn at one time to one sporting event on this continent. Gene Tunney for the skill of it, and Jack Dempsey for the kill of itand for a million and a half of dollars, more or less-were shortly to meet in the center of that square marked off by silken ropes, 20 X 20, and fight with their fists until one or the other of them should be confirmed as the champion pugilist of the world, until the crown should settle firmly on the head of Tunney or flit back to the head of Dempsey, still welted from wearing it until a year before.

Soldiers' Field, on the windy lake front of Chicago, had seated its hundred and fifty thousand. Away to the north, two blocks away at the least, lay dim and mottled masses, like mud flats in a river fog-the multiplied thousands who sat in the cheap seats, so far away that they could neither see nor hear, so far away that many of them actually never knew the result of the big fight until they went back to town and read it in the papers. Even the forty-dollar seats, ringside, sprawled broadly as a prairie corn-field. The banked tiers down the sides of the field looked, in the scramble of blaze and shade, like two great cities on distant mountain-sides, lights glowing in the windows of half the houses, some of them always going out, others always coming on-the matches struck to light a hundred thousand cigars and ciga

rettes.

"Look at it well, my boy. It's a sight that you never will see again-the biggest crowd that a prize-fight ever drew, and the biggest that a prize-fight will ever draw."

T

HE voice was the voice of James J. Corbett, "Gentleman Jim," former world's champion pugilist, always and forever the world's beau ideal of the boxer-the man who introduced boxing to the prize ring. The man who, with his head and his feet-and some help from his slender hands-put the killer Sullivan to sleep in the twenty-first round. The man who stood in front of the mauling, pile-driver fists of Peter Jackson, the Negro, for sixty-one rounds. The man who did the dance of the frol

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icsome fay around the brawny bulk of Jake Kilrain and boxed him into a stupor.

There he sat, "Gentleman Jim." Sixty. Clean and slim, almost, as when he gave a new meaning to the name of the box-stall in his father's livery stable. No cauliflower ear, no flattened nose, no scarred lip, no slightest mark upon him anywhere of all his hard-fought battles in the days when, but for him, bruising was the rule of the ring. He was a bankteller once, this Corbett. And as he sat there, flashing his rapier wit as once he flashed his fists, you might have thought that he had gone on in that career until he was president of the biggest bank in the land-except, perhaps, that his eyes were too sympathetic for the eyes of a banker. "Gentleman Jim," as he waited through the preliminaries, making prophecy of the future.

"Prize-fighting is at its peak so far as crowds and gate receipts and purses are concerned. The game will develop, yes -but in other ways. This is the biggest."

He did not say "Thank God," but he looked it.

"How? Who can tell? It's so different from what it was in my day. So much bigger and yes, so much better in many ways."

"Better? But is it honest? Honestly, is prize-fighting honest?" "Gentleman Jim" did not hesitate.

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"T's terribly hard for anything with

"IT'S

as much money in it as there is in prize-fighting to-day to be honest-especially for a sporting, gambling proposition such as prize-fighting is. I don't know of anything dishonest that has been done I wouldn't. But I know the temptations that honesty has to meet.

"If a fight is crooked, the two fighters do not have to be in on it. I doubt if they can be in on it and get away with it. But the referee. He's a poor man, usually; his earnings for a year are not a fractional part of what the short-end fighter gets for an evening's work. A few thousand dollars-or a few hundred thousands, maybe is a temptation.

"The referee might not always be able to control the result, but he can do a great deal to affect it. In the one par

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ticular of breaking the fighters when they clinch he can do more to help one and to hurt the other than the average spectator can understand-perhaps more than any man can understand unless he has been in the ring himself.

"But that's not the worst of it. There are in effect three referees-a referee and two judges. The decision is reached by majority vote. Nobody knows who voted one way or the other. That is never announced. Nobody is directly and solely responsible.

"There ought not to be any judges in a prize-fight. The whole responsibility ought to be on the shoulders of the referee. Then everybody would know that he was responsible for what was done and public opinion would hold him accountable for it. When there are three and nobody knows how they voted, anything, good or bad, just goes without being questioned very much."

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genius of Bob Fitzsimmons is excepted, the last-until Tunney jolted the crown from Dempsey's head at the Sesquicentennial a year ago. In a sense, Tunney is Corbett's son in the faith.

"Gentleman Jim" said that Gene ought to win, not that he would win. Then he went on-impersonally, it seemed:

"The men who control boxing do everything they can to cultivate the slugger and to stop the clever man. They don't try to develop scientific men. That goes for the boxing commissioners.

"What do they do to make it hard for the clever man? Lots of things.

"A ring should be twenty-four feet square. That gives a chance to the man who has footwork.

