tra, as Louis C. Elson says in his "History of American Music," "into a permanent shape," and succeeded in his purpose of "forming an orchestra that should be perfect of its kind." The standards which he set for orchestral playing have not been, and are not likely to be, surpassed.

The New Viceroy of India

A

FTER five critical years as Viceroy of India, Lord Reading, formerly British Ambassador to the United States, retires in favor of Edward Frederick Lindley Wood, a subordinate Cabinet Minister, unknown outside his own country, whose appointment indicates a refreshing audacity on the part of Prime Minister Baldwin. At one bound, a president of the Board of Agriculture mounts a throne, temporary indeed, but while he sits thereon as magnificent as that of King George himself.

Mr. Wood's promotion recalls that of Lord Curzon by Lord Salisbury. The one is just over and the other was just under forty when the great chance came. Both were sent to India straight from the House of Commons, yet both, as eldest sons of peers, stood already on the threshold of the House of Lords. Both were educated at Eton and Oxford, and both took high academic honors. Both belong, moreover, to families not only aristocratic but clerical. Lord Curzon's father was a parson as well as a peer, and Mr. Wood's is Viscount Halifax, the now venerable leader of the Anglo-Catholic Party in the Church of England. Mr. Wood himself has written a life of John Keble.

To statesmanship, therefore, Mr. Wood brings a high purpose, nourished by a genuine piety, reminiscent of Gladstone or Lord Hugh Cecil. And, while he belongs to the Conservative Party, the tradition of his family is Liberal. His grandfather, the first Viscount Halifax, was Secretary for India immediately after the Mutiny, and carried through

the reconstruction that followed the disappearance of the East India Company. Also Mr. Wood is related to Viscount Grey of Falloden, which means also to that Earl Grey who carried the British Reform Bill of 1832.

Lord Reading is leaving India with her discontents greatly abated. In Bengal there is a certain definite anarchism, but

the Empire as a whole is settling down to a renewed prosperity. The action of the Turk in abolishing the Caliphate has arrested the Islamic disaffection against

Britain. And, despite Gandhi's fast of twenty-one days, Moslems and Hindus in India herself are again at loggerheads. The political power of Gandhi is, as he frankly confesses, at an end, and even his stipulation that Swarajists spin two thousand yards of cotton every year for "khaddar" is ignored. Non-co-operation in the new Constitution has been abandoned; and even obstruction within that Constitution is apparently to be modified in favor of a policy of working with the British for Indian ends. An Indian has succeeded a Briton as Speaker of the

tional Assembly has formally deposed Shah Ahmad and renounced allegiance to his family, the Kajar dynasty, which has ruled Persia for nearly a century and a half. The Kajar monarchs were absolute rulers without any parliamentary restraint up to 1906, when the present National Assembly was established to satisfy the agitation of the people. Ahmad's father, Mahammad Ali, could not or would not work in harmony with the Assembly, and was deposed.

When, three years later, Ahmad was made Shah, he was a boy of only eleven. years, and the picturesque accounts of the enthronement of a boy king interested readers the world over. Unfortunately, as he attained manhood he showed no abilities as statesman or administrator. He was plainly told so by Reza Khan, who has been since 1923 the nominal Prime Minister and actual dictator of Persia. The anti-Reza party last year demanded the return of the Shah from Paris and a new Constitution. The story goes that Reza, who was quite willing to continue as Vice-Shah, promised to ask Ahmad to return, but that when he sent the invitation he wrote to Ahmad privately saying that it would be impossible to promise him safety if he did come back.

Evidently, the ex-Shah is of that not uncommon Oriental type who prefers sport and pleasure to a dubious and dangerous reign.

The ambitious Reza will probably continue to hold the reins of power, with such concession to the nascent Persian desire for democratic or at least constitutional concession as political security makes necessary.

well for some time without its Shah, who has spent most of his time as one of the foreign colony of kings and princes in Paris. Accordingly, the Persian Na

ter to Washington and nearly a score of years ago led the series of revolutions which resulted in the overthrow of the dictator, Zelaya) started a revolt against

the duly elected Government. He seized the fortress commanding the capital with the avowed purpose of wresting the control of affairs from the political opponents of the Chamorro family, whose members, up to the present administration, had held undisputed sway over all recent governments in Nicaragua.

