people of this country have sought to protect labor should be unwisely and unnecessarily broken down. It is a fair assumption that for the most part these safeguards are the mechanisms of efficiency. Industrial history proves that reasonable hours, fair working conditions, and a proper wage scale are essential to high production.

In regard to women's work the standards declare that "effort should be made to restrict the work of women to eight hours," that their employment on night shifts should be avoided as a necessary protection," and that "standards of wages hitherto prevailing for men should not be lowered when women render equivalent service.”

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Minors of both sexes under eighteen should have the same restriction on their hours as already outlined for women. No child under fourteen years of age shall be employed at any work under any conditions."

For the layman unacquainted with French and English experience in the past three years it is difficult to believe that these regulations were issued as a war measure to increase production. But these words from J. H. Thomas, Labor member of the British Commission to the United States, cast a new light on their origin:

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In considering this question you have to remember that in the early stages of the war we were not prepared. We got reports of our lads being mowed down like rabbits in a hole for want of munitions. You can quite understand that we had to give them some protection, and our men and our women were working fourteen, sixteen, eighteen, and all manners of hours a day, not so much because they were compelled-don't get that into your heads-but because the very circumstances, the moral influence of doing something for these gallant lads to give them a chance, compelled us all to forget hours and everything else. "Now as the war went on the sickness returns showed an alarming increase. The general health of the people was going down. Holidays were abandoned and the strain was beginning to be felt. The Government set up a committee composed of employers, trade-union representatives, and Government officials an impartial tribunal. They came to the unanimous decision that long hours and Sunday labor were disastrous, not only to the health of men and women, but to the efficiency of the service. We say, without hesitation, that it is uneconomical, it is unwise, and it is bad management to work men or women abnormally long hours, because it does not pay in the end.”

THE FRENCH DRAMA

The other night, in New York City, in a pause between the two plays of the evening's bill, M. Jacques Copeau, Director of the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier (Theater of the Old Dove-Cot), made a speech of interest to all his friends and to all friends of the French drama-for, as the success of the Alliance Française proves, there are more friends of French literature in this country than is generally supposed.

To their satisfaction, M. Copeau finds that his first season as theater manager in America warrants a second. He also learns that several members of his company, hitherto in the trenches, are to be released, notably the actor who is to take the leading part in M. Copeau's final production this season, Molière's "L'Avare."

At the outbreak of the war all of the men of the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier in Paris either volunteered or were mobilized. The theater had to be closed. It was founded by M. Copeau to give new interpretation to the great classical French repertory, not excluding modern writers either. The Paris public had scoffed at the boldness of a man who would try to present the plays of Molière, Musset, Shakespeare, outside of the Théâtre Français. But the little theater in one of the Latin Quarter's quaint streets had won out. Critics of the caliber of M. Claudel and M. Bergson had praised it. The company had been invited to tour in England, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, and Italy, and it had done so in the first two countries. The French Minister of the Fine Arts had suggested that the company should tour in the United States, for the French have ever shown a desire to illustrate to us what they really are, and also to bring about closer bonds between us and themselves. Certainly anything which helps one people to enter into the genius of another peo

ple is a step towards international understanding. When the war came, however, it was not possible to realize the Minister's project. So he requested M. Copeau to go to America and give there some addresses on French drama and theaters.

M. Copeau did so, and his American admirers asked him to create a French theater here. The theater, which bears the name of the one in Paris, is approaching the end of its first season. As in Paris, its distinctive features are, first, in M. Copeau's words, the "simplification and in many cases the suppression of scenery in order to center the public's attention on the dramatic action itself, . . . in order that every delicacy may appear there, in order that every fault may stand out, in order that the dramatic work may have a chance in this neutral atmosphere to fashion that individual_garment which it knows how to put on." ." In the second place, M. Copeau suppresses the so-called "stars" to the advantage of the general rendering of the play. Thus these ideals distinguish his theater from the more meretricious, commercial, and strolling-player notions. The staging of Molière's "L'Amour Médecin " gives evidence of these ideals. Following antique models, there is what one might call a stage apron,' which includes the first-tier boxes, and makes possible a great deal of action about the forefront of the stage. There is also a rectangular platform occupying the middle of the stage proper and reached by short stairways on either side. This Greek simplicity is united with rare decorative quality in the draperies and costumes. The piece was written at Louis XIV's command, and satirizes the quackery of the monarch's four physicians. The company interprets the broad humor of the play with naturalness and marked finish.

