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enables them to distinguish, among the things that they observe, the important from the unimportant. Neither of them is an advocate of a party or any public man. Neither of them has any interest in any merely partisan criticism. And yet the reader will find that the Administration looks rather different as pictured by the one from the way it does as pictured by the other. There is a somewhat corresponding difference in the way in which groups of people in this country at large view our Government at Washington. One group is inclined to say, "The Administration has done some things very well indeed, but—” The other group is inclined to say, "The Administration has of course made some blunders, but-" Thus there is practically unanimous agreement on two things: one, that our Government has to its credit some great achievements; the other, that our Government is responsible for some serious mistakes. It is human nature to crave appreciation for work well done. And such appreciation has been accorded to the Administration, and has been accorded ungrudgingly.

It is also human nature to resent criticism; but in spite of that fact there is little resentment of constructive criticism in er the minds of the men at Washington who are doing the hardest executive work in the prosecution of the war.

Indeed, those who are doing the best work are the very men who have recognized the value that public criticism has been to them and to their associates. There is no doubt that since last December, when the investigation of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs brought to public notice serious defects in the Government machine and thus aroused public criticism, there has been a very great improvement.

This does not mean that men in authority and responsible office were slothful or indifferent. On the contrary, there has been no harder or more conscientious work done in this country than has been done by some of the very men whose branches of the Government have been under fire.

The fact is, men in public office in time of war need the tonic of criticism—and for a very simple reason.

Those who talk with men in khaki, and especially with men who have been in training camps or at the front, know that such men talk very little about the war, or about questions of policy or strategy, or about the larger movements of troops, or the big questions of administration. The reason is that the time of those men is occupied from early morning till well on into the night with the intense activities of their own particular duty. The soldier in the trench has little time to think about the intentions of the Kaiser, for he has to have his mind on the intentions of Fritz. The medical officer is overwhelmed with his medical duties, and then has to devote time and energy to making elaborate reports. The field officer is concerned with the care of his men and the receipt and transmission of orders. Now what is true of men in camp and at the front is also true of men immersed in administrative duties. So long as they are left unmolested they have nothing to impel them to see nything but the next thing. If, for instance, they are charged with the duty of providing certain supplies, they have to keep hemselves alert to see that the requisitions for those supplies ome to them as other requisitions should come and are duly ecorded and attended to as they have always been recorded nd attended to. How can such men take up the question whether there is any need for requisitions at all? They cannot nd they do not unless some outside agency, with sufficient pressre behind it, impresses upon them the fact that there is somehing more important than the duty of the present routine, and hat is the reform of the routine itself.

This is what has happened at Washington. The old machinery hat answered well enough for renewing year by year the suplies for a stationary army was put to the job of creating a odern army with modern weapons to fight a war three thouand miles away. The men who constituted that machinery have orked like slaves in order to keep up. They had no thought r mind of changing the machinery itself. Most fortunately for le country, there were men who did have mind for just at thing. And through the investigation in the Senate the ressure was brought to bear for a change in the machinery self; and already, in two months' time, the effect in some ranches of the War Department is remarkable. And among ose who are most grateful for that criticism are the men

to-day who see its effect not only in easier work, but in results that have given greater fighting strength to our fighting forces. A people who withhold criticism from their Government withhold that to which their Government has a right.

JUSTICE TO WAR WORKERS

That men at work on the building of ships should have left their work when, above all things else, ships are needed to overcome the enemy, has horrified the country. It is not surprising, therefore, that the President should have addressed a Message to the strikers telling them that "no one can strike a deadlier blow at the safety of the Nation and of its forces on the other side than by interfering with or obstructing the ship-building programme;' and asking them, "Will you co-operate or will you obstruct?" The words of the President sobered these strikers, as they sobered the country. But now that the men have gone back to work, the country should not forget that there is another side to this question.

What that other side is has been tersely stated.

"I know of conditions in Newport News," said Mr. Homer Ferguson, President of the Newport News Ship-Building Company, in his testimony before the Committee on Commerce of the United States Senate, "where eighteen people lived in one room, and in another room a man, his wife, and three children, and two of the children had diphtheria. Imagine such a thing! We talk about uplift and training-camp activities and democracy, and then create a condition like that. I am not much of a settlement worker and that sort of thing, but when the Government goes ahead and creates a condition where men cannot live decently-an unnecessary condition-I think it is right bad."