General Chamorro is a fighter of no mean ability, a man of strength and determination, but one with a political bent that made it impossible for him to sit by and accept the verdict of the polls and allow his political enemies to rule. Some of the American republics have learned and readily accept the meaning of popular elections; with others it only means the necessity, if defeated, of finding some way to rout the "ins." With them it is not a question of how a government came into power, but of who is in power; and there is no right party but "our party."

In spite of treaties which these republics have signed, including one at a recent Washington conference attended by all five of the Central American nations in which they agreed to maintain peace and "not to recognize any other government which may come into power in any of the five republics through a coup d'état or a revolution against a recognized government;" in spite of the innumerable lessons of lost prestige which have been brought home to them; and in spite of the efforts of our Government to show them the value of living up to the republican principles on which their governments are founded, they have not yet learned to see the ballot as something to be respected even if the other side wins. General Chamorro, of Nicaragua, is one of the Central American leaders in whom personal ambition, unchecked by ability to see any party other than his own in power, was stronger than his desire to see his Government established finally on a firm constitutional basis with the popular will as expressed at the polls supreme. A Cuban Patriot

UAN GUITERAS, a Cuban by birth, died

at Matanzas on October 28. He was

a true patriot, and all the more so because his love of Cuba was proved not by political activity but by medical research.

For about thirty-five years Dr. Guiteras was a recognized authority on yellow fever and other tropical diseases. When American science through Walter Reed and his associates had demonstrated beyond question-and not without the sacrifice of life by the devoted

searchers that yellow-fever infection is transmitted by a certain species of the mosquito, Dr. Guiteras worked in union with Dr. Gorgas to make Havana and Cuba at large exempt from the pestilence which had destroyed in Havana alone about 36,000 lives in forty years. To Dr. Guiteras is due much of the credit for driving yellow fever out of Cuba. As Director of Public Health for about ten years he was able to enforce and perfect the new methods of fighting an old enemy.

Dr. Guiteras was distinguished as a writer and specialist in his own field as well as a public official who had a great opportunity and improved it. Patriotism. as well as science marked his career.

A Locarno for the

E

Balkans

UROPE wants peace. Not only the peoples of Europe, but the men who manage the affairs of the Powers that control Europe. The peoples might want peace, but be swept into war. The French people did not want war in 1914; the English people were slow in discovering that they were in the war; but the men who for the moment could determine the affairs of Europe, the managers of the AustroHungarian and German Governments, decided that they wanted war, and Europe was helpless. The balance of power had swung for the time being to their side. There was a most solemn treaty in force which was supposed to make the invasion of France by Germany or Germany by France virtually impossible; but that treaty was no obstacle to the will to war when that will was equipped with power to make war. Now, in 1925, power is in the hands of those who have the will to peace, and that is why it can be said that Europe wants peace.

The reason for this will to peace is obvious. The Great Powers that are in control must have peace if they are going to survive as independent and strong ing to survive as independent and strong nations. England, the heart and head of the British Imperial Commonwealth of Nations, needs all her energy for the problems that beset her at home and in her dominions and possessions. France is struggling to avoid a plunge into bankruptcy. Italy has withstood the disintegrating and enfeebling sickness of Communism, but the convalescence is painful, and she is still an invalid under the care of a surgeon who uses the knife freely.

Germany no longer dominates the scene; but, bereft of power as she is, she has come to realize, after the bitter humiliation of the Ruhr, that she has every reason to contribute what she can to the general will to peace. No longer, therefore, is there any Great Power in Europe that can see advantage in war. The political life of every statesman that can command a great army or a great navy depends on the repression of everything that threatens international disturbance. Slowly the rest of Europe has come to see what the French have seen from the beginning, that there must be, first of all, security.

Therefore Locarno.

Therefore, too, the short shrift given to the two quarrelsome neighbors in the Balkans, Bulgaria and Greece.

