Spanish civilization of the Incas, so remote in its origins that the beginning of its story is lost in the gray mists of antiquity. There is no wharf to which a ship can tie between Valparaiso and the Panama Canal. Every pound of freight must be lightered between ship and shore. Every passenger must travel between ship and shore in launch or rowboat. No ship-owner dares brave the wrath of the organized longshoremen by disturbing the monopoly of lightering which they have enjoyed since Pizarro plundered Peru. Nevertheless these countries of the mild Pacific shores welcome the wayfarer from our chilly northern clime and charm the senses of those of us who love the sun. No North American who has the opportunity should fail to make this visit; no one who makes it will regret it; no one who misses it may hope to gain recompense by seeking the tourist-infested shores of Europe.

My errand in South America was primarily one of business. The Corporation by which I am employed has radio interests in those lands of the southern seas. In a certain sense we stand for the Monroe Doctrine in radio communications. Our radio-communication interests in this country sought a field in South America just after the war, and we have joined others in attempting to give those countries modern direct and uncensored communications with our own and the several European countries. Great Britain, France, Germany, and to some extent Italy are interested with us in this effort. There is no source of irritation or friction so great among nations, none so fertile in breeding misunderstandings, as mutual ignorance of one another. No characteristic of our modern civilization contributes more powerfully to better understanding and to better relations between the nations than improved communications. Once the electro-magnetic signal of radio is on its way, it is beyond the control and censorship of any one, and secure from political or commercial coloring in the territory, of either friend or alien. It goes directly to its destination, pausing on neither land nor sea, neither relayed nor repeated nor delayed at intermediate stations.

While our country is associated with certain European countries in international wireless telegraphy in South America, it has there no connection with alien interests in the field of radio broadcasting. Radio broadcasting has been developed to a higher point in North America than in any other country, and there is more of it done in this country each twenty-four hours than in all the other lands of the earth combined. The

come, and comparatively soon, when the instruction and entertainment launched on the air in either of our continents will be available in the other. Already North American stations have been heard in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile, and more occasionally in Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela. With the progress of this art in South America, to which it has come somewhat later than to our country, great stations in those southern lands will send out their incomparable music, and the sonorous tongue of Cervantes will be heard nightly in North American homes. Radio broadcasting is pre-eminently the instrument of mass appeal. The imagination may run unrestrained on what this will mean to the outlying population in the forests of Brazil, on the plains of the Argentine, and along the western slopes of the Andes. creation of an intelligent public opinion, so essential to the institutions of democratic government, an enormous extension of educational facilities, and the entertainment hitherto lacking in vast reaches under the equator are all within

The

the possibilities, and that in our own times. The North American business man was late in finding his way to the markets of South America. He was preceded by the trade missionaries of nearly every country in Europe. The South American market, especially in the Argentine, is one of the most highly competitive and contested in the world. The last ten years, covering the centennial of the independence of practically all South American states, has furnished the occasion for every form of felicitation. Every European nation of importance has celebrated the anniversary of Argentine independence by suitable works of art or utility in her great city of Buenos Aires. Spain and Germany contributed great artistic groups of bronze and marble. Gifts of France express the good will of her people. The American colony-for, while the governments of other nations contribute, it is only the local American colony that does it for our countryerected a statue of George Washington. England's solid and useful clock tower, which marks the time for Buenos Aires, is duplicated in four other South American cities, which also have had anniversaries. In Peru, a British knight, Sir Augusto B. Leguia, a Peruvian, but educated and knighted in England, has long been President.

Those are fair lands to the south of us. In them there still flourishes the spirit of the conquistadores. Spanish and Portuguese civilizations there reach their best flower of modern days. There still survives the art of those artistic mother countries. There still linger the great traditions of old Spain. In that direction should flow the tide of our American tourists which now each year follows the Gulf Stream to Europe. No North American in search of pleasure and interest will fail to find them in South America. No thoughtful countryman of ours will regret the touch with the language, the art, and philosophy of our sister republics to the south. No statesman of ours can fail to benefit by the exchange of ideas with men of his own class who are engaged in solving the problems of those lands, which in many respects are much the same as our own. No North American business man whose wares reach foreign markets can afford to ignore a field which by propinquity and close identity of interest invites our enterprise. For me on my journey the charm and the interest were constant. In closing I can but reiterate what I said in the beginning, that two regrets were mine in visiting South America-the one that my visit had been so long deferred, the other that, like youth and life itself, it was bound to have its end.

