village. When next year comes, he is apprentice to a carpenter in Oregon, who took pity on him when the clown who had seemed so kindly nearly killed him with a kick.

There is a woman in Pennsylvania. She is not old (though she is older than many women who are grandmothers), but at heart she is in the sere, the yellow leaf. Next year, she says, she will be asleep in that quiet Moravian churchyard under the mourning firs. An old gentleman stops her on the street and asks her to direct him to the old Moravian churchyard. She shows him the way. When next year comes, the life has returned to her body and the light to her eyes, for she is married to the old man. There is only one cloud on her days. She is strangely ailing, and the physician is speaking portentously of operations. Bravely she faces the worst, and, lo and behold, gives birth to a son!

There is a boy in Iowa who runs errands for the corner grocery man-a gentle spirit, a friend of homeless dogs and friendless cats, too tender-hearted to hunt and torture wild things like the other village boys. Flies struggling on the tanglefoot evoke his sympathy, and he cannot bring himself needlessly to break the stem of a single flower. Next year, he says, he will be a clerk, and he rather suspects that he can keep the position for life if he attends to his business. He wants a position for life. He is not one of those fellows, he says, who are so ambitious that they never get anywhere. He guesses the corner grocery and the volunteer firemen and Mabel, the storekeeper's daughter, will round off his days very nicely. Meanwhile next year he will be cutting cheese, he declares, with more judgment as to weight than that dude in high collars who is trying to cut him out with Mabel. When next year comes, he is in a trench in France throwing sardine-boxes at somebody he does not know,

I

but whom he jocosely calls Fritz. He is already a corporal, and is studying his Infantry Drill Regulations night and day because he intends, he says, to be at least a colonel "before this thing is over."

The Happy Eremite is willing to agree with the poet that life is real, though he vaguely wonders why the poet thought it necessary to say so. He will not dispute, moreover, that life is also earnest, if by "earnest" the poet means that living is a grave and ticklish business which not one man in ten thousand ever half masters. But life, he asserts, is something else beside. It is a deep and wonderful comedy, at times in its most tragic moments stirring the spectator to that "sudden glory " which Hobbes tells us is laughter. For through the grave plot, in and out, the thin ghost of man's feeble pre-vision is forever dancing with the corpulent embodied Event.

When the thermometer is fourteen below and the news from the front is depressing, and it seems almost as though, contrary to all rules, wrong, after all, might triumph over right, the Happy Eremite consoles himself with the possibility that he may still be a Mexican bandit. And yet he knows, as well as he knows anything, that he never will. He knows it, not because he recognizes the improbability of any man in his particular station in life taking to outlawry in his old age, but because he has definitely formulated the prospect.

And life, says the Happy Eremite, has a way, for good or ill, of disappointing prospects too definitely formed.

There is always the possibility, of course, that if he is too sure that he won't be a Mexican bandit, life may swing round

and

But at that point the Happy Eremite throws up his hands and reaches for a seed catalogue.

EDUCATING WOMEN VOTERS

N a recent issue of The Outlook we urged that provision be. made by voluntary organizations throughout the country for a non-partisan study of political problems for the benefit of new voters, having especially in mind the women who have recently been enfranchised, and we invited "brief accounts of any attempt to carry out these suggestions as to preparations for the new duties of the new day." We have received a number of responses to this invitation. From these we select a few that are typical.

The New York State Woman Suffrage party organized, a few days after the woman suffrage vote of November 6, educational classes upon political and civic questions and problems of government. A course of lectures was arranged for a period of intensive study covering two weeks, which we might call the normal course, the object of it being to prepare women who at the close of the course could go through the State forming classes in every Congressional and Assembly district where possible. These normal courses were held at the Park Avenue Hotel, New York City, where the attendance varied from one hundred and twenty-five to three hundred students. Lectures on Constitutional, economic, and social history, on new problems and theories of government, and on socialized law were given by experts, and a series of twelve lectures on the machinery of government was given by several well-known suffrage leaders. Other lectures of a similar character followed, among the lecturers being such well-known persons as Henry Bruère; Mrs. H. M. Richards, the new chief of the Woman's Labor Bureau of the United States Department of Labor; and President Henry S. Pritchett, of the Carnegie Foundation. A special feature of each of the classes was the reservation of fifteen minutes for questions and discussion at the end of each lecture.