It has been said in despatches from Europe that the Græco-Bulgarian spat was a threat of a war that could spread to other countries. There was never any danger of it. The men who direct the affairs of Europe, because they speak and act under authority of the great Powers, and therefore can police the land and the sea, would not allow it. There is no country (unless it is Russia, and Russia is in no position to withstand the forces that guard the peace of Europe) that wishes (as Austria wished in 1913) to see the Balkan nations at loggerheads.

It is now reported that plans are under way for the framing of a treaty or set of treaties that will do for the Balkans what the treaties of Locarno were designed to do for their greater neighbors of the north and west. The question at once arises, Is there any such will to peace in the Balkans as there is in the rest of Europe? Probably not; but there does not need to be. If there is any Locarno pact for the Balkans, it will be engineered for the Balkan nations and not by them.

The dissensions among the Great Powers of Europe that made the Second Balkan War possible have no counterpart in the relations between the Great Powers of Europe to-day. Then there was a will to peace, but it was not backed by a sufficient balance of power to prevent war. England and France failed to act because they feared war. Now they can act because they do not fear any Power that can make war.

So the Great Powers, united for peace, can give their orders, and will be obeyed. When Briand tells the Greek and Bulgarian Ambassadors to shake hands and

take some tea, they shake hands and take some tea. Do they do it because they are fellow-members of the League of Nations? Not at all. They do it because they were told to do it by some one who is expressing the will of France. and England and Italy.

The League of Nations is very convenient nevertheless. It is the velvet glove for the iron hand. Everything is done and said in the name of the Council of the League, and that enables Bulgaria and Greece (more especially Greece, who was an ally of these three Great Powers, and therefore should be treated with consideration) to save face. So if there is a Locarno for the Balkans, the stage will be set by the League's Council, but the stage managers will be England, France, and Italy.

So long as the balance of power in Europe remains behind the will to peace, that will will be effective, and peace will reign there. At present-in spite of the Red Army of Russia and the propaganda of the Third International-it appears as if the balance of power were to remain on the side of peace in Europe for many years to come. It is America's duty to keep, not only free, but also both strong and well disposed, so that she can contribute her share to the task of seeing that the balance of power is behind the will to peace throughout the world.

Good Books Do Sell

"T

HERE are two books," said an

old author to a young one, "which will have a big sale. One is the really good book, the first-class book, the book of great and outstanding merit. The other is the book which is pizen bad." By the latter she meant the works of those popular and sugary novelists which in every generation have sold by tens of thousands, and in our day by hundreds of thousands. The chief practitioner of this school of literature in America used to have his own publishing house, devoted solely to marketing his stickily sentimental novels. The first edition of each of them is something like two hundred thousand copies.

The fact induces discouragement with the public taste. But see the other side of the picture. No such gigantic figures can be quoted for the sales of volumes of poetry, but there are three small books which in our time have had a great and well-deserved popularity. The bitterness, the cynicism, of the "Spoon River An

thology" did not prevent readers from discovering its poignancy, its rugged strength and beauty. The true poet's hand that wrought "A Shropshire Lad" carried it to success despite its prevailing note of sadness. And during the past year the evident sincerity, the whimsical fun, of Mr. Milne's "When We Were Very Young" has made it a best-seller throughout twelve months.

That Charteris Tale

L

IES are the camp followers of war. It matters not how great the cause, how terrible the conflict, how clear the issues, there are always to be found men and women who feel that

they can serve God with the weapons of the devil. The lies of which we speak are not stratagems of war, ambushes, camouflaged guns, and concealed redoubts-they are efforts to break down or bolster up morale by means of propaganda which in nine cases out of ten defeats its immediate purpose. In the tenth case the defeat follows too, even though long postponed.

Within a few weeks after the outbreak of the World War The Outlook said:

"For weeks we have been hearing charges of inhuman cruelties committed by the German troops-from French and Belgian sources. The newspapers from Germany which reach us two weeks or more late are full of circumstantial accounts of atrocities practiced by the Belgians, and of French murder and rape in Alsace. . . . There has been much exaggeration-cold-blooded, intentional exaggeration on both sides."

