The members of the League undertake to respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all members of the League.

Were I writing on the League of Nations, other paragraphs in the famous Covenant might be criticized. There is, in any case, the entire question of regional guarantees. When the new programme comes finally before the League it will very probably at once simplify and clarify the entire situation. It is proposed that within Europe there should be a general guarantee by a supplementary treaty, and secondly that, in given concrete examples, there should be local regional agreements. These would be peculiar to the problems involved and might very well make strongly for security at large. At least that is the hope of those who have been working on the project. If such a programme were adopted there might be a decided reduction in the standing armies of Europe. Under the circumstances, therefore, the status of the League of Nations leaves something to be desired. Certainly it is not the 'cure all" for which so much was claimed, nor is it the ingenious but devilish device for binding the United States that we were familiar with in 1920. It was a gamble then, but considering the circumstances of the world perhaps the only available gamble. Today and in the immediate future its duty is an improvement of its own situation.

So far no one has a workable alternative to offer to the League of Nations. On the other hand the close conservatism of our politics is breaking down. The commercial and economic forces which bind us to the rest of the world are real and effective. It is impossible, however, to touch on those elements in our world situation at this time. The economics of diplomacy is a force whose potency none can deny. That certainly is making every day for a deeper interest in foreign policy. So the various currents of our national life seem to set more strongly toward an active participation in world affairs. Whether we join the League of Nations or no, they all have the tendency to restore to our foreign policy an effective vigor and the determination that the United States will still play a rôle as a partner in great

events.

ALFRED L. P. DENNIS.

THE PROTEAN POWER

BY THOMAS COMMERFORD MARTIN

ONE of the popular philosophers of the day, Bergson, observes that it takes longer to "change ourselves than to change our tools". Another, Ferraris, has even more recently asserted that, so far from invention having done the world any good, "we have become the slaves of our own tyrant inventions". Both critical slurs on modern civilization may be true, but shall we settle back into the past, shall we stop inventing, shall we cease to use and improve the tools we have? And if there is no such possibility as arrest, must not the forward movement be continued? How can we stop thinking?

It was with no such pessimistic, Bolshevistic note that the present writer, in THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW of April, 1888, summed up what electrical development had then done in the fifty years since Morse completed his rough operative model of the recording electro-magnetic telegraph and exhibited it to a half skeptical, half marveling public. Nor can a view other than optimistic be now taken at the close of the one hundred years marked by the great electro-magnetic discoveries of Oersted, the Dane, Ampere, the Frenchman, Faraday, the Englishman, and Joseph Henry, the American. So much has been accomplished since 1820-21 in the great realm of electro-dynamics that one hesitates before the impossibility of summing up adequately all the advances in the century named, in the arts and sciences, with all the industrial and social changes involved, be they for good or ill. The direct results of electrical development are tangible and innumerable. The implications as to remote and probable effects are, equally, subtle and innumerable.

Electricity is advancing so far and fast, in these days of radio and vivisection of the atom, that people are apt to assume it is wholly shifting to new bases. Nothing of the kind! At the very instant, when the world is being belted with wireless

towers, like poles along a highway, and our Government has to intervene between rival broadcasters who are grubstaking the firmament, the Chief Signal Officer of the United States Army comes out with an announcement of a modified Morse alphabet to speed up wire and cable telegraphy. Even more emphatic evidence as to the value and utility of the older methods of transmitting intelligence is the fact that a new transatlantic cable to operate between New York and London is to be laid right away at a cost of $10,000,000. But did not Dr. Elihu Thomson assert in 1898, on the very heels of Marconi's wireless sensation, that radio "will not replace telegraph lines and cables"? And here is the proof, twenty-five years later.