An elaborate course was provided by the Woman's Club of Minneapolis, which treated the functions of government under six heads-the Constitution, both State and Federal, the educational, executive, legislative, judicial, and county departments. A brief but very comprehensive outline of the Minneapolis city government was prepared and printed in pamphlet form. This pamphlet had a very considerable circulation through the instrumentality of the Public Library, the Board of Education, the Civic and Commerce Association, and certain of the high schools.

The past winter, through the Woman's Committee of the Council of National Defense, the women have been reaching groups of foreign women with classes in English, taught by volunteer teachers. An elaborate and comprehensive course for study in county and State government comes to us from this Minneapolis club. Probably copies of these documents can be obtained by correspondence with Mrs. Walter J. Marcley.

Crossing the continent, we find the same eager resolve to prepare for the duties of citizenship in Los Angeles, California, where, under the guidance and direction of the Woman's Citizenship Club of Hollywood, a suburb of Los Angeles, systematic study is being pursued on such subjects as State and Federal control of education, community finances, public health, community recreation, and the like. In all these cases the women have been courteously treated by the public officials and given aid in their undertaking.

One of the not least interesting of the reports which have been forwarded to us is from the village of Bloomington, Illinois. In this village what we may call the laboratory method was pursued. It is graphically described by our correspondent as follows:

This small village has a very active and progressive club, and when partial suffrage was granted the women of Illinois this club was awake to its opportunity and duty. Much study in civics had been done, and a discussion of the suffrage and what it would mean to our women resulted in the appointment of a committee to undertake a mock election for the instruction of the women of the whole community. Every woman's organization-clubs, aid and missionary societies, lodges-was asked to appoint a committee to meet with the Woman's Club Committee. Strange to say, we discovered thirteen different organizations, and when all their committees met together a large working committee representative of the whole community was formed. Each member was given a portion of the work necessary to make a success of our object. The women were registered, the town officers lent us their polling-place and booths, a ballot-box was prepared, women judges and clerks of election were appointed, ballots printed in regular form, challengers selected-every arrangement made as if to carry on a real election. The women gathered first in the hall for instruction, which was given by two of our most able men, and a question box opened and answers given. After this

THE JAPANESE ARMY AND ITS COMMANDERS RECENT These photographs, the first to be received for publication in this country, and appearing this week exclusively in The Outlook, were taken at the Akiyama, or both, may have high command in any expeditionary force which Japan

mar

The officer in the left foreground with sword drawn is Prince Li of Korea, who, as a member of the Japanese Imperial Guard, is gaining military experience

PICTURES OF THE FORCES THAT MAY ENTER SIBERIA

Grand Maneuvers, held a few weeks ago. They are of special interest and timeliness in view of the fact that either General Otani or General land in Siberia, and that event may happen before this issue of The Outlook reaches its readers

the election took place, some votes being challenged, some votes sworn in; and the lesson was so thoroughly learned that in that spring election as many women as men voted, and not one woman's vote had to be thrown out.

We ought to add, to avoid any possible misapprehension, that all of these movements were initiated before the editorial in

The Outlook was published. We cannot, therefore, claim the honor of having had any share in bringing them about. We hope that this publication may stimulate other communities to organize similar education classes, and we should like to see them so organized and carried on that men as well as women could get the benefit of them.

T

SOME WASHINGTON PORTRAITS

SPECIAL CORRESPONDENCE BY FREDERICK M. DAVENPORT

HE struggle of a few weeks ago in Congress for a War Cabinet has faded in the distance. Things have waked up in the inner circle in Washington since it happened, and there is far more deference in the matter of letting the country know what is going on. And there is more chance for the really powerful civilian personalities who are at work in Washington to have a free hand in their important service. Of course the War Cabinet idea never had a look-in towards fulfillment while the President was opposed.

It is futile in a time like this to make a prolonged fight for any particular form of machinery, anyway. If Stettinius and Hoover and Hurley and Goethals and men of that sort can have their energies fully released, that is what the country is after. It is the opportunity for the effectiveness of the human element that counts, and not any particular kind of machinery.

Nevertheless the War Cabinet plan had the germ of need and truth in it all right. What is demanded more than any thing else in Washington this minute is a small group of men who are free to think, and nothing else, and to form their conclusions each day from the expert information of the day. Then the Administration would not again and again bump up against trouble which might have been foreseen. There is nothing Washington needs so much as pre-vision about the organization of material things. And it does not make a bit of difference where these pre-visioners are located provided they are free to think and to put their thinking across. The latest device seems to be to make assistant secretaries of some of them in the War Department. All right, let them sit on top of the Washington Monument-anywhere-only give pre-vision in material, mundane, military matters a chance to show what it can do. Washington is short on thinkers and long on men of energy running around in circles.

