at the point of initiation of the goods and maintaining its inspection throughout the whole year of sale." And there is no national law under which the labelfaker can be reached directly. In some cases, he can be reached indirectly under the Pure Food law and punished with "imprisonment for an inconsequential period

and the payment of a nominal fine." But that is all.

The remedy that Mr. Russell suggests is a national statute such as that which has protected the people of England for over twenty years a statute that clearly and distinctly defines label-faking as a crime and provides an adequate punishment for it.

TH

HE chief problem of the modern preacher is to tell the truth without scaring his grandmother. This, according to Harry Emerson Fosdick (Atlantic Monthly, December), might be made the text for a sermon designed to answer the multitude of critics of the church and those to whom it has become a "rage to censure the blunders of organized religion." Mr. Fosdick is quite out of patience with those who so "obviously exhibit the joy of gunning for the church and peppering it with such nice precision." While the writer admits that this twisting of the "ecclesiastical lion's tail" may have some justification, he is not willing to believe that we are tottering on the verge of a terrible religious disruption. "How many times," he asks, "have we been told of the laboring men's convention that hissed the church and cheered Jesus; of the trades union leader who said, 'Christ is all right, bat damn the church'; of that other proletarian who eclipsed them all in scorn: We used to hate and then we despised the church,' he said, "but now we ignore it.""

Behind a vast amount of this criticism, we are told, is the implicit and strangely mistaken understanding that the ecclesiastical situation used to be better than it is. It is the old cry of the "good old times." To quote:

What good old times? Good old times, when for the quibble of a text men excommunicated each other, or for a difference about the sacrament made the ground run red with human blood! when James I said of the Puritans, "I will make them conform or I will harry them out of the land," and the Puritans turned the compliment upon the Baptists and the Quakers! Good old times, when the Congregationalists of Massachusetts and the Episcopalians of Virginia were bent on state churches, supported by

a public tax, and when as late as 1833, even Lyman Beecher bewailed it as an intolerable disaster that folk of a persuasion other than his own were no more compelled to contribute to his salary! Good old times, when the elders, with a tankard of ale, walked down the aisle in the middle of the sermon, that the preacher might refresh himself before he proceeded with the next two hours of homily; and when in Connecticut a minister in jail for felony had his prison limits extended to take in the brewery which he owned, and where his presence was required for business!

Good old times, when no Governor Hughes could claim the allegiance of the people of the churches in his assault on gambling, but when many a church edifice in Greater New York was erected by a lottery! Good old times, when the Edinburgh Conference, the greatest ecumenical gathering in Christendom's history, would have been a wild impossibility for at least two reasons: that the severed branches of the church were bitterly hostile, not fraternally cooperative, and that the majority of American Protestants were anti-missionary! Good old times, doubtless, when books like Christianity and the Social Crisis, The Social Teaching of Jesus, Jesus Christ and the Social Question, were undreamed of; and Tennyson's aunt, so his biographer tells us, used rather to weep by the hour over the goodness of God, and say, "Has he not damned most of my friends? But me,-me he has picked out for eternal salvation, me who am no better than my neighbors!"

That the church meets a real crisis today, says the writer, no one doubts. "The growth of the factory system, the amazing increase in urban population, the bewildering kaleidoscope of social reconstruction, these and their kin create a crisis." We read further:

Shall the church, adapted in organization and method to an age of agriculture and domestic manufacture, confused in thought by the left-overs of an exaggerated individualism, go through no spasms in her attempts at readjustment? A few of her sons, the prophets of the new church yet to be, throw themselves into the social mêlée; but the major part of them, as usual, remain within the walls of their

little spiritual gymnasia, pulling on the exercisers that are good indeed for raising moral muscle, but are not belted in anywhere to the big business of the world. It has never been otherwise. This modern social crisis is the result of the amazing transformation of the Western world from autocratic monarchies to democratic states. Did not the church in that crisis stammer and stutter her way toward a new phrasing of her social creed? After her long aristocratic training of seventeen centuries, with Rome for her nurse and Europe's kings for tutors, she acted

like some Prince Hamlet habituated to the scenery of his royal court, who suddenly finds himself amid the setting of A Midsummer Night's Dream, with Quince the carpenter, Snug the joiner, Bottom the weaver, and a bellows-mender, a tinker, and a tailor on the stage. Shall he not be tongue-tied, or else most inept and ridiculous, when first he tries to trim his courtly mien and purse his princely lips for democratic speech? So the church hemmed and hawed then, as now, over the difficult business of readaptation.