A great army of laborers must live where the Government's enormous operations are being pushed through. Thirty thousand men are employed in the shipyards in and near New York, and thirty thousand more are coming. Forty thousand workmen have flocked to Bridgeport, Connecticut. Twenty-five thousand are going to the great yards now in development on the Newark meadows. There are no adequate accommodations near by. Most of the men come long distances; they start early and return late. They do not stay long at their jobs. Other men, hearing of the housing conditions, decline to come.

The result is, as Mr. Grosvenor Atterbury, the well-known housing expert, has pointed out in writing to The Outlook, that to-day labor is traveling from one plant to another, leaving in its wake only increasing discontent and unsettlement. And in order to tempt men to work under these conditions the Government must raise the current wage rate, said Mr. Atterbury, and as long as it permits these hardships in living conditions to persist, just so long will it practically bid against itself in the labor market. And, it may be added, just so long will a great and unnecessary overhead charge be added to the expense of making our ships and our munitions which our forces need in abundance.

This was a condition that was foreseen. The need of houses was known last spring by several bodies that brought the need to the attention of the Government. Though recommendations were made according to a plan instituted in the War Department, no request was made directly to Congress to provide the necessary housing. We do not know the reasons for the Government's delay. It was only the more imaginative who were able to visualize the coming of war to America before it came; and perhaps the Government did not soon enough visualize the needs of modern war or the methods to meet those needs. It was somewhat so in England. Though the Government there saw early that the great increase in the number of workmen building ships and making munitions would require a great increase in the number of houses, it did not see as clearly that this increase should be in good houses. It is not enough that there should be simply shelter, sanitation, and provision for family life. Men and women need something more than that. Attractiveness in environment helps the worker as it helps the soldier to do his bit more effectively.

As Mr. Winthrop Hamlin says in his recent study based on the housing collection of the Harvard Social Museum, "Hap

piness, or the chance for happiness, is still wrongly thought of as a luxury without which one may yet lead a profitable life." And Mr. Hamlin therefore includes among the elements which must be provided for in proper housing "æsthetic pleasure."

On page 364 in this issue Mr. Richard S. Childs, in an article on "The New Garden Cities of England," tells how England has undertaken to solve this problem which we have been facing for months in this country. He shows how England has not only provided houses for her war workers, but houses of beauty in veritable cities of gardens.

If America does what England has done, she will have her reward not only in the war but in the years that are to come when the war is over.

WHY NOT?

Dr. Karl Reiland, the rector of St. George's Church in New York City, in a recent sermon made an excellent suggestion, which we commend to our readers:

among

This dynamic of Prussian violation, this world-changing, military murder, this most Godless business of history, has not caused one great ecclesiastical convention, one convocation, one special synod, one Christian communal protest, or clear ringing call the differing servants of an offended deity, to voice the vigorous denunciation, the outraged conscience of altruistic humanity, the pathetic miseries, which the deep damnation of this degenerate and blasphemous fratricide unqualifiedly demands. Why not a great wave of Christian unification in every city and town, in every cathedral and building, where, without regard to creed, and with nothing but the Sermon on the Mount, forgetting for the time all theories of ministerial validity and official qualification, remembering only the Divine Servant girding himself with a towel for a servant's task, and his caution that man should seek the true God through a loving brotherhood of menwhy not, I say, come together for the greatest communion service ever held on earth, and find the unification of the fold in a simple, humble, spiritual imitation of the Shepherd? We need no commission to go anywhere else than out into its own dooryard to begin victoriously at home what misguidedly they are seeking vainly abroad. In our own hearts-the realest part of us-we stand close together, for we know best of all that we fundamentally belong to the greatest denomination in the world, which is the communion of the children of one only God.

Why not, in the spirit of this suggestion, hold weekly, or at least monthly, meetings in each village, town, and city-meetings in which all religious organizations should unite in services to strengthen our faith, inspire our courage, and incite and quicken our activities?

The second service in most churches is a task to ministers and a trial to conscientious laymen. They are exhorted to support a service the object of which is to support them. Why not substitute for this generally lame and inefficient service a union of all churches, including Jewish synagogues where they exist, in a service aimed to promote both piety and patriotism? Why inspire loyalty to the country only in halls, and loyalty to God only in churches?

There are many profoundly religious questions which laymen are asking and to which they have a right to look to the churches for an answer.

Is war ever right?

Does Jesus Christ teach a doctrine of non-resistance?