G

IVE the right sort of airplane

fleet to the right sort of aviation officer-to Colonel Billy Mitchell, let us say, just for the sake of having a concrete (which has not in this case anything to do with cement) personality in the argument-and he could sink the navies of the world, annihilate the armies, pulverize the fortifications, and so scarify the face of the earth that it would be fit for nothing except woodchuck dens.

That is one view. The other one follows:

Give Colonel Mitchell-or anybody else, for that matter, but just mentioning

By DIXON MERRITT

wait-and in pairs. Every officer had at his side his orderly-or whatever else a military secretary is called-who rested a well-packed brief-case across his trim knees. His job was to pass the papers to his chief as they were needed.

Opinions. That is what those briefcases were filled with, what the witnesses were filled with, what the records of the President's Air Board's investigation are filled with. In a court, of course, opinions come from the judges, and not from the witnesses. But a board is not a court, though it may be something just as good.

terial which the Board has now whipped somewhat into shape for purposes of recommendation to the President, there is not one single fact that was not known before.

him because he likes to be mentioned OPINIONS! In all that mass of maall the airplanes that the United States has, all the airplanes that Great Britain has, all the airplanes that France has, and then add to that mighty host of steel eagles with silk wings all the airplanes that Colonel Mitchell (mentioning him, just for instance) thinks the United States ought to have. Say to him, “Go, Colonel, with your planes and take Cuba." He could bomb around and make a deuce of a noise until he came to land. Then the police would arrest him for breach of the peace.

Those two views, clothed in a hundred different and often fantastic garbs, constitute the soul and sinew of what the President's Air Board listened to from away back in September until the fog shut out the daylight on the evening of Friday, October 16.

'HROUGH all those days the Air Board

TH

sat in a semicircle and listened. Some of them talked a good deal, most of them very little, even in the essential matter of asking questions. The two men at the ends of the arc-the end men, if the nomenclature of the minstrel stage may be applied to so serious a matterpulled continually at black pipes. One, near the center of the crescent, rumpled his gray beard and looked at some sort of paper most of the time while he listened. The others followed their various bents, but all of them were good listen

ers.

And what a mass of listening they did have to do, those members of the President's Air Board!

Room 226 of the House Office Building was constantly filled with the effulgence of Army and Navy. While one witness was on the stand others sat in

The inquiry was a flat failure if it is to be judged on the basis of discovery of new facts. But that is not the way to judge it, and the investigation was not a failure. It was a big success.

First, the public is reasonably reassured. It knows now that we really have an air force which is something more than a fleet of schoolboys' kites.

Second, the public is confirmed in its apprehension. It knows now perfectly well that we have not the sort of air force we ought to have, that there are defects in it which have got to be cured. In short, the public knows that both groups of extremists are wrong.

Third, there will not be a Congressional investigation of aviation at the next session. That is, there is not one chance in a thousand that there will be. Before the Air Board began its work there was not one chance in a thousand that there would not be. And escape from a Congressional investigation is worth almost anything.

T

kind of air force practically would make Army and Navy unnecessary.

The old soldier believes that the infantryman, his feet on the ground and a gun in his hand, is the Army, the Nation's defense, and that everything else which goes into the defense organization is merely by way of assistance to the infantryman.

The old sailor has the same abiding faith in the capital ship.

The airman says that the soldier does not understand aviation, and the soldier says that the aviator does not understand warfare. Certainly, they do not. I don't believe that either of them knows what the other is talking about. But each of them takes a very human attitude that his own specialty is the greatest thing in the world. Men have been like that from the beginning of history. No new weapon ever was invented but that the soldier who had used the old weapon said the new one was no goodexcept as an aid to the old one. When cannon came into use in warfare, the old longbowman sneered at them as bunglesome things that could not be brought into action quickly enough to be worth while, but admitted that they had some advantages when a wall was to be battered down. The gunner, of course, knew that the longbow was obsolete and would soon go out of use.