"T

HE proper care of the mind has been given such little consideration, or none at all, that at first the novelty of the suggestion is provocative of risibility." And yet, says F. C. Walsh (Technical World Magazine, December), if the brain is to attain and maintain its highest level of efficiency, it must be given the care and attention that are being so sedulously recommended for the care of the various other organs of the body. "Popular opinion and practice notwithstanding," declares Dr. Walsh, "the brain is not an 'airy nothing' that can live on mental pabulum alone; the brain requires nourishment, and of a very material kind."

Dr. Walsh is not in sympathy with the "food cranks" who starve themselves with the specious plea that an abundance of food clogs and muddles the brain. Fasts and half fasts, he asserts, never made for mental greatness, though perhaps for better morals. He finds it much better for mental efficiency to have a "rich blood stream, plenty of oxygen, abundance of sunshine, and plenty of physical exercise."

Most minds," we are told, "work best during the morning hours, and the powers of the will as well as of the intellect seem to be at their highest at that time." There are, however, exceptions:

A Balzac, prodigious wizard in the use of brainenergy, can write at stressful pace for eighteen hours on a stretch-and a Balzac can die of overwork! Moreover, the critical faculties of the mind are more apt to be suppressed at night, and as a consequence,

what may appear to be excellent work accomplished by the brain at night, too often proves to be unsatisfactory and disappointing in the morning, and requires doing over or reshaping under the keen supervision of the clearer critical faculties of the morning hours. In fact, at night the brain works very similarly to the manner in which it does when influenced by alcohol, that is, new ideas and conceptions may come into consciousness more readily, but their expression in any kind of art form is very likely to be defective. From this we evolve the axiom: the night for meditation, and the morning for execution. The will is more daring in the morning hours. Many a battle, military and financial, has been planned in the still hours of the night and executed with brilliant result on the morning after. Daycourage, either physical or moral, is often turned to cowardice at night because of this peculiar attribute of the brain. The devil and the red-skin have long been cognizant of this fact.

"Regular sleep is essential to brain health, and loss of sleep not only injures the brain itself, but sadly interferes with brain efficiency."

The average brain does well on eight hours of sleep, some require more, others less. The brain of a Napoleon thrives on four or five hours' sleep, but it does not follow from this that a man having a brain requiring ten hours may not be possessed of genius equal to Napoleon's; it simply means that if he sleeps ten hours and awakes refreshed, his particular make of brain demands that many hours of rest. A man could have a great mind and sleep twelve hours out of the twenty-four, or he could be an idiot and sleep only three. The capabilities of a mind cannot be judged by the number of hours it requires for sleep.

There are three common destroyers of brain efficiency-coffee, alcohol, and tobacco. "It has been demonstrated," the writer declares, "that small quantities of

coffee actually prevent or postpone mental fatigue, while large or excessive quantities act in the opposite manner." Alcohol in lesser quantity first whips up the brain to increased activity, and then benumbs it as the quantity is increased. New combinations of latent ideas may be brought before the eye of consciousness, but less effective work will be accomplished during the course of the alcoholic action. To quote further:

A poet, for example, may gain an entirely original conception for a poem by means of the stimulative action of alcohol in any of its forms, but if he attempt then and there to put that conception into verse, the result will not be nearly so artistically perfect as it would be if written after the brain were wholly free from the slightest alcoholic stimulation. The creative powers may be temporarily increased by the alcoholic spur, but the critical faculties of the mind are diminished at any stage of brain excitement as the result of alcohol. With continued use the creative mental power itself becomes lessened, and finally a state of brain irritation is the consequence. Alcohol, then, is of no value for the actual accomplishment of brain work; on the contrary, its use lessens the ability to perform the most satisfactory and effective mental labor. At this point modern science joins hands with the old morality, and in the

interests of brain efficiency stands for complete purity of living. This is no mere preachment, but an impartial, disinterested statement of cold fact.

