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partment of Public Works should include the Supervising Architect's office (now in the Treasury Department), the United States Engineers' office and the Board of Engineers for Rivers and Harbors, the Mississippi River Commission, the California Débris Commission, the Board of Road Commissioners for Alaska, and the Office of Public Buildings and Grounds (with which the Capitol Buildings and Grounds Office should be combined), all now in the War Department, together with such independent bodies as the Federal Power Commission, the Commission on Fine Arts, and the Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway Commission?

And, in like manner, why not have a Department of Public Welfare, particularly when it should comprise the Public Health Service and the Bureau of War Risk Insurance, now in the Treasury Department; the Children's Bureau and the Women's Bureau, now in the Department of Labor; as well as the United States Employees' Compensation Commission, the Federal Board for Vocational Education, the United States Social Hygiene Board, and the supervision over such institutions as the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers and the Columbia Institution for the Deaf?

All this is sufficiently drastic, but it is not the only revamping desirable. For instance:

The State, not the War, Department should have the Insular Bureau.

The Department of Justice should really include the Secret Service divisions from the Treasury and other departments, difficult as this may be to bring about. But surely it would seem appropriate that the Department of Justice should have the authority now vested in the Internal Revenue Commissioner with respect to enforcing the Prohibition Act. Finally, the office of Alien Property Custodian, it would appear, belongs in the Department of Justice, and nowhere else.

As to the Department of Agriculture, it is indeed strange that the Botanical Garden should be outside of its charge.

Perhaps most important of all are the changes which might be made in the Department of Commerce. This Depart ment should have control of all our commercial relations. Why, then, should the State Department have a Foreign Trade Bureau? Similar agencies ought to be consolidated under one management. The Department of Commerce should also have the Patent Office, now in the Interior Department, and might well have the Coast Guard (the union of the old Revenue Cutter and LifeSaving Services), now in the Treasury Department; the Lake Survey Office and the Inland and Coastwise Waterways Services from the War Department; the Hydrographic Office and Observatory from the Navy Department; finally, the Weather Bureau from the Department of Agriculture.

However these particular suggestions may work out, there must be a general regrouping of Government activities.

All are agreed as to that. To this end the President has named Walter F. Brown, of Toledo, Ohio, as Chairman of a Joint Congressional Committee, provided for by Senator Smoot's resolution, introduced a year ago, to propose the changes which can be effected without legislation and to draft a bill for those which cannot. The Senate members of

Bain

WALTER F. BROWN Chairman of the Joint Congressional Committee to propose changes in the organization of the Government

this Committee are Senators Smoot (Vice-Chairman of the Committee), Wadsworth, and Harrison, and the Representatives are Messrs. Reavis, Temple, and Moore. The Chairman is not a member of either house of Congress.

Said

The appointment of this Committee has been hailed with satisfaction. a Senator to me to-day: "I have in mind one Bureau whose personnel could be cut down by two-thirds with an increase of efficiency. There is much dead wood to cut out. It may be a painful job. It's like having a useless tooth out. But it has got to be done. The families in all our States contribute sixty or seventy dollars apiece to keep the Government going. After visiting Washington and seeing extravagance and duplication and waste throughout the departments, the head of the average household is likely to demand that the Administration act with the efficiency which would characterize any ordinary business concern." The announcement of a programme of lopping off of offices and of employees has caused consternation here. Of course it is only natural that, especially in these times of high cost of living, men and women cannot face the prospect of unemployment with calmness. But at any time the inveterate habit of dependence on the Government, which naturally grows about the employees here, would be rudely shaken by such a radical measure as is now proposed. The em

ployees have become so roused that not a few of them have started an antiAdministration propaganda intended to affect members of Congress and, through the influence of those members, check the Administration in its programme, especially where new legislation is involved. A Senator showed me a huge stack of letters which he had received on this subject, many of them threatening. Of course Senators and Representatives have to think of their "home fences."

The President is intent on departmental reorganization. It is said that he made it a condition as to the acceptance of office by his Cabinet nominees. One of them, at least, made it a condition of his own acceptance. Yet how much good will it do for a secretary to favor the reform if every one of the employees in his department is conducting an opposition campaign?

The employees' activity has aroused the President. A notably kindly man, he can be stern if necessary. He has warned the employees that any indulgence in anti-Administration activity will result in their dismissal from their present positions.

As to centralization of offices and resulting efficiency, a Senator remarked: "The country has gone wild on the subject of extra commissions, on the plausible theory, of course, that their work is more impartial than a similar work would be under some appropriate Cabinet head. That idea underlay the more radical Packer Bill, which recently came within three votes of passing the Senate. But the House bill triumphed, was accepted by the Senate, and saved us one more commission. There is sometimes safety in numbers. But who will not deny that the Shipping Board would be more efficient were it now in the Department of Commerce under Hoover?"

In his entire programme of Government economy and efficiency the President, I am convinced, is animated only by the desire to do his whole duty by the people. He is acting solely because he believes in the principle of economy and efficiency in running the Government of the United States, just as he did when he was running the Marion "Star." A talk with him has convinced me that this desire absorbs his whole thought, to the exclusion, of course, of any political aspect.