SUICIDES IN JAPAN

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According to the Rev. Dr. Sidney L. Gulick, who has lived long in the Far East, suicides among Japanese students are probably more prevalent than among any other students in the world. The causes he mentions are, first, the high-strung nerves and exceptional sensitiveness to anything that may be regarded as a personal humiliation; and, second, the extraordinary competition among students to secure places in the Government schools. Dr. Gulick also notes the three causes given by the Christian Literature Society, of which he is a member, namely: the struggle for existence, the handicap of poor physique, and the absence of an enlightened faith.

As to student suicides due to failure in examinations, it may be noted that in Japan it is not easy to enter any schools. Of the boys thirteen and fourteen years old who strive by competitive examinations to enter the middle schools, only sixty-one per cent, we learn, though intellectually qualified, are admitted. The rest are excluded for lack of room. In Tokyo the annual applicants for admission to the higher institutions are several times greater in number than can be admitted. A year ago over five hundred youths were refused admittance to the Doshisha, the only Christian university in Japan, entirely because of lack of accommodations.

As to the absence of an enlightened faith, while the lower schools have not yet been touched by the Christian Literature Society, we are glad to know that in 1917, with the consent of the principals, the Society reached 1,330 secondary schools in Japan, containing some 410,000 pupils, with the "Myojo" (Day Star), its paper for young men; that this paper reaches nearly all the middle schools and colleges to the extent of about one copy to every seven students; finally, that to the Society's offer of a free six months' correspondence course of Christian instruction for graduates over 450 applications have come in. Young Japanese are thus beginning to see that the antidote for despair is not found in the native religions-in Buddhism, with its pessimistic emphasis on the meaninglessness and misery of existence; in Confucianism, with its practical agnosticism; in Shintoism, with its sole emphasis on nationalism; or in all these three, with their light valuation of human life. The cure for pessimism and despair is a spiritual inspiration of some kindthe kind found in Christianity. Japan is the leader of the Orient, and it will make a great difference to the world whether she becomes Christian or remains non-Christian.

It is interesting to compare the above with the statement

that suicides among German school-children are prominent. This leads to the conclusion that these catastrophes, both in Japan and Germany, may be due to still another factor than those mentioned, namely, to the ingrained teaching of materialism. If boys and girls are taught that material success is the measure of life, and do not achieve it, they naturally feel that life is a failure.

INDUSTRIAL FREEDOM AND THE WAR

HILE the guns at the front are churning the soil of France they are also upheaving the social and industrial life of all civilized nations. Nothing is more certain than that out of this war is going to emerge a new social order. Even this conservative country, far away from the scene of hostilities, has undergone a change which would have been incredible four years ago, and which nothing less than a world commotion could have wrought.

The irony of it is that all this vast turmoil has been brought upon the world by men who have set out to fasten upon the world the tyranny of the old order. They are the worshipers of power, whether it be the power of royalty, or the power of the military master, or the power of the owner and manipulator of accumulated wealth. If these men succeed, the cause of freedom will be defeated, whether it be freedom from the tyranny of the absolute monarch, or freedom from the arbitrary rule of military power, or freedom from industrial despotism."

That is as clear as daylight. It is so clear, so obvious, so undebatable, that it is astonishing to find any man or set of men so blind as not to see that all who love freedom and are seeking it have a common cause. The laborer who is struggling for economic freedom has to-day as his supreme enemy the enemy of those who are struggling for civil freedom against military rule and political freedom against the rule of the despot.

..

And yet to-day the greatest success which Germany, the enemy of all freedom, has won has been due to the enfeeblement brought upon Russia by the Bolsheviki in the name of economic and industrial liberation.

