T

must place his country before his party and God in his Cabinet. Hope. I hope for better things. If the Republican party fails to make that hope reality, I shall still hope, for out of that failure will some day come a new party, not a Socialist one, nor a lost cause party with the lunatic fringe," as Theodore Roosevelt called it, rushing to join its ranks; but a fine, upstanding, middle-of-the-road-in-thesunlight party. But I believe that the Republican party will endeavor to be that party. It has a majority of the thought and responsibility of the country in its ranks. It has been able to sit off during eight years of rapid social changing and see, like all onlookers, most of the game. It intends to be a fair-deal party, and by that I mean that it will not recognize either the autocracy of mass or the autocracy of class. It will remember that no one class can keep a party in power or return it to power-not labor or bankers, women ΟΙ secret organizations, or churches or armies; but that the balance of power lies in some ninety millions of people, unorganized, inarticulate save at the polls, and asking only for the right under honest conditions to labor, to achieve, and to aspire.

HE Editor of The Outlook is so good as to ask me how I shall vote next November. I should like him or some other wise and dispassionate man to answer that question for me. At the moment I am almost disposed to say that I do not know how I shall vote or ought to vote; and in this I believe I am only one of a very large number of Americans who like to do their own thinking; who to-day practically are men without a country, or at least without a party.

For the greater part of my life I have voted the Republican ticket-at first straight, and ignorantly. Then I voted with the Progressives when I had opportunity, not because I thought their creed perfect, but because I thought it better than anything else that offered. It is all very well to say that we must have two political parties in order to sustain our institutions. But what if neither of the two great parties shall represent the honest convictions of a thinking voter and independent man? What if neither of the two in the least shall appear to answer the questions which America is asking to-day in the greatest crisis of her history?

I fancy that most men of intelligence to-day will admit that such a crisis does exist. But where are our leaders? Where are our great men-where is one great man, one real statesman? I

find no such man at the head of either ticket.

What shall I do with my vote, knowing that if I do not vote I am not doing my part in running this repubdoing my part in running this republican form of government? And in what case is a man who votes with the feeling that his country's form of government is still in the experimental stage? As to the latter, where does a study of our recent political history leave one? Scriptures tell us of the man who could not steal, whereas to beg he was ashamed. There must have been in view even then the man who likes to do his own thinking, and not have it handed to him like a name plate at a dinner table.

There are men who vote as Socialists -I cannot understand why. There have been tickets for the Prohibitionists-I cannot understand why. For me there are, therefore, two tickets, the Republican and the Democratic. Between these I must decide by a process of elimination.

It will take this country fifty years to recover from the Wilson Administration. Indeed, this country never again will be America. Here is where we lost America. Should I, then-how can any thinking man-vote for any remotest possibility of a continuation of that sort of thing? As to the Democratic candidate-No.

That leaves Harding. If I were in

politics, naturally I would do as the great part of the leadership, rank, and file of the Republican party has donegrimace first, and then look pleasant as I could, and talk as sweetly as I could. But I sustain the great difficulty of not being in politics, having thus far been able to make a living in some other way. Therefore, I am obliged to say that I probably shall vote for Mr. Harding and be disgusted with myself when I do so; feeling when I do so that I am casting a ballot for a coterie of politicians and not for a griev ously troubled country.

When I vote for Mr. Harding, I shall do so with the prayer that some grace of God be given to him to raise him above politics and into statesmanship; a prayer that he may grow large enough to incline his ear not to the whispers of a few men, but to the mur mur of America in her need.

This country is in trouble. There ought to have been this fall a complete wiping out of all party lines. The best men of the two great parties ought to have thrown away political traditions in order to save America for her own traditions while yet she may be saved. But what do we see on both sides? Mud-slinging, trickery, billingsgate, partisan accusations-the same spirit which thwarted the will of the people in both of the great Conventions of last summer! The methods of both those Conventions, and the methods of both the candidates who came out of those Conventions, are enough to disgust, and they do disgust, the thinking men of this country.

It is true that, if Mr. Harding should be elected and I do not doubt he will be-he could in part restore the National morale which his handlers have done so much to destroy. He could appoint a coalition Cabinet-with such a

Author of "The Mississippi Bubble," Web," "The Girl at the Halfway House,' four Forty or Fight," etc.

"The

Fifty

man as Leonard Wood as Secretary of War, such a man as Herbert Hoover as Secretary of State, such a man as John Barton Payne as Secretary of the Interior. If he could rise to heights where this much would be possible, he would begin to get the country back of him. It is by no means back of him

now.