There is a real War Cabinet in Washington, anyway, and there has been all along-the "reg'lar fellers "-and, I suppose, that is one reason the President resented the new idea so keenly. The real War Cabinet are Wilson, McAdoo, Baker, and Daniels. And perhaps I ought to add Gompers. But, not being exactly a "reglar feller," I suppose he must be listed among the extraordinarily effective civilian outsiders. And Secretary Lane must not be forgotten, with his far-reaching plans for an effective mastery of our natural internal resources while the war lasts and a greater America when the war is done. But I am talking about the central intensive power group. And they are Wilson, McAdoo, Baker, and Daniels.

there. And he does not seem to have been fooled much in his information or his insight about men. He is rated high in Washington for acute human penetration. And it is the human side of Daniels which is most attractive. He has fine sympathies and splendid horse sense. His enemies say he is not the greatest man in the United States. Well, who is?

And next take Baker. Not yet forty-seven, short, blackhaired, clean-shaven, still youthful in haired, clean-shaven, still youthful in appearance. A man whose mind, I judge, runs far more easily among the idealistic moralities than among the sheer brutalisms of things necessary to put the moralities across. Not a man perhaps who might have been selected for Secretary of War if war had been on when he was selected. But just then the President was keeping us out of war. Strangely enough, if my memory serves me right, Baker came into office within a day of the Villa raid. That must have been a rude awakening for a man who normally hates war. Not that Baker is a mollycoddle. Far from it. Ask the city of Cleveland. Ask the men who tried to get the Cleveland water-front away from the people. I can understand why Wilson likes him. He has a mind that works like chain lightning, a fair mind, a scholar's mind, but full of rich human experience, a good mixer, a liberal. I think very likely he has been until recently too complacent about his Department and its activities. The War Department is a harder job than the Navy, and is normally not in as good order. And in sifting men out and in the development of the "follow-up" system to see that things in the whole war organization are fit and right, the Army seems to have fallen considerably behind the Navy. The great contribution which Baker has made to the country is the human welfare environment of the army camps. There has been nothing like that among armies in the history of the world. And if-which may God forbid!-America should be, in the course of events, estopped from bringing her whole power of sacrifice to bear in this conflict upon the cause of civilization and freedom, the very safety of the country for the future would lie in the deliberate retention of universal train ing, and the carrying out of the Baker idea on its social and industrial as well as military side into the immediate physical, mental, and moral disciplining of the Nation. And my judgment is that if the purely militaristic ideal were safeguarded by the social and vocational check, there would be little opposition from men like Baker and those who think as he does about pure militarism in the United States. To say that Baker is a pacifist by nature, as Senator Weeks did in Congress, is absurd. Any way, Mrs. Baker isn't, judging by the words of a song I noticed she sang yesterday to the men at Camp Meade: "We are ready now to serve, Uncle Sam,

To begin with Daniels. Whatever the newspapers may have said of him in the past, he is a good old scout, And an efficient old scout the country has at last learned that. He was lucky to get his dose of criticism early. And don't you doubt that he profited by it. Most of the criticism was undeserved, anyway. He may have been a little over-stiff in the backbone in his suspicions about munition profiteers that is a trait that runs through the whole inner Administration circle. It is a trait that can be overworked in a crisis, but the country does not reckon it to be a bad trait. And Daniels insisted upon liquor being kept out of the Navy on grounds of efficiency and safety. It is too late in the day to put a twenty-million-dollar superdreadnought under the control of a booze brain. And the country is just learning that efficiency is good old scout Daniels's middle name. The Navy afloat and the naval depart ments at home are in charge of young, eager, virile, efficient Americans. And Daniels picked most of them and put them

We have money, men, and nerve, Uncle Sam,
We will stick through thick and thin till we shut them in Berlin,
For, by God, we're going to win, Uncle Sam.
Let the eagle flap his wings, Uncle Sam ;
These are sorry days for kings, Uncle Sam,
And the Kaiser and his crew will be missing when they're through
With the old Red, White, and Blue, Uncle Sam."

And take McAdoo. Now, I am not nominating anybody for the Presidency. As a Republican who believes that the Repub lican party, under liberal leadership, has naturally a far larger proportion of efficient men in it for the purposes of government. I shall be acquitted of any subtle leading interest in Democratic candidates. But, next to President Wilson, his esteemed son-inlaw, William Gibbs McAdoo, does as much thinking for the