business matters should listen to exponents of capital, labor, and especially of the public interest at large. It should recommend legislation by Congress as needed. It should answer such questions as whether we should have a permanent Coal Labor Board, as we have the Railway Labor Board; whether the present laws about coal mining, transportation, and distribution are obeyed; whether human labor conditions are what they should be; whether the seasonal conditions of the coal trade are properly adjusted; whether regularity of employment can be substituted for the present alternation of rush periods and long "lay-offs" of miners; whether the soft-coal trade is, as has been said by Mr. Hoover, "one of the worst functioning industries in the country;" whether the admitted waste in the present coal business can be lessened.

One suggestion of the possible recommendations of such a board is made by Mr. William Hard in one of the remarkably instructive group of articles published in the "Survey's" Graphic on Coal. He says:

Suppose, then, that a freedom of co-operative selling, mildly similar to the freedom granted to farmers in the Capper-Volstead Law, were offered to-or imposed upon-coal operators. Suppose that a certain degree of co-operation and of combination, by certain methods and within certain limits, were legalized throughout the coal industry in both its sections, anthracite and bituminous. Suppose that the activities of the cooperating persons and combined persons were subjected to a publicity which also would include the investments, the costs, the prices, the profits, existing and current in the whole totaled industry. What would happen then to the public's interest in an ethical price for coal?

I venture to maintain the thesis that then for the first time the situation would exist which would make it possible to ascertain and to promulgate an ethical price for coal.

The graph reproduced herewith from a valuable pamphlet on "The Coal Miners' Insecurity" just issued by the Russell Sage Foundation will give an idea of the extraordinary variations in production in the soft-coal industry. Some of the varying conditions in the coal industry are shown in Mr. W. P. Helm's article in this issue.

As the soft-coal trade is very much the larger part of the country's coal business, and as its groups of mines differ extremely in quality and quantity of production, possibilities of profit, local and general sale opportunities, and many other points, it is evident that the bituminous-coal trade is complicated and insecure. To this add the competition between the unionized and nonunionized fields, and the difficulties grow

greater. All the more reason that a National Coal Commission should study and report. The ordinary manufacturer is bewildered by the complicated claims and statistics laid before him by capital and labor. He would like to know the facts simply and clearly. Congress has shown no disposition even to discuss on its floor several bills providing for public information or mild Governmental oversight. It could hardly ignore altogether in like manner the recommendations of a National Coal Commission.

The anthracite industry is highly organized; too highly organized, consumers say, for they are paying admittedly exorbitant prices, while a quarrel goes on as to whether it is the miner, the producer, the railway; or the middleman in distribution who gets too much. The operators and miners are still in conference and may settle their disputes. But beyond this the consumer would exceedingly like to have a judicial statement from a National Coal Commission which would let consumers know whether or not they are being fairly treated-and if not, why not.

That the worker should have a wage upon which he can support himself and his family decently and save a little for the future all non-partisans in this quarrel agree. Apparently some miners do, others do not; certainly of late the miner's employment, whatever the wage, has been exceedingly irregular and uncertain; thus seven dollars a day may be a high wage, but if it is received, say, only 150 days in a year the total of $1,050 is small nowadays, and the enforced idleness is demoralizing.

Yes, there are plenty of subjects in both branches of the coal industry which might well occupy the attention of such a National commission as many journals, conservative as well as radical,

are now advocating. It is earnestly be hoped that the President will tak steps to that end.

A

EGYPT

RECENT issue of the New Yor

"Times" contains a long al well-written article by Josep Collins entitled "England's Problem i Egypt." We regret that we do not know the author or his capacity for a fir hand knowledge of the Egyptians, e cept that it is apparent from the articl that he has made a recent visit to tha unhappy country. It is quite possibl that there may be an indication in hi name of a Sinn Fein prejudice agains the colonial administration of the Brit ish Empire. But, while his article give some very interesting and suggestiv facts about the present situation in Egypt, it is also an illustration of the confusion of mind which has been pro duced in many good men by the phrase "self-determination of nations," invented we believe, by President Wilson.