What has made the Bolsheviki and their kindred spirits in other countries the most effective allies that Germany has has been the fact that they, like the military masters of Germany, hold that there is something more desirable than liberty. This thing that they want to set above everything else is their doc trinę. It is true that in some vital respects their doctrine differs from the doctrine of the Kaiser and his group; but the Kaiser and his group care nothing for that. What the military masters of Germany fear are men who will fight for freedom. If they can alienate scme of these men from the cause of freedom even by diverting them to a fanatical devotion to some doctrine that the German military mind despises, they have weakened the enemy of despotism and correspondingly strengthened their own forces.

This is what makes the reactionary and the extreme radical bedfellows.

The reactionary does not want freedom. He wants to make secure the power which men have gained either by blood descent, by military force, or by the possession of wealth.

At the other extreme is the so-called radical. He does not want freedom either. He wants power taken from those who have it now and handed over to another group.

There is no doubt that the men who have wielded power in the past are going to lose some of it; some of them, we hope, will lose all of it; and other men who have never had power before are going to have it and exercise it. But what the world is fighting for to-day is not the transfer of power from one set of men to another set of men. There will be no gain if a Czar at one end of the scale is dethroned only by the setting up of another Czar at the other end of the scale in his place.

Americans will not be misled by the propagandists of any doctrine. The love of liberty is bred too deep in them. They are not fighting to keep a group in power. Neither are they fight ing to give power to any other group. They are not fighting in defense of an old doctrine, nor are they fighting in order to assert a new one. They are not fighting to maintain the old order, whether it be political or economic, or to establish another

order in its stead. They are not fighting to maintain any form of government. They are not fighting to retain any industrial system of capitalism. Neither are they fighting to set up any new form of government, nor are they fighting in order to establish a new system of industry. They are fighting for lib erty. They want the freedom to determine their own form of government-freedom to decide whether they will keep the old or adopt another. And they want also freedom to determine whether they shall have the old industrial order, with its system of wages and its differences between capital and labor, or whether they will go on to a new order in which those differences will not exist, and in which some other reward than wages will be provided for men's labor.

If they lose this war, it is this freedom that they will lose. Nothing else to-day is worth fighting for.

EASTER

recur

The entombment and the resurrection are constantly ring events in the world's history. Man is always crucifying the Christ and the Christ is always rising again from the dead. His disciples are ever denying him, betraying him, deserting him, and ever astounded by his immortality. The greed of Judas, the ambition of Caiaphas, the cowardice of Pilate, are ever conspiring to compass his death. They bury the dead Christ and put a seal upon his tomb and say, Now let his Father deliver him if he will own him. And heartbroken Mary comes to the grave weeping, and knows not the risen Christ who stands undiscovered at her side. Christianity has its Good Friday and its Easter; Christianity shares the Passion and also shares the resurrection of the Master.

In the first century Nero thought he had slain the new faith just born, feebly manifested in a feeble band, neither understood by others nor understanding themselves. From the ashes of that fiery persecution Christianity arose, and three centuries later a successor of Nero proclaimed Rome a Christian empire.

In the Middle Ages Christianity had become the universal religion of Europe, but it was a paganized Christianity. The Church had borrowed from the pagans some of their forms of worship, much of their theology, the very names of their days, and, worst of all, their persecuting spirit. The Christians slain by a Christian Church outnumbered by far the Christians slain by a pagan empire. The Church was materially rich and spir itually poor, politically strong and spiritually weak. Caiaphas ruled in its councils. Great cathedrals were tombs of a buried Christ and priestly robes were as resplendent shrouds. And yet Christ was alive in the Church and manifested his life in the lives of the preaching friars, who were laying in England the foundations of its future liberties, and in devout and selfdenying sisters of mercy and charity, who were precursors and prophets of the Red Cross of the then distant future.

In the eighteenth century Christ was buried in Protestant England. The beauty of its cathedral worship was the beauty of icebergs-reflecting the glory but not the warmth of a fardistant God. The cross was on the spire and above the altar, but not in the lives of the clergy. The preaching was an ethics as uninspiring as that of Confucius. The religion of Dean Swift was no better than the infidelity of Bolingbroke. The cynic's sneer at the piety of Job, "Doth Job fear God for naught?" became the foundation of England's ethical philosophy in Arch deacon Paley's famous definition: "Virtue is the doing good to mankind in obedience to the will of God and for the sake of everlasting happiness." Yet out of this entombment came forth Wesleyanism in England and Moravianism on the Continent. Not

many wise men nor mighty men nor noble men were called; but Methodism saved England from re-enacting the terrible tragedy of a French Revolution.