The habitual use of tobacco seems to restrain the fullest freedom of mental activity:

Writers, poets, painters, composers, and scientific workers for the most part admit that they can do better work after giving up the habit altogether. For the first few days or even weeks after its discontinuance, the difficulties of mental effort in the respective callings are increased; but as time goes on and the soothing effect of the nicotine is no longer missed, the powers of concentration become greater, the mind feels clearer, works longer and faster without fatigue, and the work turned out seems to be of higher quality. It is true that many possessors of the most brilliant minds have used tobacco in moderation and even to excess, Robert Louis Stevenson being a noted example; but there is much reason to believe that their work would have been even better and greater had they not been addicted to this widespread habit of modern life. It is a curious reflection on this point that of those who enter on the career of literature, there are a greater number of successes among the women than the men, and other things being equal, it is not going too far to surmise, at least, that this is due to a difference of acquired habit or lack of habit in the sexes.

"R

EAL business competition under present conditions would be too destructive, and private monopoly, complete and unrestrained, is intolerable." This is the complex state of affairs in the business world that Mr. George W. Perkins, recently a partner in the banking-house of J. P. Morgan & Co., seeks to better by a cure made up of a combination of a National Business Court and coöperation.

Mr. Perkins, writing in a recent number of the Independent, declares that "electricity more than aught else has been the creator of our modern corporations. Ruthless competition by ox team," he asserts, "could never be very serious, but ruthless competition by electricity spells bankruptcy." As the "claim is made that monopoly fleeces the public always," the writer believes that we are forced to consider a third method of business procedure.

By the term coöperation, Mr. Perkins means "a system of doing business by which

all parties interested will enjoy the benefits of the business. It must be coöperation between labor and capital, between capital and consumer, between company and government." Broadly speaking, he would organize the ideal coöperative company in the following manner:

The brain workers and hand workers should be paid their regular compensation for earning the interest on the bonded debt and dividends on preferred stock. If by successful management they earn more than this, it would under modern arrangements go to what are known as common stockholders, and at this point the organization of brain workers and hand workers should share with the common stockholders in the profits made for the common stockholders, and share on a definitely stated basis, varying according to conditions in different lines of business. Where this has been tried it has been found eminently successful.

Mr. Perkins calls our attention to the fact that the trust has been developed by reason of modern invention and that it furnishes a more economical and efficient way of doing

business. "Would it not be better to preserve the acknowledged good that is in the trusts," he pleads, "and eradicate the evil?" Congress, we are informed, "has ignored every suggestion by Roosevelt, by Taft, by Wickersham, looking toward any method that would preserve any good there is, any benefit or advantage there is to the people in large business undertakings, and has seemed content to let the country drift toward business chaos." We read further:

What has given us the sweatshop? Competition. What has given us child labor? Competition. What throws labor out of employment? Competition.

What causes low wages? Competition.

What brings panic and failure? Competition. And what is our Congress at this moment calling loudly on our Attorney-General to enforce, even to the door of the jail? Competition.

The Congressman who stands for a literal enforcement of the Sherman Act stands for the sweatshop and child labor.

Competition produces the two extremes-millionaires and paupers; while cooperation looks toward more stable conditions and a more equal distribution of wealth.

As a final remedy for the present "intolerable situation," the writer would establish "in Washington a business court to which our great business problems could go for final adjustment when they could not be settled otherwise:

We now have at Washington a Supreme Court, to which is referred the final settlement of our legal questions. This court is composed, of course, of lawyers only, and it is the dream of every young man who enters the law that he may some day be. called to the Supreme Court bench. If such a call comes, it matters not how lucrative his practice, he always drops it for the honor conferred. Why not have a similar goal for our business men? Why not have a court for business questions, on which no man could sit who had not had a business training, with an honorable record? This would surely come to be regarded by business men in the same way that the Supreme Court is regarded by lawyers. The supervision of business by such a body of men, who had reached such a court in such a way, would unquestionably be fair and equitable to business, fair and equitable to the public. Furthermore, it would not take out of business that invaluable asset, individual initiative. It would leave the every-day management of business untrammeled and allow men free swing to devise ways and means to improve, enlarge and develop domestic and foreign commerce.