Cold-blooded, intentional exaggeration of this kind has been recently disclosed by a statement made by Brigadier-General J. V. Charteris, Chief of Intelligence of the British Army during the war, at a gathering in the National Arts Club in New York City. In this speech General Charteris disclosed the fact that he had authorized the transfer of a caption from a picture showing a train taking dead horses to the rear to a picture showing a train taking dead Germans to the rear for burial. The point of the transfer lay in the fact that the caption said that the bodies were to be made into fat and fertilizer.

The story was given wide currency— possibly to the immediate increase in hostility to Germany. The ultimate effect of the story has been to strengthen the hands of those who still insist that

the war was merely a greedy scramble on both sides for power and domination. Any one who can lose sight of the real issue of the war because of a revelation such as General Charteris has made cannot be said to be capable of mental stablity. This fact, however, in no way lessens the responsibliity of those who put out this particular brand of canard.

Propaganda of this type is not new. Even so distinguished a statesman as Benjamin Franklin published in France during our Revolution a fake copy of the Boston "Chronicle" which contained a letter describing what purported to be an invoice of eight packs of cured, dried, hooped, and painted scalps of rebelsmen, women, and children-taken by Indians in the British employ. It was such lies as this which drew from Balzac the statement that Franklin “invented the lightning-rod, the hoax, and the republic." We do not recall that anything so vicious as Dr. Franklin's document was issued from official American sources during the past war, although some of the material put out by George Creel was certainly equally mendacious.

Armistice Day might serve as an excellent occasion for the governments of the world to resolve to abandon lies as part of the official equipment of diplomacy and propaganda. A universal resolve of this kind would leave no country at any particular disadvantage. If it cannot be done on moral grounds, it might be accomplished on the basis of the fact that lies don't work.

Not a Footless Tradition

Ο

UR friends the French derived at least one satisfaction from Caillaux's mission in America. The mission took back to France a story of American manners which has provided the French with innumerable opportunities for wit and trenchant comment. The story to which we refer was that dealing with the position of Senator Smoot's feet at the conclusion of the financial conference. It seems that the Senator at the breakup of the final meeting leaned back in his chair and put his feet on the table.

The French may know, or they think they know, American manners, but it is possible that they are not as familiar with our political institutions as might be expected of so scholarly a race. Certainly in jumping to the conclusion the placing of feet upon a confe ble was a sign of bad manners

shown a woeful lack of knowledge of an Anglo-American institution.

We inherit the essentials of our political structure from England, and, although some of these essentials have been greatly modified by the sea change they have suffered, still students with the proper background are easily able to understand the significance of much in American life which might otherwise escape them.

Are the French really unaware that

Mo

the corner-stone of British liberty is the privilege which her Parliamentarians possess of placing their feet upon the august table upon which rests the Speaker's mace? Apparently in America the tradition has become modified, and our Senators consider themselves privileged to place their feet upon the table only at the conclusion of business. Despite French disapproval, we rejoice in the fact that Americans have not wholly lost their respect for tradition.

own unhappy experience, forty years ago or more, in "prep school" and college as a slave-driven student of the so-called classics is being revived in my memory. by my contact with two young peoplea boy and a girl-who are in the midst. of their preparation for their college board examinations. They are struggling to read Cæsar's "Gallic Wars," or, to display my own meager classical knowledge, let me give the original title-"Commentarii De Bello Gallico." When they escape this drudgery, they will be plunged into the worse one of reading Cicero's Orations or his essays "De Senectute" and "De Amicitia."

Now I protest that I am not an enemy of classical education. The older I grow, the more I believe that every cultivated person, male or female, ought to know something of the Latin language and Latin literature. And, as I have said before in these pages, familiarity with the Greek alphabet will at least help those who are addicted to the solution of cross-word puzzles to solve their problems; for I notice that the authors of these modern compilations are beginning to introduce beta and eta and rho and tau and omega into their vocabularies. My objection to the current classical teaching is that to try to interest a sixteen-year-old boy and girl in Latin literature by making them read Cicero's Orations or Cæsar's Commentaries is about as futile as it would be to hope to interest a French boy in American literature by compelling him just as he is beginning to learn the rudiments of the English language to read the "Federalist" or Admiral Mahan's "The Influence of Sea Power upon History."

