W

E may not work ourselves into a transport over the subject of transportation, but we can learn something by looking at pictures.

Journeying in seven European countries, I was first struck by the scarcity of automobiles. I asked, just as you would, "What's the price of gas here?" The answer was in francs, liters, and lead-pencils, and resulted in a final "Oh, call it seventy cents a gallon." We saw a lot of taxes and licenses in the background, and concluded we knew why the horse, the bike, and the hike were still in vogue in Europe.

a

In America we sometimes find one auto to every five persons. In Europe one to five hundred is about the average. They can get along without pleasure cars, but where the war caused scarcity of horses they need auto-trucks. If I were scared myself, I might try to scare you by saying: "Just you look out! One of these fine days Europe will pounce down on old Uncle Sam and carry off every drop of gasoline he's got. Then won't he holler! For now he has most of the world's supply of oil as well as gold and a few other very desirable things."

I traveled through devastated Belgium, and thought of that desolate part of the United States called the "Middle West," where the poor farmers are so short of barns for their crops they actually have to sometimes leave their autos out in the open overnight.

Before the war Belgium raised the

PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE AUTHOR

most majestic draught-horses in the world. They still have some, but, strange to say, we saw them over the German border-big light bays-and across the Rhine too. I don't remember seeing them there before 1914. The debating societies in Belgium took up that old question, "Resolved, that the cow is a more useful animal than the horse," and decided (owing to the scarcity of horses) that the old cow would have to be made more useful-useful even to pull a plow or wagon.

The dog in Belgium occupies a unique position. They will tell you that he

PULLING TWENTY-EIGHT HUNDRED POUNDS OF COAL IN BELGIUM WITH ONLY A DOG TO

HELP

pulls more when hitched to a load than any other unit of power in the world. A man will hitch a dog under a wagon, out of his sight, and trust him to pull his share of the load. No living man is worthy of similar confidence.

VENICE

Every avenue is "Canal Street" in Venice. If you want to gather statistics on water transportation, from funeral processions to circus parades, you can get them in that amphibious city. Everything goes by water. Venice was laid out with reference to fish raising, so I was told. The fish are grown in baskets in the back yard, the baskets are lifted from the water at the psychological moment, drained, and placed in [ the sun in a boat. Later the dried fish are delivered to the market in the same boat, in the same baskets. Can you beat it?

The City Council has much more trouble with the milk business than with any other, for obvious reasons. The milk comes from the mainland in cans-in boats. "Aye, there's the rub," as Shakespeare said. I understand they now employ a color test-the waters of the canals are none too clear-and where milk reaches the canal dweller only sixty-seven per cent white some one is shot at sunrise.

Austria and Hungary are using more human power than ever before. They came through the war fairly well, but

the experiment in democracy since the armistice has been tragic.

Austria has been slaughtered by imperialism, dismembered by Allied commissions, and looted by democracy, but the other two were as nothing compared to the plague of democracy.

Yes, I know I am writing about transportation. But the wheels in the heads of the well-intentioned democrats must be visualized in order to understand why people have to make dray-horses of themselves in Austria now.

After the armistice the popular Government took over the food business, the railways, and too many other things to mention here. There were jobs for all, and a low cost of living. Incidentally, the Government lost money. They paid the deficits promptly in new paper money. This worked so well that the business increased; SO did the deficits and the paper money. It was unfortunate, but the value of the paper kronen went down about in proportion to the increase of the quantity printed. People with fixed incomes found they were in trouble. Rents were not allowed to be increased, so a man who had a monthly income of five hundred kronen (with a pre-war value of one hundred dollars) found prices of necessities so high he couldn't live more than two or three days, because his five hundred kronen were worth perhaps not more than one dollar. (The present value of

the krone is only about one-hundredth of its pre-war value, and one-fiftieth of its value on armistice day.) So this petit bourgeoise had to work or starve. If he had a hand-cart, he was lucky, because then he could go into the delivery business and add some income to the rent from his houses.

Wages have increased in Austria, but not in proportion to the cost of living; hence the social distress-almost all caused by experiments in social government since the war.

The United States seems thousands of miles away from these European conditions, geographically and socially, yet many a half-baked leader among us has said: "The old order has passed away, a new day has dawned, and the people are to come into their own." This is what the politicians said in Austria before election. They tried to make good after election.