The facts are that the English Govern ment, which has for many years bee: maintaining both a nominal and actua protectorate over Egypt, has entere upon a policy of retiring from that coun try as rapidly and as completely as the demands of law and order will permit. But this is not enough for some Egyp tian politicians nor for Mr. Collins him self. Mr. Collins says:

Yet freedom must come to Egypt and come soon. It is absurd to have given a listening ear and an understanding heart to the righteousness of self-determination, as we have done the past decade, and then stand supinely aside and be a witness of the repeated shipwreck on the rock of militarism of the negotiations leading to liberty and not raise our voice to justify Egypt's cause and clearly to publish its merit. There are approximately 13,000,000 voices in Egypt, and it is probably quite within the truth to say 95 per cent of them are clamoring for the British Empire to terminate its protectorate, with its forces, and substitute fraternalism for paternalism. It is not a question of religion, as some alarmists would have us believe. It is not even selfishness and predatoriness.

Just as a child can make its mother yield if it keeps up its clamor long and loud enough, providing it does not display conduct that alienates the mother's affection and provoke wrath that is beyond control, so will Egypt succeed. First, because it is her right; second, because it is in conformity with evolution; and, third, because an enlightened public opinion of other nations will insist upon it.

Having uttered this sentiment, whiet is creditable to his feeling but not en tirely to his logic, Mr. Collins in an amusingly inconsistent fashion goes on to point out that Egypt is still in the

infancy of development and needs a protecting mother. He says that no nation can be self-governing unless it has eduIcation and intelligence, and that with this necessity the "blighting illiteracy" and the "supine acceptation" of the Egyptians of the unwillingness of their leaders to give them elementary education is "enigmatic." He describes the only university which the Egyptians themselves have established, the Mohammedan University of El Azhar.

This University has thousands of students, and the writer of these lines, like Mr. Collins, has seen them assembled in their mediæval fashion, sitting on their haunches studying the philosophy of the Koran. There are, as Mr. Collins rightly says, in this unique Egyptian University no laboratories, apparatus, charts, or other aids or ancillæ of the pedagogic art and no Arabic scientific literature. What modern nations understand by education is to be obtained by the Egyptians only in schools established by English and Americans. To quote Mr. Collins again: "Lice, mosquitoes, and flies. kill men, potential and actual men, in Egypt every year, and will continue to do so until the fundamental principles of hygience are taught in the schools and enforced by the medical profession. Imagine a country, the mother of civilization, in which the simplest principles of sanitary science are as hidden from ninety per cent of its inhabitants as the meaning of the inscriptions on the Rosetta stone are to the scrubwomen of the British Museum, and one gets a faint idea of their ignorance of hygiene and all that it implies."

And yet, saying this, Mr. Collins still insists that under the law of self-determination these people ought to be left to themselves to maintain the great waterworks and projects of the Nile, and perhaps even to protect the Suez Canal, which is one of the essential highways of modern civilization. We do not understand the consistency of a political writer who urges that the British administration should retire bag and baggage from Egypt and almost in the same breath exclaims: "How can a country, the vast preponderance of whose education and culture is fostered and conditioned by such an institution as El Azhar, legitimately expect to participate in world order and conduct of civilized nations?"

The facts are that Great Britain has saved Egypt from the murderous exploitation of the Turks and has given the peasantry of that ancient country the only system of justice that they have known for centuries and the only methods of agriculture which have saved them from periodical famine and starvation. The English Government still has

(C) Keystone

FUAD PASHA, WHO HAS ASSUMED THE TITLE OF KING OF EGYPT

a duty to perform for the civilized world in Egypt. The only things that can be demanded from England with regard to Egypt are that her protectorate government in the country of the Nile shall be administered for the benefit of the Egyptians and the purpose of as rapidly as possible giving them a control in administrative affairs.