In the nineteenth century religion had become in Protestant England and America as dogmatic as the Roman Catholic relig ion which they had cast out. Traditionalism, driven out at the door, had crept back through the window. Creeds took the place of faith; theology, of religion. The aphorism," The only heresy is lack of love," was carelessly forgotten or indignantly denied. The mind of the Church was double-locked and barred against new truth. Then arose a new and specious enemy of Christian

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I suppose so. She probably told her protégée in the approved Western manner to jump on the band-wagon and be in on the scramble at the end. I can't think it was really China. The real China has no regard for band-wagons or scrambles. She doesn't care for war, and she doesn't care who wins this war. She could see the whole of Europe wiped out and not bat an eyelid. She is the only perfect neutral, stirred by our fervor for the things which we in the Western world believe constitute progress only to an unobtrusive but profound contempt. She resents no injuries. She glows with no enthusiasms. She is indulgent to the spendthrift of time. She is long-suffering beyond belief. She has an appalling, thousand-year patience. No Occidentally minded man can possibly bring himself to admire China. As a nation she is so hopelessly flabby. We have every right to be joyously Pharisaical. And yet there are moments, there are

moments

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"When China's calm contempt," continued her husband, "gets on my nerves. You remember that poem of Moody's," he went on, called The Menagerie'? It's about a man who, having had one drink too many, strays into the Zoo one day, and suddenly sees the animals, not as circus beasts at all, but as old hearthmates gathered together by brother Forepaugh' to exhibit to the world the stages of nature's 'huge experiment.' The man, telling about it, cries:

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'Helpless I stood among those awful cages;

The beasts were walking loose and I was bagged!
I, I, last product of the toiling ages,

Goal of heroic feet that never lagged,

A little man in trousers, slightly jagged.

Deliver me from such another jury!

The Judgment Day will be a picnic to 't.
Their satire was more dreadful than their fury,
And worst of all was just a kind of brute
Disgust, and giving up, and sinking mute.'

The victim's advice at the end is pertinent:
"If you're a sweet thing in a flower-bed hat,
Ör her best fellow with his tie tucked in,
Don't squander love's bright springtime girding at
An old chimpanzee with an Irish chin;

There may be hidden meaning in his grin.' "Sometimes when I have been mentally 'girding' at China for her stodgy refusal to follow the Western world up the steep road of progress, whose milestones are the steam-engine, the cotton-gin, the telegraph, the bath-tub, and the motor car, there comes a moment when, like the 'little man in trousers, slightly jagged,' I seem to divine a 'hidden meaning' in her cool selfsufficiency."

"Exactly!" cried the Lady Eremite. "It is our vague sus

W

picion that China may see and know something which we of the Western world are blind to that makes her calm persistence in her ancient ways so disconcerting and irritating." "The trouble is," the Happy Eremite went on, 66 that Our philosophies are as far apart as our countries. And we Occi dentals, having come rather to smash, are sensitive about it and resent that smug old Oriental's 'I told you so.' We of the Western world are, as it were, dipped at birth in running waters. We are consecrated in infancy to that old Heracleian god, Eternal flux. We must be in motion or perish. It is different, it seems, with the Orientals."

"How about the Japanese? Surely they have bestirred themselves," said the Lady Eremite.

"The Japanese, I sometimes think, have sold their birthright for a mess of pottage. America jingled a handful of bangles and jewels outside a nun's window-and the nun lost her head. "China is a nun, too, but she is a wise old nun. She has seen what bangles come to, she says, and she has huge contempt for the people who set store by them. She thinks our frantic nationalism is foolishness, and our hunger after wealth is foolishness, and our worship of progress is foolishness, and our patter of hygiene and sanitation, she says, is like the crackling of thorns under a pot.