The League of Nations cuts not the lightest figure in my own personal deision. In my own weak personal belief, all this hullaballoo about the League of Nations is the poorest claptrap ever sprung on a suffering public. Partisan drums at the bedside of a corpse call atthe attention of the public to an "issue which is worse than moribund. The people never understood the League of Nations any more than did its author and contriver. No man lives who can predict what it means or will mean ten or fifty years from now. The only saving grace about the whole League of Nations proposition is that it makes little odds whether we do or do not have it. But it does make a great deal sof odds that so much public time and money has been wasted over a purely partisan question. Where were our great men, our statesmen? Are we to have none such again?

In my own weak judgment, permissibly cynical after a review of the post-bellum

activities in Europe and the antebellum activities also, we should in all likelihood keep a League of Nations as long as it worked well for us, and then forget it. That is precisely what other nations are doing and would do. Why, then, any Brahministic mysteries and mockeries about it? In my own weak judgment, it were much better to spend our time and money in growing strong and fit so that we may command our own survival when the time comes, and not put that to the test of a political quibble. Dead hands and dead voices do not rule a world fifty years ahead. With the air out of it and the acid applied to it, the League of Nations seems to the unhallowed mind about the hollowest piece of emptiness ever offered to a man's intelligence in the time of early snowfall.

I presume I shall vote for Mr. Harding, but I shall do that coldly and with no great hope. He, is my choice of two convention-and conventionalevils. But ah, if he could read some history wider than that of Ohio! Ah, if he had some vision beyond the platform of a convention hall!

The political picture of to-day is not one to offer any comfort, even in the alternative, to any man who is accustomed to do his own thinking. To me the times seem exceedingly grave.

A

SI see it, the present outstripping duty of the United States is to become at once an active partner in the League of Nations as it appears in the Treaty of Versailles. This is not saying that the United States should take this step without frankly stating the interpretations it puts on the Covenant or without making clear any reservations which it may feel will be necessary thoroughly to safeguard National interests. It does mean that I believe we should join the League as it now is and take a man's part in correcting it as its weaknesses and dangers develop. This is what we are doing and have from the start been doing with our Constitution. It is what every nation does and must do with its form of government. The League is the boldest, the most inclusive, and the most carefully constructed scheme for organizing the world for peace which men have yet attempted. It provides for international action-in limiting armaments, in spreading knowledge of understandings and treaties between member nations, in arbitrating differences, in developing a court of international law, in stabilizing and regulating economic and labor conditions, in controlling disease, and in making universal the humanitarian work of the Red Cross. All of these noble activities, looking to

a more orderly and peaceful world, have already been organized and the work of several of them is far advanced. For this Nation to withhold its support from an international undertaking devoted to such purposes is to prove false to the principles on which it is founded and to the highest ideals which it pro

I

SAYS THAT "YOU'RE A SHALL vote the Republican ticket this fall. Most of us are prejudiced, although we may try not to be, and I presume I, by training and early environment, am prejudiced in favor of the Republican party. However, my prejudice has not prevented me from voting for Democratic candidates-for example, Mr. Wilson in his campaign for Governor of New Jersey-and I was an ardent follower of Colonel Roosevelt in 1912. I am as certain now as I was then that the action of the Convention which deprived him of the nomination was a political crime. For the matter of that, I believe the nomination of Mr. Harding to be one more instance of the triumph of the politicians over the public. In saying this I am not characterizing Mr. Harding as an unfit candidate ; I mean simply that

IDA M. TARBELL

Author of "The Life of Abraham Lincoln," "The History of the Standard Oil Co.," "The Rising of the Tide,' ," "He Knew Lincoln," etc.

fesses. The League offers the best chance to further peace and good will which is now before the nations of the world. Refusing to join is to delay, in proportion to our position in the world, these great objects.

Moreover, as I see it, there is no issue before this country to-day-high cost of living, unfair distribution of wealth, bringing industry from a military to a peace basis, profiteering nothing which can be tackled regardless of world conditions. To deal with our National problems with any hope of success we must first help put in operation the international machinery for dealing with international problems.

Seeing things in this way, there is but one ticket to which I can give my vote -the Democratic Cox and Roosevelt.

LINCOLN

LIAR" IS NO ARGUMENT

he was and is, to most us, a comparatively unknown man. Every Republican of my acquaintance voted at the primaries for some one other than heand that is all the good it did them.