If England had followed the will-o'the-wisp of self-determination in 1910, when Boutros Pasha, the native Egyptian Prime Minister, was assassinated by the very type of Egyptian revolutionists who are now demanding that the British abandon the Nile and the Suez Canal, Egypt would have been successfully invaded by the Turks under German leadership in the World War, the Suez Canal would have been cut, the Mediterranean might have been made a closed sea, and the Germans might have won the World War in the first two years of its prosecution.

to complain if certain facts are kindly and considerately brought to their attention.

Those who are working for the repeal of prohibition legislation say, and rightly, that the Volstead Act has made lawbreakers out of previously lawabiding citizens and that part, at least, of our present crime wave is due to this fact. When, however, they say that the restoration of the liquor traffic will restore respect for the law, they manifest a singular forgetfulness. When did the liquor traffic in America show anything but an enforced recognition of the sanctity of the law? The saloon and the saloon element, backed by brewers and distillers, laughed at law whenever the laugh proved profitable. The liquor traffic corrupted legislatures, dominated municipal governments, and debauched minors without the slightest moral compunction. Greed for the dollar at any cost was not confined to the manufacturers of what prohibitionists call the "demon rum;" it was the gentle-hearted brewer as well who, holding the cornersaloon keeper between his thumb and fingers, forced in many instances violations of law and public order. A little less greed and a little more regard for public decency, and the country might not have been roused to the elimination of the saloon.

I

T is a spirit of pharisaic intolerance that sweepingly imputes low morals Actors by classes or professions. and college students have suffered most under such sweeping condemnation. We are glad to see that the talk about low standards of conduct in the colleges was deprecated the other day at the New England Conference of the Methodist Church. One of the secretaries of the Educational Board, Dr. Warren Sheldon, reported that a recent examination of moral conditions in a hundred colleges left the conviction that among students the standards as to morality are at least as high as in any other group of corresponding numbers. Dr. Sheldon said: "I do not mean to imply that college dormitories are glowing examples of rectitude, for single men living in barracks do not naturally grow into plaster saints. My contention is that the moral standard of any representative group of college men is higher than a correspond

ing group of young men from any other field of activity."

Every one who has lived in a college town knows how pranks and noise and youthful ebullition on the part of students are mistaken for terrible viciousness, and how the dissipation and extravagance of a comparatively small number of students are held up to the alarm of distant parents, while few ever think of asking whether as large percentages of fast young fellows might not be found among clerks or young professional men.

Having done this friendly act toward the student, our Methodist friends might

well go further and remove their ancient ban from the decent stage and the decent dance. In fact, several local Conferences have already recommended that the "blue laws" of the Book of Discipline be rescinded, but no General Conference has been willing to act. A protest made by a Methodist layman, son of a Methodist minister, has just been laid before the New York Conference. It declares that at the bar of public opinion Methodism is held responsible for Bishop Joseph F. Berry's statement made in the fall of 1920, at Atlantic City, in answer to a request for information from the Actors' Equity Association. Bishop

Berry is quoted as saying: "No dane: master or actor could get into Methodist Church without very since repentance. Dancing and theater-go are specifically prohibited to member Inasmuch as we prohibit these iniq ties, we could hardly be expected to ai mit to membership those who are ra sponsible for their promotion."

It is time that liberal-minded peopleand individual Methodists are nota! liberal and human in spirit-shou: drop the austere attitude of an ancie asceticism and recognize the fact tha as to morality men and women are to be judged as individuals and not by class

The audience gasped. It was a Negro woman who said that. She was standing on the platform of the chapel of Tuskegee Institute. Before her her hearers were ranged, row upon row. Of the twenty-five hundred or more of the faces that were looking up into her face and were following her as she strode back and forth on that platform, certainly more than two thousand were black.