What is the difference between the righteous indignation that inspired Christ's unparalleled invective against the hypocrites of his time and the unrighteous wrath which the universal conscience either vigorously condemns or feebly excuses?

Can we maintain a rational faith in the goodness and power of God in view of the awful calamities of the present hour?-If so, what is that faith and how shall we maintain it?

How are we to regard death, and in what spirit are we to meet it when it comes to us and to our dear ones?

How shall we maintain our interest and activity in promoting the cause at stake in this war and avoid the worries and anxieties which depress and discourage us?

"I do the little I can do,

And leave the rest to God."

How shall we discriminate between the little we can do and the rest that we are to leave to God, and how shall we keep

alive in us the trust that leaves the rest to God that we may do our bit more hopefully and more efficiently?

Such are some of the questions which are being pressed home upon the hearts and consciences of men and women in every town and village in the country. The Church should answer them.

A French soldier, writing from the front, says in a recent publication:1

Religion flourishes whenever men pause and begin to think. Because this war is being carried on by people who are not professional soldiers, each one has been uprooted from his normal place and consequently from his routine. It has put each one in such a novel position that even those most limited mentally are anxious to understand what it is that is happening to them. They are forced to think of their destiny, and, willingly or not, they turn to the God whom they learned to know and pray to at

their mothers' knees.

If this war does not impel us to think of our destiny and turn to the God whom we learned to know and pray to at our mothers' knees, it will be the fault of the churches. The Outlook has defended them from the charge that they have done nothing; but are they doing all they can? No. The Church at this time ought to be an army. It is a series of detachments acting independently and separately, with little coherence in counsel and little co-operation in action. Dr. Reiland has pointed out one way in which they can do more. His message we repeat to all the churches we can reach:

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We should be workers together with God."

Actions speak louder than words. Dr. Reiland's counsel is both illustrated and emphasized by the remarkable dedication of church headquarters at Camp Upton on February 24-a dedication in which Protestants, Jews, and Catholics unitedof a building to be employed by them all in common under the auspices of a voluntary committee representing six different Protestant communions who provided the cost for the erection of this building.

But that dedication ought not to be an extraordinary event. It ought to be an example to be followed in spirit in every community and by all Christian churches, an example of cordial co-operation in promoting the religion of faith, hope, and love of which no sect has any monopoly.

LENTEN LESSONS

II-A TEACHER OF LIFE

A writer of the first century, a disciple of Jesus, and probably a contemporary, has defined in the following words the object of the teaching of Jesus :

For the grace of God hath appeared, bringing salvation to all men, instructing us, to the intent that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly and righteously and godly in this present world; looking for the blessed hope and appearing of the glory of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ. This statement, though very brief, is very comprehensive. for it covers the four possible relations of man to life. His relation

To the material world through the body.
To the world of man in society.

To the Supreme Being.

To the future.

How did the great Teacher teach his disciples they should live in these four relations? How should they act toward their bodies and the material world; toward their fellow-men in society; toward God; toward the future? What did Jesus mean by the four words: soberly, righteously, godly, hope fully? What should these words mean to Jesus' disciples?

What should they mean? Then Jesus did teach his disciples what to think.

Yes. Thinking is an important part of living. But with Jesus thinking correctly was incidental, living correctly was essential. Too often in the teaching of the Church thinking correctly has

1 Comrades in Courage. By Lieutenant Antoine Redier. Translated by M Philip Duncan Wilson. Doubleday, Page & Co., Garden City, N. Y. $1.40.

been essential and living correctly incidental. Living correctly is morality; thinking correctly is orthodoxy. And orthodoxy has been treated as more important than morality.

There is more preaching on life in this first quarter of the twentieth century; there was more preaching on theology in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless we wonder how large a proportion of the time of the theological seminaries is spent in teaching men how to live; how many of the church Bible classes are studying the interpretation which Jesus gave to these four words-soberly, righteously, godly, hopefully.

We wonder also how many even of our preachers think it more important to study themselves and teach their congregations what Jesus taught his disciples about sobriety, righteousness, godliness, and hopefulness than what he taught about inspiration, atonement, and the Trinity.

We venture to suggest four clnes to his teaching on these four subjects.

Soberly-" Is not the life more than the food, and the body than the raiment?"

Jesus taught that things are made for folks, not folks for things. That to sacrifice one's health of body or spirit to acquire things is always a poor bargain. That the profiteer who spends his energies in accumulating and storing wealth is a fool. Things are good servants but bad masters.