But it did not go out of use, exactly. No single weapon that man ever created for fighting is obsolete. It may have a vacation for a century or two, but it comes back. Nobody could have believed that a short, thick-bladed knife would be an essential weapon of armies in the twentieth century-until the trench knife became an essential weapon of the men in the trenches during the World War.

THE

HIS snarling of soldier at aviator and of aviator at soldier is an act centuries old. Both actors act foolishly. The airplane is more important than the old soldier can believe it is. It is not as important, and never will be as important, as the airman feels certain it is.

There, now! I did not think I had an opinion, and was certain that I would not express it if I had. I was trying to lead up to what the Air Board has before it.

When the President appointed that Board, he laid down no hard and fast

But such dicta as he did lay down divided themselves into two fields. First, the Board was asked to go into all phases of present-day aviation; to find what, if anything, is wrong with its administration, and suggest remedies. Second, it was

changes in administration will be of less importance than means of securing the fullest possible scientific development of aircraft and of developing the aviation industry.

told to explore the probabilities of the Bu В

future and to recommend means for making sure that the United States gets the benefit of scientific investigation and discovery in matters pertaining to aviation. All of the indications are that the President attaches more importance to the second than to the first.

Now as regards recommendations for changes in administration, the Board may tell the President how to bring about readjustments which, while falling short of satisfying the airman, will ruffle the temper of the Army and the Navymore particularly of the Navy, for it looks with even less complacency than the Army on changes in the Air Service. The Secretary of War, it will be remembered, was largely instrumental in bringing about the inquiry. The Secretary of the Navy strenuously opposed it. But

UT even the means of securing the fullest development of the science of aviation is of less importance than something else that must be decided, if not by thing else that must be decided, if not by the Air Board, then by somebody else after the Air Board has made its report to the President.

A decision is imperative as to what an airman ought to be. There are four unalterably fixed opinions on that point, and all of them, of course, are wrong, because it is a fact a million times demonstrated that when any man has an unalterable opinion on any subject he knows less about that subject than a man ought to know.

The airmen believe that they are now what airmen ought to be-simply airmen of technical skill and high emprise and indomitable daring. indomitable daring. The Army insists that an airman must be a soldier, capable

of commanding land forces upon occasion. The Navy is equally insistent that an airman must be a sailor, capable of commanding a ship or a squadron or a fleet, and that he must actually command ships at times. The fourth opinion is that an airman must be a meteorologist and oceanographer, even more skilled in the wizardry of weather than civilian meteorologists are now.

Now all of those opinions are right. Even our crabbed uncle Carlyle knew that no man comes to an unalterable conclusion without some bit of the rock of truth to build upon. And Anatole France knew that the varicolored bits of error, stirred together and revolved rapidly enough, make the white expanse of truth.

The truth was told, in innumerable bits of error, before the President's Air Board. All that remains to be donebut it may be more than mortal man can do is to revolve the motley mess of colors and shades and tints rapidly enough to make it white, the white of an adequate and continuing National policy in aviation.

I'

Look Who's Here!

From the Seattle "Times"

F there is any one thing that has become fatiguing to Seattle people it is this constant annoyance of being "discovered."

Every half-baked writer or assistant sub-editor on any kind of Eastern or Mid-Western periodical that accidentally gets into this country thinks he has become another Columbus. So startled is he to find that there is anything in the world outside of his own home town that he rushes into print for relief.

Naïve confession of his own monumental ignorance!

Quaint things are discovered that are commonplace enough to those of us who know how and where to live-but unusual indeed to the Babbitts of some of the Middle Western and even more benighted partially Eastern communities.

But the worst pest of the whole halfbaked variety is the writer or sub-editor who rather fancies himself and when he comes to town expects the Mayor, the City Council, the Chamber of Commerce, and all leading citizens to turn out with a brass band to greet him. Invariably disappointed, this is the type that gets

Perhaps his statement that Tacoma lies between Seattle and Mount Rainier is poetic license. Perhaps, also, his charge that Seattle has no courtesy and no idea of service beyond roughneck thoughts of domination by the "soak 'em" process. (What style and grace!)