"I

"Understand me," she demanded. hate slavery. It was the wickedest institution known to man. But anything for which men are willing to die is successful, and white men of the South were willing to die to preserve slavery. Any man or anything that is successful to that extent is worth studying, and slavery is worth studying. What made it grow? In the first place, the slaveowners owned Negroes, and then they did three things with them-they woke their Negroes up; they made their Negroes work; and they brought their Negroes in. And they were willing to die for their slaves; they knew their Negroes were valuable. They didn't

leave those valuable Negroes to wake up of themselves. They saw that they were awake in time. And after they had made them work, they did not leave them to run about at night, for they knew the value of rest; so after work they brought their Negroes in. Now slavery has gone forever and white men own Negroes no longer. But Negroes are owned still. Every Negro in this house owns a Negro. Every one of you owns what the South was willing to die for. Are you willing to do for your Negroes what the South did for theirs?" At this, a colored man in the audience shouted, "There now!" Nannie Burroughs scarcely paused to let the audience echo the colored man's ejaculation, but went on: "I have been thinking of what this institution here means, and I have found

out. That's what it means. Wake yo Negro up. Make your Negro wor Bring your Negro in. The thing .. solved."

In that audience there were wh people from the North as well as fro.. the South. Some of them were peop of wealth and most of them were. : one way or another, people of leadershi and that black woman's speech stru them as hard as it struck any blar hearer. Perhaps for the first time sonof them realized that every white pers: owns a white person and should w that white person up, and make h work, and bring him in.

That is exactly the effect that Tusgee had upon me. Here were colorpeople creating for colored people educational institution which white per ple had never had the genius to crea": for themselves. This school was waking Negroes up, lending them power to malt themselves work, and implanting it them a discipline over themselves st that they could bring themselves in and, as Nannie Burroughs said (for am able only to paraphrase, not to quote her speech exactly), it was doing physically, mentally, spiritually.

It is true that the method which Booker Washington, the founder Tuskegee, used for waking the people his own race up, and teaching them t work, and giving them self-disciplin

Tuskegee Institute Press Service

Photograph by C. M. Battey ROBERT R. MOTON, THE ABLE SUCCESSOR OF THE FOUNDER OF TUSKEGEE

was the method which he found and learned at Hampton, where he was taught. It is true that that method was worked out by white people; but it was worked out for Negroes. It was very nearly literally hitching a wagon to a star. It was hitching work to mind. Educationists call it co-ordinating the academic and the industrial. That is not altogether unknown in schools and colleges generally; but ordinarily it is a method grafted upon practices which are based on the theory that the hands do not need the mind and that the mind is quite independent of the hands. At Hampton and at Tuskegee, on the other hand, the whole process of education is ore of partnership between hand and mind. When the boys and girls in either of these schools study arithmetic, they practice carpentry, or paper-hanging, or some other manual trade, simultaneously. Their problems are the problems that they themselves are meeting in their work, and their work is itself disciplinary and educational because it enlists their minds. When they study social conditions (I heard a class in American history reciting on this subject), they do not learn things out of books alone, but out of the condition of the people in their own county and of their own race. A geometry lesson can be demonstrated not merely upon the blackboard but upon a wagon wheel or a pair of shafts. That, however, is but the method; and it is common to Hampton and Tuskegee. What is distinctive of Tuskegee is that by this method the Negroes of the South are waking themselves up, making themselves work, and bringing themselves into the subjection of their own control.

somewhere. If so, I do not know, where it is to be found.

Founder's Day at Tuskegee was April 5. This year it was celebrated by the unveiling of a monument to the founder. For three or four days beforehand people were gathering, by train, by automobile, by horse and buggy, by mule power, and on foot, to pay their respects to one of the greatest of Americans.

On the Sunday preceding some of us were greeted by the students, and then went to chapel with them. There we heard them sing their spirituals and with them listened to a sermon on overcoming. In the afternoon we drove out about ten miles into the country to attend service at the Mount Nebo Baptist Church. There the colored congregation was already assembled in the little meeting-house. One of our number, Mary Antin, who remembers her childhood in Poland, said that the sound of the chanting, if chanting it can be called-a strange harmony which modernists in music would find it vain to attempt to reproduce by any artificial means-carried her back across the intervening years to some remote church in Russia. There we listened to the colored preacher who had made arrangements with his other congregations at distant points to be present on this Sunday to greet the white visitors. Again the sermon spoke of warfare. Brother Chisholm took as his text that passage from the Apostle Paul's second letter to the Corinthians which reaches its climax by describing that warfare as "bringing into captivity every thought." We beat the Germans, he said, and drove them from France to defensive positions on their own soil; black and white, together we drove them back; and we captured their army. But the Germans are as mean as ever. Why? he asked. Because, he answered, though we captured their bodies, we did not bring into captivity their thoughts. That, said he, is what the Church has to do to bring into captivity the thought of the world.