Righteously-"A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another; even as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.'

Righteousness is conforming to a standard. If a pupil spells the word as it is spelled in the dictionary, he has spelled it rightly. If the yardstick is of the same length as the standard at the City Hall, it is a right yardstick. If a life set alongside the life of Jesus measures up to his life, it is a right life. If our love for the poor, the suffering, the sinful is like his love, it is a right love.

Godly-"After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven."

We are the children of a Father, not the subjects of a King. What is the difference? The loyal subject obeys the will of his king; the loyal child shares the will of his, father. The king controls the conduct of his subjects by law; the father molds the character of his children by love. The king dwells apart from his subjects, ruling them through subordinates; the father dwells with and in his children, inspiring them by his own present personality.

Hopefully-" And the glory which thou hast given me I have given unto them."

What is this glory? The glory of the good shepherd laying down his life for the sheep. The glory of the father welcoming back without reproach the returning son. The glory of love, service, and sacrifice. The glory which Mrs. Browning has so beautifully portrayed:

THE BATH OF BEAUTY

The Happy Eremite laid aside the evening paper with a deep sigh, rose, and began to walk thoughtfully up and down the dim-lit library. The room was very quiet. The Lady Eremite and the children had long gone to bed and to sleep. Sonny, the Airedale, too, had gone to sleep with his nose on the hearth. The green hickory logs had ceased from crackling, and were purring like a drowsy cat.

The Happy Eremite was not altogether happy. The newspaper had set his nerves on edge. He was passionately interested in the war. He read each scrap of news as avidly as on those first strange, tragic, and incomparably exciting days of late July and early August nearly four years back. He devoured the editorials. This man's attack on that man, that man's defense, and a third man's scathing denunciation of both he studied with anxious care. He read reports from the camps, and endless articles and books of human stuff from the trenches. And morning, noon, and night, he talked and talked of the war.

And now he was walking up and down his pleasant library, lined with books of exquisite literature almost untouched these three and a half years, suddenly aware that the war was getting on his nerves. He found himself suddenly disgusted with the strife of tongues; disgusted with the pitiful inadequacy of his own thinking and speculating; appalled and revolted beyond words by the ceaseless record day by day of maiming and killing by ever-new devices of devilish ingenuity.

"The war is too much with us," he murmured, emending Wordsworth.

He strode up and down. "I am losing my sense of values," he said to himself half aloud. "This war is right. We had to get into it to save our soul, our liberty, the liberty of the world. And we must see it through. Really through. Not half-way through to an inglorious, indeterminate, ignoble peace. But through, clear through. And not the President only, not the Government, but we. I must see it through."

He stopped at the broad lamp-lit table and leaned over the newspaper outspread across it, nodding rather solemnly. Then he folded the paper and slipped it into the scrap-basket.

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They order these things better in France," he said to himself, with a faint, troubled smile. "There it's forty-eight hours in the trenches and forty-eight hours in billets, with a concert and a movie or two and a game of baseball and letters home for diversion, and a bath-especially a bath. Poor civilian stayat-homes that we are, we over here keep to our trenches too much. Our minds become stupefied, mechanical, mud-coated. We lose the fighting edge. There are even vermin, of a kind, that get us. We need diversion and a bath-especially a bath."

He began to pace the floor again. "The movies and a phonograph concert will do the business for the man who fights with his hands," he murmured. "But they won't do it for us who fight with this thing we talk about so much and call our mind. And no water that runs from a faucet will cleanse and refresh that mind. The bath we need is a different kind of bath. A bath for the spirit, a bath in the water of life-the running water of life; a bath of beauty."

He felt the tears rise to his eyes, and swallowed with an effort the lump in his throat; for he had suddenly become conscious. in full measure of his own great need of immersion in some such restoring fountain of loveliness. "Beauty," he said, softly. "I have almost forgotten that there was such a thing as beauty. I used to see beauty in every street and along every country road and in the stars. Now I see only war. I used to find beauty in the grand old stories, in poetry, music. I do not read the grand old stories nowadays. I do not read poetry. I do not hear music. I read the newspapers and the war books, and when I put a record on the phonograph it is not Bach's 'Air for the G String,' as it used to be, or the 'Liebestod,' or a bit of Mozart, but Over There,' or 'Good-by, Broadway! Hello, France!' or 'Pack All Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag!' He paused. "I must find beauty again somehow. My soul needs a bath-a bath of beauty.'