However, if Harding was the politicians' choice, so, too, was Cox. None of my Democratic friends favored him. And, thus far at least, I consider Mr. Harding's campaign utterances to be more worth-while and thoughtful and dignified than those of his opponent. Mr. Cox makes a charge to substantiate which he offers no proof. When that charge is denied, he still offers no proof, but says, in effect, "You're a liar." "You're a liar," with no worthwhile evidence of the lie, is not what most of us would call an expression of constructive statesmanship. And, besides, when the pot calls the kettle

by his Government must have been intended for the Democratic fund, was because Sir Auckland Geddes (the Ambassador of Great Britain and representative of his sovereign) was a poor man, and therefore not likely to use that amount for entertaining. Don't you think it is time we opened a school for our minor politicians (and some major) for instruction in European customs and affairs? Such ignoramuses make us a laughing-stock.

The worst thing to be said about Harding is that the wrong newspapers are indorsing him, but I suppose that is merely a question of party politicsone of the several curses of this country.

I should vote for Senator Phelan's re-election if I were a black Republican, because he has served this State

T

"LL be too late-it'll be too late, I tell you!"

He was half-way out of his chair, his body tensely taut as a steel cable strained with the weight of a ship in a wind. Out of his black eyes, prismed by his glasses, came forth the incandescence of a mind and soul neurotically at war with life-burningly and bitterly at war.

The speed of his speech, rising and falling like the fury of a typhoon which one can only, sitting behind shelter, watch in fascinated awe, drowned out the tempered logic of any one about him, rolled over any argumentative answers like a wave breaking over a beach. Utter verbal inundation swiftly befell all who ventured to stand against him.

"You say we can't expect the millennium to arrive to-morrow. I tell you a millennium has been ready for a hundred years and capitalistic society has barred the doors against it, and will continue to bar the doors against it for another hundred years! Are we going to permit it? Are you going to go backward or forward? We're ruled by catchwords; we're lulled to sleep by fine phrases and made cowards by fear of change. Oh, I know it! I see it work on myself; the American proletariat is drugged and bribed-they've got us all bound to the wheel. But I tell you

After twenty minutes the intense white heat of this spirit aflame subsided to red hot, and soon to a strange pale glow, as though the fierce fires within had consumed all the fuel and were flickering and dying.

Then for a long time Aaron sat listless, the nostrils of his long, thin Jewish nose dilating with the tremor and exhaustion of a high-bred horse led to his paddock after a race. But soon

again he would be at it; and so at alternating intervals would he keep up the debate, utterly unmindful of hours.

He was a school-teacher, and avoided the company of mature, strong-willed adults. Conservative mental poise and deliberate logic arrayed against him particularly infuriated him. He was not accustomed to and could not bear being crossed in argument; he shone best when in the company of callow adolescents of both sexes to whom he was an inspiration and a god.

Only in the rôle of uninterrupted expounder, orator, and denunciator was he thoroughly in character. He was rarely disciplined by minds of equal caliber, and thus there were no checks and counterbalances to his views and assertions, nor any arena of life except schoolroom and rostrum in which to relate his ideas to reality. He stormed and thundered, dissected and denounced, propounded and disposed of social and economic theory and philosophy, ostensibly with the assurance and facility of a Burke or a Webster. All his energy and passions and emotions were vented upon his discourses and his broodings and his attempted writings. Adoles cent, uncritical girls, hypnotized by his magnificent earnestness, eloquence, and assurance, lost their hearts to him in numbers-but he vowed he would never marry; he was as impersonal toward women as bronze. He lived at home, and his mother or brother constantly had to see to it that he put on his overcoat or his hat or changed his clothes or had enough money in his pocket to get about. (He hated money-symbol of economic slavery, reminder of the crass things of reality.)

Then one day his mother died, his home was broken up, and he went to live with a friend's family. In it was Rose.

more ably and faithfully than any California Senator has ever done, and there is no doubt that a great many Republicans will vote for him on his record. But for the rest of the Democratic party I am not surcharged with enthusiasm at the present moment.

May I add that I wish that Nicholas Murray Butler could have been nominated and elected? He was the bestequipped man for the office in every way, including a profound knowledge of Europe. But his surpassing abilities were the best of reasons for not nominating him. He would be no man's tool.

With many thanks for your compliment in asking me to contribute to your syndicate.

The Goldwyn Studio, Culver City, California.