"But they deliberately change the rules to suit themselves. Many times they stage bouts in sixteen, eighteen. twenty foot rings. That robs the clever man of his chance, of his footwork. One jump back-he's against the ropes. He is forced to stand up and slug.

"Many times a man who does not know the first rules of boxing can, if he is big and strong, win the decision over a man vastly his superior. That's due to the system which is encouraged.

"If the bout is fairly even, they nearly always give it to the aggressor. Now who is going to be the aggressor but the big slugger? Naturally, he is the aggres

sor. Naturally, the clever boxer is using his feet, keeping out of the way of the wallops. But the decision goes to the aggressor.

"That is a very bad thing. The decision should be given on points, on style, on generalship. If a man is being rushed but can't be hit, he deserves credit for not being hit.

"How can you develop a scientific fighter when they give him the worst of it every time he starts?

"Now, you were asking about the possibility of a fight's being fixed between the fighters themselves. Honestly, I don't believe it can be done. One of them may know that it has been fixed, that he is to win whether he wins or not. But the two of them conniving in a fixed fight-no.

"When the men themselves cook up something, it shows on the surface. Oh, it has been done once in a while, but it is detected without any trouble. Prizefighters are not good enough actors to get by with it. When it has been attempted, the fight has usually been stopped and thrown out. That is not the way fights are fixed-if they are fixed."

THE talk came back to Jack and

Gene, to things that might affect the fight immediately ahead. Why was there such insistence that Dempsey be

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required to put his bandages on in the ring? Said "Gentleman Jim:"

"Bandages are important thingsvery important. Gibson, Tunney's manager, insists that Dempsey has sometimes put some stuff, practically a cement, on his bandages. I don't know. But you see what such a thing would mean-bandages that would get harder the longer they stayed on, until the man could beat on an iron post, practically without feeling it.

"Has such a thing ever been done? Oh, yes. It's an old trick. Kid McCoy made it famous. Or it made him famous or otherwise.

"Dempsey has been putting his bandages on in his dressing-room.

"It should be made an absolute rule of the game that all bandages must be put on in the ring, in the sight of the spectators."

A buzz as of innumerable bee swarms swept the towering tiers. A hush. A roar. Silence again. All the lights went out in all the houses of the cities on the mountain-sides. They were coming on for the big bout, the contestants and other celebrities. Big Jim Jeffries, exchampion, was there. Sharkey, close Sharkey, close contender for championship honors, was there.

A call came for Corbett. He smiled his thanks, and shook his head. He was o see a boxer fight. His principles

and his heart-were in the ring. Why Bur "Gentleman Jim" was elated, too,

should he parade before the footlights?

THE

HE ten rounds of the Tunney-Dempsey fight is a tale a thousand times told. This is all that matters here:

The slugger "Dempsey of the fighting heart"-got home with the best that he had, got home with his mightiest blow, the blow that pulverized Willard and Firpo and all the rest. The boxer took it full on the jaw, all of it, and another one behind it. He went to the floor-and came up at the count of nine the same cool, consummate ring general that he had been at the beginning of the bout. Came up and won by the exercise of that which "Gentleman Jim" calls cleverness, which some have called the supremacy of brain over brawn.

"Gentleman Jim" had won; in a sense, he was champion of the world again. His principles, as embodied in Tunney, had for the second time triumphed over the slugging idol of the "fighting heart."

Was "Gentleman Jim" elated? All that he said was this: "I'm sorry for Dempsey. I know how it feels-know but cannot express it-to lose a championship fight."

Those who are old enough may remember that when he won the championship of the world his first expression was one of sorrow for Sullivan, lying there on the boards.

BU

UT on Soldiers' Field. He was delighted with the orderliness of the big crowd, the way in which the fight was handled. Nobody could have any complaint, or any suspicions, he said. His prophecies were optimistic now. Thus:

"Boxing is better off than it ever was, if it can be kept there.

"When I fought, women would not go to a fight. Now the best people go.

"Boxing is not a brutal sport. Blood? Yes, but nobody is hurt much when you see blood-only a mashed nose or a cut lip.

The blows that really hurt the spectator never knows.

"Remember this: Boxing is the fairest sport of all. A man knocked down must get up of his own free will, unassisted. He can end the fight any time he wants to. There's not half as much punishment in boxing as there may be in football.

"The fight fans cheer when a man is down, yes. But I heard a football crowd cheer when a player was taken off the field-might have had his back broken, a thing that could not happen in a prize-fight. Yes, they cheer when a man is down. It's very sad, that part of all games.

"But the boxing game is better than it used to be. Whether it goes on getting better-that's all up to the boxing commissions."

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