As to that aspect a prominent Republican Representative remarked: "If Harding were not acting from principle, he would be forced as party leader to act from expediency. Unless, a year from next November, the Administration can point to the triumph of both economy and efficiency, demanded by budget and departmental reform, the present Senate majority will be reduced and the huge House majority may even be wiped out. Three years and a half from next November, under similar circumstances, Harding himself may be a 'goner.' Nor would any Republican have a chance. The people's temper is aroused. They have been doormats long enough."

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ELBERT F. BALDWI

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MOUNT RAINIER (TACOMA), IN WESTERN WASHINGTON, FROM MIRROR LAKE

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T

OPPOSING VIEWS

I-WHY DON'T THEY COME TO CHURCH?

HIS query is made of a rural church because the question has been asked by its pastor. I suspect that it might be made with equal propriety concerning an urban church, for the anxieties of thoughtful pastors and parishioners in city and country alike find "Smith not coming to church," and are querying why.

Recently I was in a community of two thousand people in Maryland. There were six churches there-Episcopal, Methodist Episcopal, Protestant Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, Catholic. Not one of these churches had a self-supporting-sized congregation, I was told. I asked one church officer how they paid their minister. "Oh," said he, "the bank pays him, and then, when the notes come due, the bank gets after us and we have a fair or entertainment to raise the money."

I live in a rural community that is somewhat better off than this rural village, for the church, or rather its pastor, has a constituency for burial rites and marriage ceremonies of about 1,000, though the roster of membership is around 300. One night recently a rather cheap musical play was given in this church to an audience that taxed its capacity. Some were turned away. In the sermon on Sunday, to a large number of vacant pews, the pastor rightfully asked why people will crowd to entertainments and avoid Sunday service. The pointed remarks of this pastor have gone the rounds in this community, and in casual contact with the thought stirred up I find the frank expression of why people do not come to church.

The station agent tells me the story of his spiritual life from a boy; of how he was once punished for being tardy for service, and dates his apathy from that incident. The rest of his story is as follows:

"On Christmas morning following my punishment my father awakened my brother, who had come from a distance, and myself to attend church. I didn't

go. My brother went. The next day he left to go back to his work and asked my father for the price of the ticket to return. Suspecting he had a return ticket, I planned to discover the fraud, and when I did my brother said, 'Don't tell father.' But afterward, when I got into some disagreement with my father, I told him, and asked him if it were not true that he did not like me as well as my brother because I didn't go to church and my brother did. He said yes. Then I told him of my brother's dishonesty in the matter of the ticket.

few years after this I used to go ar a Baptist minister preach be

BY ANDREW TEN EYCK

cause he was a great preacher and said things I understood, and helped me in my life. I go now when I can hear men like that."

Another tells me he goes to church but seldom because it doesn't take hold of him as it used to.

One says he would like to go, but has no way of getting there, some three miles, unless he walks. My mother tells of her mother, in the early days of the nineteenth century, walking nine miles to attend church.

The ex-soldier who the pastor says is a spiritual disappointment because in the matter of church-going he does not show the high spiritual development he was said to have reached in the war by the complacency into which he has sunk in the midst of the humdrum of affairs, tells a story something like this:

"Spiritual development-I wonderwell, the war was broadening. We got used to hearing a Catholic service at one end of the field and a Protestant at the other. Catholic and Protestant service was read alike over the dead, sometimes in ignorance of the belief of the dead. But war had a brutalizing aspect. We were in a profession, and in a crisis where only the strongest could hope to survive. We thought much, overmuch perhaps, of our stomachs in the army, of mess, of sleep as we had once known it in terms of beds and bed-covers. We were so constantly overworked and overdrilled that our chief desire was to escape. In a way, I guess we got to fearing death less because it didn't make much difference whether we met it or not. It couldn't be much worse. We felt that way. And being amongst fellows whom you would roll up under the blankets with one night and plant like trees in the ground the next sort of made it human for things to happen that way; sort of walking the valley without fear, I guess. So, you see, the thing the Church taught us to fear we don't now, and it isn't very near to us."

So it is among a few types of nonchurch-goers in this community.

If plays were given instead of sermons, would the pews be filled? The people attend this real and perhaps typical rural church, but not as many as should. Men talk under the sheds of crops, automobile tires, shingling barns, taxes, politics; women speak in the vestibules of forthcoming suppers and the latest gossip; but not of the service. These people go to entertainments in the church, and when they leave every one has some notion about the play. They talk about it. Is the church service less real than the plays, or do people react differently toward it?

I do not believe people are less spirit

ual to-day. My neighbor comes over into the orchard this afternoon, and we both marvel about a bursting appleblossom, and talk in a little while of the resurrection. My friend the station agent tells me he would like to hear a preacher who would use words like those Christ used. "He talked of hungering, thirsting, the salt losing its savor, of candles, moth, and rust, of fowls, reaping, lilies and grass, fruit, mustard seeds, vineyards, fishermen, of carpentry, foxes, birds, swine, and went to eat with the customs officer, Matthew, and the folks outside of the fold. He got into the life of the common folks. Why can't the ministers do that to-day? Then we would understand."