That is exactly what Tuskegee is doing. It is capturing the thought of the colored race in America. There at Tuskegee is exemplified the power of a simple idea. Many of those who once thought that Booker Washington was degrading the Negro by teaching him the dignity of work and was perpetuating in the race traditions of servility are coming to see that, instead, he was giving them the key to mastery. When before have men turned to Negro leaders for guidance in science and education? Let me give two examples.

Photograph by C. M. Battey

BOOKER T. WASHINGTON the crops of that region he has manufactured in his laboratory scores of food products a hundred from the peanut, eighty from the pecan nut, and one hundred and twelve from the sweet potato. There at Tuskegee is a laboratory for the application of the science of chemistry to agriculture which would certainly command respect in any institution.

There in Tuskegee is one of the headquarters of co-operative extension work in agriculture and home economics in which the State of Alabama co-operates with the United States Department of Agriculture. For a good part of a morning I listened to the reports of the colored men and women who were carrying out throughout the rural districts of that State knowledge of better farming and better living. And, although they did not say so, I soon learned that they did not confine their instruction to the colored people, but they let it filter through to the whites. Other parts of the country are receiving education like this through the Farm Bureaus; but here the people are receiving the same kind of education through a somewhat different machinery. I learned something about making tin cups out of tin cans which I expect to practice myself. The point, however, is not that there is instruction in good farming methods, but that Tuskegee, by virtue of the power it is imparting to Negroes to wake themselves up, to make themselves work, and to bring themselves in, has assumed a leadership in Alabama which it would never have got through merely claiming the right of Negroes to lead.

These two instances, both agricultural, of the power which Booker Washington's idea, derived from Hampton and expressed at Tuskegee, has given to the Negroes to secure leadership through service might be supplemented by other instances almost indefinitely. Everywhere throughout the school the objective set before the students is nothing less than the best. I asked a student in

"Of

the photographic department whether these appliances that I saw the class working with were not far beyond the means of any one going out from this school to become a photographer. course," was his answer; "but any one who knows how to use these appliances knows how to do without them; and when the time comes for him to get a projecting machine, for example, he will know how to use it." Those boys are being trained with an ambition to make of themselves in each case the best photographer in town. The effect of all this-whether it is in plumbing, or carpentry, or shoemaking, or automobile repairing, or any of the other tradesis to leaven the South with colored men and women convinced that the only effective strategy in the struggle for. progress on the part of any race is the - strategy of giving the world the best that is in the race. As a consequence, Tuskegee is a center to which Negro leaders naturally repair. During the few days I was there there were a gathering of representatives of the Negro press and a convention of Negro Baptists. Tuskegee is perhaps the center in the South of the Rosenwald School Movement, which is giving to the Negro people of the rural districts in the South schools which long ago ought to have been at the service of the country children in Maine and New York and Minnesota and every other State.

Indeed Tuskegee has brought into captivity not only the thoughts of Southern Negroes, but the thoughts of whites, North and South, as well. There was a play given at that school on Founder's

Day eve which I should like to see put on tour. It was entitled "A Day in a Rural Home." Each student who participated wrote his or her own part. Separately these parts might have been regarded as essays. In fact, the exercises were called "Rhetoricals;" but the effect was that of a simple play. It was staged in and about a three-room house, and the action consisted in the daily routine of milking, cooking, gardening, sweeping, dusting, bed-making, blacksmithing, automobile repairing, and even vaccinating a hen. One of the dramatis persona was a cow. Simplicity in furnishing and in practice did not prevent these youths from setting forth in each practice what was best. Perhaps some other school could duplicate that exhibition, but I know of none for white students.