Even again poetic license might account for the writer's resuscitation of the tales of the old "Seattle Spirit." Every one who lives here knows that this is a thing that has hardly been mentioned in the last fifteen years by people who live in Seattle, and probably not for a longer period by other people who live on Puget period by other people who live on Puget Sound-in other words, since Seattle became a city.

alone must be placed the following quotation from The Outlook's article:

In the peroration of the blast with which the city's publicity organization seeks to charm streams of conventions, with their thousands and millions of alluvial deposit, to the city's shores and within its gates, occur these words which have been copied verbatim into the uncommercial traveler's handbook:

"Seattle!-a town with a reputation for putting things over right! Home of the far-famed 'Seattle Spirit' which has made her the major metropolis of the great Northwest Empire, and largest city of her age in all the world!"

It is this sort of thing that moves a devout Mohammedan, in contemplating the ways of the giaour, to mutter "Allah Akbar!" in his beard, and prompts even some outside Christians of a simpler faith with closed eyes to call upon the name of the Lord!

room.

pire" and "the largest city of her age in the world." However, these quotations have never been associated by the Chamber of Commerce or any other official publicity agency working on behalf of Seattle, and even in the second correct extract The Outlook's mendacious authority was compelled to insert the word "all" in order to round out his annoying fabrication.

For this fabrication The Outlook owes Seattle and its Chamber of Commerce a

E

complete and abject apology, even though the average Seattleite would be just as well pleased never to hear from The Outlook again. But, in passing, one cannot refrain from wondering whether the comparison made by The Outlook's writer between the Japanese mountain "Fuji" and our own Mount Rainier was based on the writer's actual Far Eastern travels or did his mendacity carry him to the point where he could not be trusted even in so minor a matter?

VEN a good neighbor may be pardoned a chuckle when a joke comes home to roost on the doorstep of the community joker.

Here is our kindly contemporary, Seattle, for example, which has always prided itself on being the original clever publicity expert of the Pacific Northwest. It has usually gotten away with it, too, much to the chagrin of some of those whose household utensils have been borrowed incontinently. Now it appears as if our good neighbor on Elliott Bay has been hoist by its own publicity petard.

During the summer along came George Marvin, an editorial representative of The Outlook, the New York weekly magazine. In Seattle Mr. Marvin had a great deal of attention paid him by the Seattleites, who are always keen on hospitality to traveling publicists who may say a kindly word for the enterprising city whose busy streets reach from Puget Sound to Lake Washington. Mr. Mar

vin was given a typical Seattle welcome vin was given a typical Seattle welcome and civic statistics were thrust at him. with every forkful of food that he took during his stay in the city.

The long-awaited article now appears in the current issue of The Outlook. It is publicity for Seattle all right, but such publicity! The author writes of "the Seattle Spirit," and during the course of some thousand words tells what would seem to be a few plain truths about the Elliott Bay municipality. He says, for example, that "in the Northwest the people speak of the Seattle Spirit with a smile. Sometimes it is a good-natured smile. Other times it is a rueful smile. Now and then, as in Tacoma, it is a bitter smile." He admits that "Seattle does put things over," and calls attention to the fact that it has put its port into "the congested class of the second largest in the United States," although it had to borrow all the rest of Puget Sound shipping to do it.

He mildly cites the fact that Tacoma lies between Seattle and the mountain, and further points out that "the Seattle Spirit comprehends the mountain as a distinct selling point in its aggressive programme of putting things over." "The realizability of Rainier in concrete terms of sales seems to be the mountain's one usefulness," he says. "There is plenty of spirit in Seattle," he admits. Though "trying to keep up with it costs plenty of money." "In Seattle 'Soak 'em' seems to take the place of Service," he quotes an unnamed citizen of Tacoma as saying.

This is of course the truth unadorned and told without diplomacy or sugarcoating.

Such frankness moves Seattle to fury. The leading newspaper devotes its main editorial to this annoying performance. Here are a few of the adjectives which the writer uses in the course of half a column in describing The Outlook's performance: "Half-baked," "another Columbus," "monumental ignorance," "Babbitt of the benighted Eastern communities," "worst pest," "absolutely mendacious," "poetic license," and "absolutely false in thought and construction."