Does the Sunday paper take the place of the Sunday service? Why don't they come to church? I ask it not that I can answer it, but because I believe something is wrong, and because I believe there is in most people a real latent spiritual sense that is hungering for satisfaction. Does my friend the station agent state a reason, and do my comrades say something most soldiers feel?

Meredith Nicholson, in the "Atlantic" in 1912, wrote, "Should Smith go to Church?" These years and the war have done little to change the situation concerning which he wrote. All I wish to say here is that most people have a spiritual nature; more people would go to church if they found satisfaction for that nature in the service. For myself, I have found that satisfaction in the Church, and out of the Church in places I least expected.

One such experience came to me at two o'clock one morning in France. We were breaking camp in the open on a beautiful hillside sloping to a river. The mist was hanging in a perceptible cloud just over us, and above was the clear starlit sky. I stood sentry where I could see the picture. Reveille sounded, and in fifteen minutes, as by one touch of an electric button, but by six hundred hands, as many candles were lit before as many dog-tents. The mist became rays of purple light, and it was as though some magic supertouch had created sacred atmosphere for one's thought. Breaking camp for whither we knew not, one's thoughts were of the unknown. I scribbled on a piece of paper and tucked it into the rear of a leather photograph case I always carried. It reads:

"In the constant presence of death one reaches spiritual development that he could never otherwise attain, for the visualization of the dissolution of the flesh throws dependence on the indissoluble spirit. Perhaps this is the

spiritual glory of war. It is too bad that most of humanity passes away without knowing it. I think I have talked and walked with God in the last few minutes. It was so very real, very human. I know I won't mind the hurt if it comes and I don't go back. I'll be with friends in a little while. There isn't much hero stuff connected with this over here. It is unattractive, brutal work, but I guess it is the biggest thing in the world now. It does not mean so much loss of individuality for the sake of a common good, but actual realization of self through sacrifice for an ideal. Ideals are intangible, and for days it

has seemed as though there weren't
any; but I believe they have never been
as real and as near the surface. Per-
haps this experience will reveal in the
way we react to it what kind of men we
are fundamentally because of the way
we react to these ever-changing new
daily experiences. I guess that is the
one satisfaction we will get out of
this."

My scribblings ended there. I am
thankful I have carried them back my-
self. It was one of the experiences I
had amongst mud, mess, and army
doldrums.

some spiritual stirrings as a soldier, and also to assure him there was not, in my army life at least, very much of the high spirituality said of it. We seemed to live, from reveille to taps, pretty much for the belly's sake, unconscious of spiritual changes within.

Perhaps the Church needs the testings of some great, rapid, soul-searching experience. Perhaps it needs to lift us out of the clay that is sticking to our feet and holding us to the humdrum affairs of life. I merely want to say that the common feelings most of us have contain the embryo of the spiritual

I speak of it to assure my pastor of that yearns for nurture, for growth.

II-A LITTLE CLINIC ON THE STATUS OF CHURCH-GOING

(C) Bachrach

REV. DR. GEORGE A. GORDON

REV. DR. A. Z. CONRAD

BY HOWARD A. BRIDGMAN

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W

HY do people go to church? But they don't. Haven't you read Dr. Jeremiah Croaker's lamentations in a recent number of the "Transcontinental Magazine" over the empty pews in city sanctuaries and the unoccupied horse-sheds behind the village meeting-house that are no longer tenanted by vehicles drawn by horses or propelled by gasoline? Don't you realize that all the great preachers are dead and that the theological seminaries are no good and that an army of highsalaried overhead officials are simply trying to galvanize the churches into a semblance of life by instituting artificial drives and campaigns, and that nobody goes anywhere except to dances and the movies?

Yes, we've read that article, and others like it. They are due to appear about once in five years with almost clocklike regularity and for at least ten days to furnish material for sapient comment on the part of the secular and religious press and for animated discussions at the ecclesiastical gatherings. But while the articles are being written and compliments and maledictions are being showered upon the authors something else is happening. And what is that? Oh, just a steady procession of men, women, and children Sunday after Sunday starting from hundreds of thousands of all kinds of homes in all parts of America and ending at the portals of churches of all sizes, shapes, and denominational affiliations.

Let us come at once to particulars. Let me take a cross-section of one of our larger cities and put it under the magnifying-glass for the purpose of observation. From one city we can learn, or at least infer, what is happening in the matter of church-going from coast to coast. Boston is as good a city as any in the country for our ecclesiastical clinic. Perhaps it is better than some, for Boston, Puritan city though it be by tradition, is not conspicuously orthodox to-day or nearly so devoted to churchgoing as, say, Toronto or Los Angeles. Boston has always been a seed-bed for religious fads. The faithful-whatever their peculiar faith-tend toward flock

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