The resulting burdens on the people can be duplicated in this country. We already pay more taxes per capita than any country in Europe.

This discussion of what Europe can teach us would not be complete without a reference to their large canal boats and small freight cars.

Their canals were developed centuries ago, long before railway problems were known. They form a network all over Europe, and with the standard canal boat between two and three hundred

feet long, they move immense quantities of material at low costs, especially fuel and building material. They are generally pulled by horses, but occasionally men and women hitch themselves to what seems an impossible load and move it for miles.

There is no question about the cheapness of such transportation, especially when the canals are already built and no burden of modern bonded debt is the penalty of their use.

The small freight car may also give Europe an advantage over us.

There are generally two sides to questions. The large United States standard freight car requires a minimum of, say, thirty tons. If an American shipper has that much material, the car is loaded and goes a thousand miles or more with no rehandling of the load. But what about the shipment of ten tons? In Europe that represents their car-load minimum, and they send it anywhere without rehandling and at the car-load rate, but the shipper in the United States who wants to forward ten tons must do it as local freight, at local rates. It must be rehandled at junction points and at terminals, causing great delay and great labor cost.

I am not advising any change here. I am merely showing where Europe has cheaper costs, and why. We may learn many lessons, including a larger use of hand-carts and wheelbarrows.

HE Martha-in-me filled her days

T'with tasks devoid of joy and praise:

She polished well the furniture;

She made the locks and bolts secure;
She trimmed the lamps with barren ease;
She rubbed the ivory of the keys;
She made the windows shine and glow;
She washed the linen fair as snow.

The Mary-in-me did not stay

At home, as Martha did, each day:
She held aloof like some wild bird
Whose music is but seldom heard.
My Martha felt a little shy

Of Mary as she passed her by,

And one day hid the cloth and broom
With which she garnishes my room.
When Mary saw, she paused and pressed
A hand of Martha to her breast,
And whispered, "We must learn to do
Our labors side by side, we two."

A

THE

NEW and notable piece of American dramatic literature has come out of the celebration of the tercentenary of the landing of the Pilgrims. It is by George Pierce Baker, Professor of Dramatic Literature at Harvard University; it is called "The Pilgrim Spirit;" and it was performed a dozen times during July and August by the people of Plymouth, Massachusetts, before audiences which aggregated about one hundred thousand persons.

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It was called a "pageant," which was perhaps a little misleading and disconcerting. Over-enthusiastic amateurs

have in recent years been producing rather too many pageants. History has been unfolded a bit too liberally by eager, half-trained people celebrating this or that centenary; and wise folk

1 The Pilgrim Spirit: A Pageant in Celebration of the Tercentenary of the Landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, Massachusetts, December 21, 1620. By George Pierce Baker. The Marshall Jones Company, Boston.

BY HERMANN HAGEDORN

have grown wary of pageants, seeing visions of wearisome processions, of conventional dances, of undramatic and unconnected tableaux, of symbolism which failed to symbolize, and tangled allegory which no one could unravel; admitting the virtues of the pageant in stimulating community feeling, but regarding it, in spite of Mr. Percy MacKaye's brilliant adventures in that field, as a form of human activity more closely related to sociology than to art. Professor Baker's work is not a pageant at all if by the word pageant we define those spectacles, some of them involved and tedious, some of them childish and tedious, and some of them only tedious, which have bored millions of honest citizens who did not have the courage to confess how bored they were. It is no more specifically a pageant than any of Shakespeare's chronicle histories. It is a historical drama, built about an idea, with a beginning, a middle, and an

end, sure-footed and lucid in development, swift in action, crisp in dialogue, a deeply moving play of human conflict and sacrifice, tied as closely to the America of to-day and to-morrow as to the America of three hundred years ago.

The play was produced after nightfall on a piece of land, adjoining Plymouth Rock, recently reclaimed to form part of the National Pilgrim Reservation, a permanent memorial to the Pilgrim Fathers to be established jointly by the State of Massachusetts and the Federal Government. The great oval stage, some five or six hundred feet across, with a depth of four hundred feet or more, had only the night sea under a night sky for back-drop; and on it, here or there, picked out by powerful lights, or moving across it in brilliant masses, the dramatic scenes swiftly succeeded one another. The actors were without exception amateurs-men, women, and children of Plymouth and the