Dear, dear! What an explosion over a publicity stunt! For, after all, Seattle did get the publicity that it was after, although it was not publicity of the saccharine variety which it sought. The neighbors cannot forbear a chuckle. They wonder what would happen if some other presumptuous municipality should venture to borrow Lake Washington or Harbor Island or the University of Washington stadium for public" poses!

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N

The Book Table

Edited by EDMUND PEARSON

Christina Alberta's Father
Reviewed by H. W. BOYNTON

OTHING could be more comfortably Wellsian than this latest Wells novel.' It combines, if It combines, if not fuses, all the familiar elements and ideas of this ingenious author. His publishers are wont to divide his longer narratives into several classes: (1) Novels; (2) Fantastic and Imaginative Romances; (3) Books on Social, Religious, and Political Questions; some forty-four volumes in all. "Christina Alberta's Father" is as much romance as novel, and as much speculative essay as romance. Nothing could be more fantastic-more characteristic of Wells's fancy than this parable of Sargon, the reincarnate King of the lost Atlantis. "Imaginative" is never quite the word for his nimble play of mind, which, for all its apparent freedom, sticks always to the predestined channel of a few "ideas."

Nothing could be more free-and-easy than the author's use of the persons of this romance or novel-as mouthpieces for his latest animated comments on human experience and destiny. They all talk alike, and they all talk like H. G. Wells, with a certain perfunctory shifting of pitch and modification of accent to fit their sex and costume. The performance is ventriloquial, the puppets even are unchanged. If you knew Ann Veronica in 1909 and Mr. Polly in 1910, you know Christina Alberta and Mr. Preemby and Bobby in 1925. For there are two Mr. Pollys here the kindly, muddle-headed Daddy of Christina Alberta (who is not her father), and the kindly, muddleheaded Bobby who is her faithful and slightly fatuous lover. As for Christina Alberta's real father, he is hardly more than a reflective figure in the background.

These people all frankly represent different moods or aspects of H. G. Wells himself Wells the scientific observer of

Founded 1873

New York Smith Bldg., Washington, D.C. Pittsburgh

Philadelphia

Minneapolis

scientiously indulgent commentator on the latest thing in humanity, the young female of the species; and Wells the wistful seeker of romantic happiness. In the usual form of social comedy, this

1 Christina Alberta's Father. By H. G. Wells. The Macmillan Company, New York. $2.50.

book gives the usual Wellsian blend of yearning for personal freedom or expression, altruistic emotion, and faith in a human perfectibility to be attained partly by utopian legislation and partly by the working of that mysterious force which the prophet variously (and always definitively) terms "God, the Invisible King," the "Mind of the Race," or "Sargonism"-this last being a state wherein we are all to be "fellow Kings," one of another!

Other Fiction

THE NAKED MAN. By Vere Hutchinson. The Century Company, New York. $2. "Naked came I out and naked shall I return." But Luke Baddock, the central figure of Miss Hutchinson's novel, was no Job either in virtue or patience. Life treats him cruelly from the first. He is the son of a drunkard and a virago; his childhood is hard, his youth, save for one blessed year on a farm, is spent bitterly and rebelliously in the mines. He loses his first love and marries indifferently, for convenience; yet it is Maggie, his loyal and self-sacrificing wife, who in the end brings him comfort and tranquillity after he has owned only to lose the farm in which his heart was bound up, has been shamed and thwarted and bereft in hope after hope, and turns to her a broken man. A strong and somber tale, at times an impressive one, marred only by the relation of the wife to the wanton. That a childless, loving, and unloved wife might step aside for a loved mistress who is the mother of her husband's son is believable; that such a wife would deliberately, in her own home, to give her husband the son he yearns for, put a light woman in his way and fairly thrust her upon him stretches credibility to the extreme, and leaves the line between noble and ignoble more than hazy.

ALAN. By E. F. Benson. The George H. Doran Company, New York. $2.

In "Alan" Mr. Benson has given us a novel second only to his exquisitely humorous "Queen Lucia" as satirical comedy. The book deals entirely with the home life of a successful novelist whose vogue is on the wane, and the story introduces us, not only to Alan and his much enduring wife, but also to certain