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China, in other words, is a poor old fuddy-duddy nation, ages behind the times. I realize that fully. She needs a general manager and a board of directors and ten thousand efficiency experts and an army of prospectors and engineers and railway builders and chewing-gum drummers. I tell myself that every time I think of China. Some Chinese philanthropist should buy Detroit, for instance, and move it bodily, men, women, and children, into the interior of China. China needs something to make her hum. I know that. And yet there are moments when it seems to me that we of the Western world might, not without profit, sit down and whisper to our souls, like the President of China: I examine myself and feel that I have many defects.'

"We have a great contempt for China. We cannot forgive her for never moving. And China, I suspect, has a great contempt for us, and cannot forgive us for never sitting still. The god she worships sits with legs folded under his knees, thinking. The god the Western world has worshiped-I never heard his name, unless it is Mercury-has been always running to get something. The god of the Occident had his apotheosis in August, 1914, when Germany crossed the Belgian frontier to 'get' Paris. That day Belgium saw the old god for what he was, and spurned him; France spurned him; England spurned him. We in America clung to him for a while, but then we too cast him off, seeing a greater God whom we had forgotten. Mercury is having his twilight among the Allies, and by and by he will have his twilight in Germany, too. That is the great thing about this war. Out of the horror and the sacrifice a purer God is coming to his own.

"Meanwhile there are moments when I wonder whether the heathen are not still the most sincere and thorough Christians that there are."

"It all depends on what one calls Christian," said the Lady Eremite.

mate for the authorities to have appointed him to a chair in the university and given financial and moral support to his teaching.

The teachers in their discussions of academic freedom natu rally lay emphasis on the rights and liberties of the members of their own profession. They are apt to be silent concerning the rights of the pupils and their parents, and concerning the duties of the teachers toward their pupils and the parents. This char acteristic is illustrated by three papers which lie before mea article in the January Atlantic" by Alexander Meiklejohn.

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the President of Amherst College; the annual report for 1916-17 of President A. Lawrence Lowell, of Harvard University; and a special report on "Academic Freedom in War Time" by a Special Committee of three, which was presented at a recent meeting of the American Association of University Professors.

President Meiklejohn lays stress on the college as a place of research, and apparently claims for it unlimited freedom. "Men form their opinions from partial knowledge; the college must know, so far as may be known, all that the human mind has thought and learned which bears on these opinions. . . . It must in this sense stand apart, viewing all interests of men alike with equal eye, and measuring each in terms of every other and the whole. It is a place of knowledge and of criticism."

President Lowell, with greater discrimination, distinguishes between the college professor's utterances within and without the college. "The teaching by the professor in his class-room on the subjects within the scope of his chair ought to be absolutely free." He maintains, however, that such teaching should be confined to the subject upon which the professor is an expert; and that the students have a right not to be compelled to listen to remarks offensive or injurious to them on subjects of which the instructor is not a master. Outside university walls, President Lowell holds, the liberty of the professor is identical with the liberty of other citizens, provided he speaks as a citizen, not as a professor. If he writes or speaks in such fashion as to lead the public to suppose that his utterance is in any sense representative of the university, he is misleading the public.

The Committee of the American Association of University Professors deals specifically with the freedom of college professors in war time. It does not recognize the principle enunciated by President Lowell concerning the professor's speaking as a private citizen, for in its comments on the dismissal of Professor Cattell from Columbia University it does not note the vital fact that Professor Cattell's letters to Congressmen against compulsory military service abroad were written on University note paper and were consequently taken by the Congressmen to indicate the University's sanction of his views. This writing as a professor, not as a private citizen, was the reason for his discharge. With reference to the general rights of professors in war time, the Committee holds that such restrictions as the war calls for should be only temporary, and only such as are necessary; that the professor has no right to practice or to inculcate disobedience of any law of the land; and no right" to obstruct or impede the execution of any measure lawfully determined upon as requisite for the safety of the country and the successful prosecution of the war." And the Committee draws with clearness the "plain difference between an attempt to persuade citizens or legislators by argument to favor or oppose a project of law not yet enacted, and an attempt to persuade individuals to disobey or evade or render ineffective a law already enacted.'