I recollect that in my course of compulsory Greek at a New England college

I read, or was supposed to read, the Odyssey. But, as we read it twenty or thirty lines at a time and as any literary inspirations were daily strangled in a swamp of prosody, philology, and grammar, I had no conception of the human interest of the story until, two or three years after leaving college, I read Professor George Herbert Palmer's beautiful translation, and found the Odyssey what the modern newspaper critics would call "a rattling good story of human inter-. est."

I have never read Theocritus in Greek, and never shall read it, because about all the fruit of the mechanical and conventional teaching which I had in college is to recali it, like a certain senior in New York University in my uncle's day, as "that language with the funny little crooked letters in it." But some years ago the poems of the English humorist Charles S. Calverley fell into my hands. I enjoyed his parodies, and, perusing him a little further, I found that he was a classicist of the first rank, and so read some of his translations of Theocritus and found, to my astonishment, that Theocritus was not a mere twister of hieroglyphics but gave a marvelous picture of the men and women and life of his time. "Though he lived in an artificial period," says a competent critic, "there is in his work a simplicity,

fidelity, and a love of nature that has given him a universal fame. His dramatic and mimetic power was great, so that his peasants, shepherds, reapers, and fishermen have a real existence and are not merely literary creations."

Now is there not some way of teaching Latin and Greek to young students that they shall get this impression of human interest from the originals which they come in contact with as well as from

the translations they are lucky enough to meet with in later life? No one can be a more ardent admirer than I am of the achievements of modern science, and yet I am inclined to think that the scientific spirit is the bane of literary teaching.

Macaulay in his essay on Hallam

says:

To make the past present, to bring the distant near, to place us in the society of a great man or on the eminence which overlooks the field of a mighty battle, to invest with the reality of human flesh and blood beings which we are too much inclined to consider as personified qualities in an allegory, to call up our ancestors before us with all their peculiarities of language, manners, and garb, to show us over their houses, to seat us at their tables, to rummage their old-fashioned wardrobes, to explain the uses of their ponderous furniture, these parts of the duty which properly belongs to the historian have been appropriated by the historical novelist.

The duties, as Macaulay thus implies, which have been neglected by the scientific historian have also, it seems to me, been neglected by the scientific teachers of classical literature. Of what particular value to the undergraduate of our schools and colleges is a knowledge of the Greek optative or of Grimm's Law? The brothers Grimm have done about as much harm to a spontaneous love of literature as their compatriot Freud has done to the spontaneous love of man for woman. The technology of science is right and necessary for the research laboratory, but it ought to have a very subordinate place in creative art. I have always had sympathy with the undergraduate of Wesleyan who, in an exami nation on philology, was asked to give an example of Grimm's Law of phonetic derivatives. "Well," he answered, "Middletown may be derived from Moses." "How?" asked the astonished professor. "By dropping the 'oses' and adding the 'iddletown'!" was the somewhat flippant reply. But is it not really a good deal more important that the average undergraduate should know something about Moses and his profound influence upor the hygiene and morals of civilization, and about Middletown, its two institutions of learning and its interesting colonial history, than that he should be able to recite the complicated operations of Grimm's Law?

A few years ago I was asked to read a paper before a literary club of women in a large Southern city. I elected to speak

contention was that as the muscles of the body need food and exercise, so this faculty of the mind needs cultivation and nourishment, and that the habitual reading of poetry is the best source of its fertilization and growth. I therefore entitled my paper "Keats for the Kitchen." I was told afterwards that one of the members on seeing the announcement on the programme innocently asked, "What are keats?" I admit that this punning blunder has some of the bur of the chestnut clinging about it. But yesterday I was told the actual story of a graduate of Vassar who, on hearing an allusion to the parable of Dives and Lazarus remarked, musingly, "What are dives?" A nephew of mine recently in Yale had a classmate who received some of his preparatory education in France and spoke and read French like a native and cultivated Frenchman. He was flunked in his freshman or sophomore French examination because he could not give the American-made rule for the subjunctive, although he used the subjunctive as naturally and correctly as a duckling swims.