Soon it was Rose who saw to it that he wore an overcoat and did not go out without a necktie. Rose was ambitious to be a radical, as was the fashion among the brightest of her friends, and she gradually acquired the terminology. She too, with true Jewish reverence for what it believes to be learning, sat at Aaron's feet. He paid no attention to her personally until a young man began to court her, and until in her preoccupation over her incipient romance she neglected the usual personal atten-. tions upon his comfort. Suddenly, then, he developed an overbearing jealousy which frightened and flattered her. It seemed to Aaron as if he could murder

the

young man who courted Rose. He looked himself over for the first time in his life to assay his personal attractiveness, and it seemed as if he never wanted anything so much in his life as to touch Rose. It quickly resulted in marriage.

Ensconced in a small apartment, the physical world pushed itself upward into Aaron's consciousness from all directions, like a slow tide. Guy-ropes from earth and reality rose up and drew firmly down the soaring lighterthan-air structure of his mind and soul, and diverted toward physical matters his former emotional concentration upon abstract things. A continuing consciousness of his appearance obsessed him, so that he actually fussed over his neckwear. A definite joy in ownership of sordid merchandise-furniture, rugs, and pictures-developed; and of course there was Rose, very concrete and shapely, an exclusive, intensely real possession.

Possessiveness grew upon him apace. He stopped giving books away with his old disdain of ownership. He counted his money with particular care

S the present cost of food necessary?"

"How much of my income for the next few years must be spent for food?"

"Are the farmers profiteers ?" "Will it cost more to produce foodstuffs in the future than it does at present?"

"Who is to blame?"

These are persistent, legitimate questions. Every consumer wants them answered. Most farmers I have talked to are willing and anxious to let the public know what they receive for their products. They will give the figures and the public can draw its own conclusions.

Whatever farmers pay to produce foodstuffs must affect the cost of living to the consumer. And certainly it would affect that cost materially more if the farmer conducted his business on a cost

plus basis, which he does not. Observe the difference in cost of grains at wholesale rates to farmers in July, 1913, compared with July, 1920. The figures were given to me by a grain dealer, not by a farmer. But most farmers are not in a financial position

to buy in wholesale quantities, and hence have to pay considerably more than is shown by these figures:

These are the principal raw materials that enter into the production of milk, beef, and general farm products. Another leading factor is labor. A few years ago milk hands received from $9 to $10 per week; to-day they receive from $32 to $36 per week, if day hands; if hired by the month, three times what they made in 1914. Farm help in general costs the farmer to-day from two and one-half to three times what it did

three or four years ago. A few years

ago it cost $1.25 to get a horse shod. To-day it costs from $2.75 to $3. All farm implements and tools cost now about three times as much as in 1915, all repair work from two to three times more. All agricultural seeds are from

two to five times higher now than in 1914. The same grade of cows that cost the farmer $75 in 1914 now cost him $200.

What does the farmer get for his products? For milk in 1914 he was getting from 5 to 6 cents per quart; now he gets about 71⁄2 to 8 cents net. For potatoes in the late fall of 1919 the New England farmer received on an average not more than $1.30 per bushel. (What did you pay for potatoes during the winter and last spring? Was it $1.50 per peck?) A Maine farmer told me that the average pricereceived for potatoes through the farmers' exchanges last year was about 40 cents per peck, and that last year was the first time since 1916 that Maine farmers made a profit on raising pota

toes.

Most perishable farm products sold on August 27, 1920, in New York wholesale markets and farmers' public markets at a lower price than at a corresponding date a year ago:

1920.

. $1.00 to 2.00 $0.75 to 2.00 .75" 1.25

1.50" 2.00
2.00" 3.50
2.25" 3.25
5.50" 5.75 4.00

Apples, per bushel
Cabbage, per bushel
Green corn, 100 ears
Onions, per box
Potatoes, per bbl.
Tomatoes (in quarts) .50"

2.50 3.00 2.00" 3.00

4.50

1.00

What splendid encouragement to farmers for another year's planting!

400 PER CENT PROFIT PER BUSHEL

Last year farmers' wool sold for $1.40 per pound, scoured-that is, in condition to be dyed and made into yarn. Retailers sold the wool in the form of yarn for $4.70 to $5.25 per pound. Statistics show that of every $1,500 family budget, only about 23 per cent goes directly to the American farmer. A man who every year sells hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of perishable farm products informed me that the consumer pays from 100 per cent to 500 per cent more for those goods than the farmer receives for them.

A co-operative exchange sold aspara gus at market for 14 cents per pound; it was sold to the public for 35 cents per pound. The same exchange sold spinach for 30 cents per bushel; it was sold to the public for $1.50 per bushelan increase of 400 per cent.

Recent reports from 5,000 farmers