It is just twenty-one years since Marconi, having a month or two before jumped the signal "S" in Morse code across the Atlantic, was banqueted by the American Institute of Electrical Engineers to mark their appreciation of the significant event. To use his own language, he had "proved once and for all that electric waves could be transmitted and received across the ocean; and that long distance radio-telegraphy, about which so many doubts were entertained, was really going to become an established fact." Rumours were in circulation that "doubts were still so profound at the time that the scoffers actually got up a round robin of protest against such recognition of the brilliant young Italian. Before the same body last year, when over here to receive two American engineering gold medals, the great inventor, dealing with the technical problems of a new art and gigantic industry, was able to assert: "If radio has already done so much for the safety of life at sea, for commerce, and for commercial and military communications, it is also destined to bring new and until recently unforeseen opportunities for healthy recreation and instruction into the lives of millions of human beings." A month before this, a portrait of King Victor Emmanuel had been transmitted by wireless from Italy to the United States. Late in 1921 President Harding addressed a peace message to twenty-seven nations by wireless from Long Island.

Beyond all this lies the infinitely important field of wireless power transmission. The discussion of this crops up incessantly, showing how much it is in men's minds. In lectures in

VOL. CCXVIII.-NO. 812

America, England and France, thirty years ago, Nikola Tesla proclaimed his belief in the coming feasibility of such transmission; and a little later he described in detail some features of his systematic research then carried on, and still being urged, with the object of perfecting a method of transmission of electrical energy through the natural medium; first, to develop a transmitter of great power; second, to perfect means for individualizing and isolating the energy transmitted; and third, to ascertain the laws of propagation through the earth and the atmosphere.

Intimately associated as telephony is with the telegraph out of which it grew, and with radio that has emancipated it from any bondage of the wired circuit, speech transmission remains an art and industry alone, apart from both in all its essentials. The American Government insisted on this separation of function and management a few years ago—which had some reason; although anti-trust legislation has never gone quite so far as to hold that the same man shall not sell moist sugar and granulated over the same counter; or that an electric light company must not supply arc and incandescent lamps from the same plant. Telephony as a business is, indeed, all that one class of managers could well look after, even if it were all consolidated into one system, as it is not. The growth is extraordinary, with 14,000,000 telephone stations now tied into a single network, or one to every eight of the population. Ten years ago, it was one in thirteen, and in 1900 it was only one in ninety. Probably there are about as many public exchange telephones in use as automobiles, to say nothing of an enormous aggregate scattered through small "interior" services. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, while the population of the United States has increased forty-five per cent and the volume of general business may be said roughly to have increased one hundred per cent, the number of telephone stations has increased nine hundred per cent. That any two of these fourteen million subscribers can literally talk to each other at any time, if they will, is to say the least extraordinary. That many of them require such service is seen in the fact that in New York alone 4,000,000 long distance calls originate yearly; 2,000,000 in Chicago and Philadelphia each, and 500,000 in such places as

Boston, Pittsburg and Cleveland. The vital value of the telephone as a means of swift communication between seventy thousand American cities, towns and villages is seen in the further fact that the telephone communications of the country exceed the postal by fifty per cent. If Europe enjoyed anything like such service, further discussion of a League of Nations might well seem academic. It might enjoy equivalent conditions, if the telephone were in private hands there as here and were not muddled and mangled by governmental bureaus. As was said by President Gill, of the British Institution of Electrical Engineers, last November: "One way of increasing good will among nations-especially to be encouraged by all means possible at the present time— is by greater and ever greater intercommunication by all methods. In the telephone we have the most perfect means of communication of which we know, and the ability by interchange of conversation, to remove misunderstandings."

Perhaps the most notable change in telephonic electro-mechanical conditions in recent years has been the removal from the subscriber's station of the hand crank that he had to work and the batteries that the local company had to renew. Rivaling this modification would be the resort to "machine switching" or the "automatic system", still in its earlier stages of general use. It marks in the older industry, telephony, the same radical supersession of human labour seen even more strikingly in the later one of domestic electric light and power service. As in the home, so in the telephone exchange, a great deal of work still has to be done by women. But we are now face to face with a reorganized domestic economy, when electricity becomes the "angel in the house", so far as that beautiful phrase applies to "hired help". Modern electrified social life in America is very different from what such unelectrified life was before the Great War. No ordinary coincidence lies in the upward swinging curves of electrical appliance sales as contrasted with the downward swinging curves of female immigration and the decline in the rate of population increase. A social revolution is also seen in the combined higher cost of living and the greater scarcity of labour. It will take a long time, if it ever happens at all, to bring back the rate of population gain of about fourteen per cent in the decade 1910