I

Such is the effect of the American "college board" system of education. It stifles any original and human interest in knowing "the best that has been said and thought in the world," and its average product seems to be a set of young people who know how to answer a preordained series of standardized questions but not much more. The college board" but not much more. The college board" examinations are the anise and cummin of modern American educational High Priests.

If High Priest is resented as too strong an epithet to apply in this connection, let me add one more incident. It is generally recognized by the head masters of our secondary schools that the chief object of a college education for American boys is to give them a certain sort of social standing. If a boy cannot pass the "college boards" in ordinary course, he is sent to a "cramming school" that makes a specialty of the kind of questions which college examiners like to ask. When the cramming school thrusts the boy into college by this system of "bucking the line," he is kept there by special tutors who from long experience have come to understand

the weak points of their adversaries—the

college authorities. "Buck the line" on the gridiron and "buck the line" in the examination room might be said to be the slogan of the pedagogical ecclesiastics of the American college system. At a recent meeting of head masters and masters of secondary schools this condition of things was recognized and deplored. plored. But when it was proposed to take up the question of reform with the various college authorities of the country a violent protest arose. Any change would upset things terribly. It is much more comfortable and convenient to have a cut-and-dried system than it is to do original and creative work.

When the forward pass was introduced into football, it was denounced by the conventionalists as a dangerous innovation that would destroy the whole system. It might be magnificent, but it was not in accordance with the traditions of the game. But the reformers persisted, and the forward pass has brought into the game the element of personal initiative and agility which has really saved it. What the American collegiate system needs to-day is the introduction of the forward pass in its educational scrimmages.

N its Italian elegance the press bureau at Locarno reminded me of our headquarters at the Genoa Conference three years and a half ago. Two floors in a fine old palace were provided for us there. At Locarno we had one large lofty hall, with impressively frescoed ceiling, also in a fine old palace. Telephone booths were lined on one side of the hall; every moment one heard the Italian equivalent for "Rome is ready, signore," or the French for "Monsieur Chose, Paris is calling." The floor was ablaze with rich Oriental rugs lent by obliging Locarnese families. Writing, typist, newspaper tables abounded; on the last-named I counted two hundred and four different papers; by a curious coincidence there were just two hundred and four journalists there.

Most of them looked like men of ability and experience. Everywhere one found a desire to report and interpret the Conference exactly and soberly. In helping to form public opinion the journalists helped the framers of the acts of

The Outlook's Editor in Europe Locarno. In this room were journalists

from many lands. One of them, a veteran of large experience in Central Europe, remarked:

"You hear every one say, 'We cannot be too thankful that, actually, Germany, in the person of Stresemann, the Foreign Minister, showed us last February this path to peace.' Don't you believe it. He was no father of the Rhine pact. His was not the first suggestion of it."

"Well, whose?" I queried, and was not surprised at the answer:

"England, in the person of Lord d'Abernon, British Foreign Minister at Berlin."

Whatever be the paternity of the acts of Locarno, they might be appropriately concluded in the room I noted to the right on entering the Palace of Justice. The sessions of the Conference occurred in the aula upstairs. Over the door of the downstairs room I read: “Giudicatora di Pace." It is where disputes are settled out of court.

THE primal task at Locarno seemed to be to manage German susceptibilities, personal and political.

The Germans did not seem to want to be "mixers." Apparently they really desired to emphasize detachment and differences. It may only have happened that way, but theirs was the only delegation where sudden illness compelled the postponement of a Conference plenary session, and theirs seemed the only one fearing sudden death. It must be heartily admitted nevertheless that, with the Rathenau assassination in mind, the Teutons had reason for fear, and the more as one read that some ultraNationalists warned any German signer of a non-Nationalist security pact that he might not return alive to Berlin. If so, however, why should have the German delegates complained about having to be constantly shadowed by detectives? Other political leaders also receive threatening letters-it is part of the game-but say nothing. Other leaders have often to be accompanied by