He turned to his bookshelves and stood before the section where the books of poetry were ranged. His eyes wandered over the titles. There was beauty there, surely, but to-night it did not lure him, and he began to wonder whether possibly the

old delight in poetry had been choked within him by the luxuriant tares of these three years of sensation and endless argument. His fingers fell on a worn copy of the "Golden Treasury," " and he drew it forth and opened it at random. And dreamily, half aloud, he began to read:

"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran,
Through caverns measureless to man,
Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round;

And there were gardens, bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills
Infolding sunny spots of greenery."

He felt his blood run more swiftly, and he drew a long breath as though he had been suddenly lifted into the clear ether about a mountain-top. He read the familiar lines slowly, as though he had never known their magic before:

"It was a miracle of rare device,—

A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
A damsel with a dulcimer

In a vision once I saw ;

It was an Abyssinian maid,

And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me

Her symphony and song,

To such a deep delight 'twould win me
That, with music loud and long,

I would build that dome in air,

That sunny dome! Those caves of ice!

And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise."

He closed the book on his forefinger with a long sigh and a relaxing of over-tense muscles. For a long time he stood thus with eyes half shut, feeling suddenly cleansed of the dust of petty temporal struggles in the cool, effervescent, healing waters of beauty. The angry strife of little men seemed remote and unreal. Even the war seemed for an instant a matter of small moment, a conflict of red ants with black ants, all of whom together could be trodden out by one firm footfall. He repeated the last lines softly:

"Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise."

"Dear God, but it is beautiful!" he said.

The hall clock chimed at last, reminding him that the hour was midnight. Dreamily, he turned to the fireplace and set the screen before the simmering logs. Dreamily, he turned off the light and ascended the stairs to his bedroom.

Sleep came slowly from afar off. He seemed to see it coming, in a dark-blue ship with a dark-blue sail on a night sea under a blue translucent bowl. Blissfully rocking on long, calm swells, he saw sleep come in his ship. The sky seemed to brighten slowly behind it, and a soft wind arose, blowing out the candle of the single low-hanging star; the sea began to wake and to glint and gleam in bronze and crimson and oily purple. The ship came very slowly. He closed his eyes and listened to the purling of the water about the prow of the ship of sleep as it came out of the golden quarter of Atlantis-listened with arms outstretched, floating, floating, floating in golden, liquid beauty — "Could I revive within me

Her symphony and songCould I revive within me, Could I revive within meHer symphony-and song-"

T

HAT was a very human touch of Clemenceau in his speech the other day in the Chamber of Deputies on the occasion of the debate over the calling to the colors of the class of 1919. He spoke of a peasant whom he had met on a recent visit to his old home in the province of the Vendée, who had four sons killed in the war, the fifth was a prisoner, and the sixth at the front. The old peasant looked up into the Premier's face and said: "Messieur Clemenceau, will all this end well?" And Clemenceau said, “Yes.” “ "Good," said the old peasant; "then we will give all."

As the more thoughtful and serious portion of the plain American people have pondered the recent revelations of governmental incompetence, and have realized how characteristic it all is of the public side of the American democracy, there has begun to creep over the mind of a nation the disquieting question of the old French peasant-" Will all this end well?"

Yesterday I watched Lieutenant-Colonel Lee, reckoned the second greatest British flier, with a record of forty-two German planes, circling over the White House and the great gray Executive Department buildings on either side, doing the "spinning nose" dive and the "falling leaf," and performing the most astonishing feats with the skill and ease of a master. The

preceding week had been one of unusual fatality among the young American airmen in training who were learning to exe cute similar maneuvers. And Lee said that nevertheless all these startling stunts of the sky are of the highest value, and. despite much peril, must be learned to the last light turn of the wrist until they become second nature and proficiency of high degree becomes a possession. It is the only way to conquer in the air. In that realm the slightest inefficiency is disaster.

On the sea and in the sky the natural daring and initiative of America are coming through. The fates have only to give us a little time and a chance. It is about the mental leadership and organization of the vast industrial and military resources of the country which are vital to victory that the heart flutter. and the inarticulate murmur of the millions rises into the inter rogatory of the peasant-" Will all this end well?"

MUDDLING THROUGH

When you get a look into the inside of certain processes of the Administration at Washington or at certain of the processes of the mind of the country at war, you wonder if there is anything more tragic than a democracy trying to extricate itself from a deadly danger. At first all its speeded-up activities seem to be