S

YDNEY BROOKS, an eminent English publicist who has recently been visiting America, has returned to his country deeply impressed with Uncle Sam's idea of patriotism. Taking America as an example, he has started right in to scold his fellow citizens on their lack of pride in England's history and their gross negligence in connection with the public commemoration of notable events.

In the United States, the writer found conditions just the opposite. We quote from the Forum (December):

The Americans at this moment are recalling the events of the Civil War on a scale and with accessories that simply amaze Englishmen. To gather the veterans of that gigantic struggle on one of their historic battlegrounds, to form them up in opposing lines, to have them solemnly march up to one another and shake hands over the scene of their ancient strife -that is an exhibition of sentiment and melodrama at which Englishmen can only gasp. They are themselves temperamentally incapable of even conceiving themselves as taking part in such a demonstration.

In America, again, Mr. Brooks found patriotism habitually taught as a school subject:

An American boy of ten knows the words and tunes of more patriotic songs than an Englishman hears in a lifetime. Nothing is more interesting than to go into one of the public schools of New York City just when the children are assembling. You will find them marshalled in the playground in semimilitary formation. They march off to their classrooms to a martial air. In each classroom above the teacher's desk hangs the Stars and Stripes, and the children every morning, before the day's work begins, hold up their hands toward the national flag, and with flashing eyes repeat some such vow as this: "I pledge my allegiance to this flag and the country for which it stands, one country indivisible, with justice and liberty for all." There is something of the puerile and the humorous in this little ceremony, but there is also something very impressive. It makes boys and girls emotionally proud of their country and interested in it. It is precisely one of those things that have made the public schools of America the greatest instrument of racial assimilation and patriotic instruction that the world has yet seen.

T

HE lords, the barons, the aristocracy of former days," says Felix Adler, "won their way by physical prowess; the middle class won its way by intellectual qualities; the working class, I am persuaded, will win its way neither by physical force nor by intellectual qualities chiefly, but by the development among themselves, and for the world, of new moral qualities." This is the most luminous word that I have seen upon the labor question.

The McNamara case dazzled the country, as a flash of lightning. The labor leaders. were staggered. The rank and file of the unions were blinded.

After the lightning-flash, comes the thunder, the voice of God.

That voice says what it has always said since history began:

"It is not your gathered money, your power to hurt, and your deeds of violence; it is the righteousness of your cause alone that shall make you prosper."

The trouble with individual men is that they do not realize their nobleness. Men do unworthy things when they lose selfrespect. If every man would believe that he is divine, he would be ashamed to act brutishly.

The trouble with labor is that it does not understand its own stature.

It forgets that it is divine and uses the devil's weapons.

Forgetting that it is noble, it descends to ignoble ways.

For the cause of labor is the cause of humanity.

The triumph of labor is the triumph of democracy.

The freedom and dignity of labor mean

the enfranchisement and manhood of. the whole people.

The labor movement is another name for the advance of civilization.

It has been said that labor carries all other classes on its back. True! And therefore labor cannot rise without lifting the whole world.

THE

Class Spirit a Curse

HE curse of labor is the class spirit. Those who regard the labor question as a clash of class against class are narrow. They lack vision. And "where there is no vision the people perish."

When class fights class, it is merely selfishness wrestling with selfishness, it is greed against greed, it is the have-nots opposed to the haves.

Those who take this view degrade labor. The cry for justice becomes a servile snarl. The hymn of humanity is turned to the jackal's howl.

There is no room in America for class of any kind.

The very word "class" stinks in the nostrils of democracy.

To speak of the lower classes is to apply a term of medievalism to modern life. There are no real lower nor higher classes. America is for humanity.

To call the workingmen a class, and to incite class passions, is to defeat the very dream and purpose of labor.

In the eighteenth century, the conscience of the world pointed to an improvement of the conditions of the lower classes. In the twentieth century, the unfolding conscience of a progressing world demands that there shall be no class.