We approach the question of academic freedom from a different point of view. To the community it is not so important to determine what are the rights and privileges of teachers as what are their duties and what are the rights of the pupils and their parents.

It is the duty of the school or the college to prepare its students for life in a free commonwealth. The object of all educational institutions should be to make their students able to contribute something to the wealth of the community by their industry, or to the intelligence of the community by their wis dom, or to the moral life of the community by their spirit. If any instructor is contributing to this result, it is presumptively the duty of the college to retain him in his chair and give to him the largest possible freedom of utterance. Without such freedom of utterance no teacher can accomplish for the college and its students the purpose for which the college has been organized and the students are attending it. He must be more than an echo of other people's opinions. A human phonograph can do little to equip the hearer for productive industry and practically nothing to impart to him either wisdom to guide or spirit to inspire his life.

If any professor is not contributing to the result for which

the college was organized and the students are attending it, it is the duty of the college to remove him from his chair and put another teacher in his place. Thomas Arnold fought successfully in England for the right and the duty of Rugby to dismiss any pupil whose presence in the school was no benefit to himself and was an injury to others. If the school or college authorities have a right to remove a pupil whose presence is an injury, they certainly have no duty of maintaining a teacher whose instruction the authorities regard as injurious. It cannot be doubted that a Protestant has a right to teach that neither the Church nor the Pope is infallible. But the Roman Catholic Church is not under any obligation to afford him either financial or moral support while he is so teaching. There is no doubt that Professor Bertrand Russell had a right to say to England that it ought to be possible "for the women who must at present remain unmarried to have children if they wish it." But it is not the duty of the people of England to give to that teaching the moral and financial support of Oxford University unless they think that the teaching is calculated to improve the moral life of the students and the social order of the state. So we do not doubt the legal right of any disciple of Nietzsche to teach that "the task of the race is to create these Lords or Gods-if you cannot create a God, Zarathustra says, stop talking of one." But it is not the duty of a Protestant theological seminary to keep in its chair of theology a disciple of Nietzsche who is teaching this doctrine to his classes.

Sixty years ago practically every college and every theological seminary in the country had its system of philosophy which it taught to its pupils, and which they were expected to accept without question. We have no wish to go back to that practice. This, however, is not because the practice denied the rights of the teachers, but because it forbade them from performing their duties. The object of education is not to furnish either a theological, a political, or a sociological system of thought adapted to the fashion of the times, which the pupil is to accept and wear on graduation day. The object of education is to equip the student with power to do his own thinking. Any higher institution of learning which fails to furnish its student with power to do his own thinking fails fundamentally to fulfill its function. Mr. Crothers has said, with as much truth as wit, that many men do not do their own thinking because they lack the necessary conveniences. The object of the college is to furnish its pupils with the necessary conveniences. No doubt the presentation of different points of view and the resultant debate among the students either inside or outside the class is conducive to this general end. It is therefore not the duty of the college authorities to determine what theories of life shall be taught by the professors. But if the college authorities are satisfied that the professor's teaching, as combined with the teaching of other members of the faculty, is not conducive to the making of intelligent, virtuous, and patriotic citizens, it is not only the right, it is the duty of the college authorities to dismiss him and appoint another teacher in his place. And this is their duty because it is the right of the pupils and their parents to have the purpose for which the school or college has been created and is maintained carried out honestly and efficiently by those who are responsible for its administration.

Academic freedom has two sides. On the one hand, the professor should be free, as long as he remains a professor, to teach what he believes to be the truth in his department. But it is the duty of his superior authorities to determine whether they will give the financial and moral support of the university to his teaching. It is difficult to draw the line between liberty and license. It is difficult to guard against intellectual anarchy on the one side and intellectual despotism on the other. But it is at least safe to say that the men who are intrusted with the control of our educational institutions, whether they are the voters in the school district or the trustees in a university, are in duty bound to see to it that the education furnished is fitting the pupils for life in a community which believes in four fundamental ethical principles-the rights of persons, of property, of reputation, and of the family; and in the one fundamental political principle-" Government of the people, by the people, and for the people."

The Knoll, Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York.