Nearly eighteen years ago it was repeatedly said to me in the South that as long as Booker Washington lived Tuskegee would probably flourish; but it was doubtful whether there were other leaders to be found in the Negro race who could carry such a school without white supervision. Such fears could be disproved only by experience; and experience has now disproved them. In Dr. R. R. Mofon Tuskegee has a man of unquestioned leadership, self-effacing, modest, but powerful. Dr. Moton was the outstanding personality among whites and blacks during those days I spent at the Institute. Those crowded days were a test of a man's administrative capacity, and they bore witness of Dr. Moton's power of direction. Distinct from Booker Washington in personality.

he is like him in combining simplicity, humility, purpose, and power.

One of the most moving and most characteristic of the plantation melodies, the spirituals, which Tuskegee is preserving to the enrichment of the literature of folk music, is “Live a Humble.' Those who have read Booker Washington's great autobiography, "Up From Slavery" (which first appeared as a series of articles in The Outlook), can understand what power there is in a man who, with purpose and will, lives a humble. To-day that man, of such obscure origin that he knew nothing of the date or place of his birth except that he "must have been born somewhere and at some time," receives the tribute of men without regard to station. On Founder's Day tributes were paid to him by former Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, of North Carolina; Dr. G. C. Hall, a prominent colored physician of Chicago; and Dr. Wallace Buttrick, of the General Education Board; and as the final ceremony. Charles Keck's monument, the gift of a hundred thousand Negroes to Tuskegee, was unveiled with a presentation address by Dr. Washington's former secre tary, E. J. Scott, an address of acceptance by the President of Tuskegee's Trustees, W. G. Willcox, and an address by a Tuskegee graduate, A. J. Neely. Here black and white, Northerner and Southerner, private citizen and former official, united in representing the homage that is given the man who, forgetting himself, lent power to a lowly people to wake themselves up, set themselves to work, and bring themselves in.

T

HE householder who expects the coal strike to make a big cut in the price of next winter's coal most certainly will be disappointed. No matter which side wins, the retail price will remain, on the average, not far from what it is to-day.

That is largely because the present controversy affects but one of several items which go to build up the prevalent high retail prices. That item is the cost of production. The other items concern distribution of the coal after it is produced. They are unaffected by the strike. They will be found, barring the unexpected, at its termination just exactly where they were at its beginning.

It costs, on the average, at least twice as much to distribute coal after it is mined as it does to mine it in the first place. If soft coal were given away, free of cost, on railway cars at Pittsburgh mines, it would still cost the consumer $4 a ton in Pittsburgh and more than $16 in Los Angeles.

If the soft-coal mine operators were to win every point they have raised in the

present controversy, the retail cost of their product probably would not drop more than fifty cents a ton, delivered on the sidewalk, in any city in the United States.

If the anthracite mine operators were to win their contention throughout, the retail price of coal probably would not be reduced more than one dollar a ton.

And there you are. Why? Well, let's take a specific case by way of illustration.

In Pittsburgh lump coal (bituminous) for household use sold on December 15 last for $6.75 a ton. The operators paid pick miners for digging and loading the coal at the rate of $1.04 a ton.

The spread between what, the miner received and what the householder paid for the same coal was $5.71, or about five and one-half times what the miner got out of the transaction. The distance in that case between the miner at work digging the coal in the mine and the householder shoveling it into his fur nace was about fifty miles.

On the face of these figures, some one

apparently made an inordinate profit. Superficially there would appear to be no adequate reason why in a fifty-mile trip the price of a ton of coal should increase more than five hundred per cent.

Investigation, however, discloses several pertinent conditions concerning dis tribution which contributed to the rise in price. It also leads to the conclusion that present methods of handling, marketing, and distributing coal are wasteful, archaic, and utterly out of step with the march of the times toward industrial economy.

Beginning the investigation, we start at the coal-walled room in which the miner works. The coal he loads into his mine car is carried away, with other cars similarly loaded, over a narrowgauge railway track laid on the floor of the mine to the bottom of a shaft which extends upward to the earth's surface. An electric locomotive "gathers" and transports the coal thus loaded and, returning, distributes empty mine cars among the workers. At the bottom of