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The Government's Responsibility for Poisonous Whisky

to which they are now driven by their government. And the Treasury itself will find that a penny apiece from the dozen is more than a groat from a single one. This reformation, however, will require time. Our merchants know nothing of the infinite variety of cheap and good wines to be had in Europe, and particularly in France, in Italy, and in the Grecian Isles.

It is true that Jefferson says nothing about beer, but he wrote before the Germans had so widely popularized their favorite beverage in this country. Jefferson practiced what he preached, and the cellars of Monticello, always abundantly stocked with light European wines, would have shocked Mr. Bryan as much as would his great democratic mentor's views on religion.

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A Discouraging Situation

HE articles published in this magazine by Mr. Rollin Lynde Hartt make extremely discouraging reading. Of the straightforwardness and discriminating character of these articles there can be no question. Mr. Hartt has simply made that first hand investigation of the enforcement of the Volstead Act which any citizen, had he the time and the motive, could have made for himself.

There is, perhaps, no subject more colored by the preconceptions and prejudices of the investigator than this. A vast amount of literature, published by the champions and the enemies of the Eighteenth Amendment, reaches the editorial desk. None of it bears the impress of careful research. One side conclusively proves the complete success of prohibition, another just as completely its total failure. Mr. Hartt, however, views the situation from no professional standpoint, other than the standpoint of the conscientious journalist whose business it is to report precisely what he sees. He sees the open disregard of the Volstead Act on every hand. This disregard has reached a point where it is a domestic issue of the utmost importance.

What is the future of this Prohibition Amendment to be? That is the question

now before the President and before Congress. Is it to be taken seriously, as a measure which there is to be a sincere attempt to force, or is it to be permitted to fall into disuse and become a dead letter? At present it cannot be said that Congress is making any genuine effort to enforce the Volstead Act. It may piously proclaim its intention of doing so, but an appropriation infinitely larger than that now set aside for the purpose will be necessary. An army of agents, selected, not for political reasons, but for merit, and paid decent living wages, will be needed. Until such an "army" is recruited and put to work, prohibition enforcement will remain the farce which it evidently is at this moment. Unless Congress does this and the people willingly pay the vast appropriation required, the Eighteenth Amendment will gradually take its place as one of those not uncommon and praiseworthy efforts to improve human nature which were doomed to failure at their birth.

The most suggestive analogy are the laws which exist in all Anglo-Saxon communities against prostitution. That this form of prohibitory law is on the statute book every citizen knows; that it is everywhere violated and is consequently everywhere a dead letter, is just as apparent. Yet any attempt to repeal it would start a storm of protest. This protest would be based, not on the assumption that such legislation accomplished much in mitigating the particular evil at which it was aimed, but that its presence on the statute book represented a moral attitude on the part of the community as a whole-a kind of endorsement by the state of continent individual living and of domestic sanctity.

At the present rate of disregard the Eighteenth Amendment will soon fulfill a similar rôle. That it can never be repealed, is entirely clear; the mere suggestion would produce almost a convulsion. But the time is perhaps not far distant when its presence in the Constitution will be merely an expression of national opinion that addiction to alcohol is an evil and that all good citizens should abstain from it. At the same time, the impossibility of en

forcement will be tacitly conceded. Before this time is reached, however, the Eighteenth Amendment is entitled to at least an honest and efficient effort at enforcement.

Some cynic has said that it is unfair to call Christianity a failure, for it has really never been tried. The same can be said of prohibition.

A Memorial to Walter Hines Page

S

EVERAL months ago, friends and admirers of the late Walter Hines Page began quietly to plan a permanent memorial to his life and work. Discussion crystallized into the belief that the most appropriate form for such a memorial would be a school of international relations, to be erected within one of the great universities and devoted to post-graduate research in the fields of world affairs, where the crowning labors of our war-time Ambassador to the Court of St. James's were performed.

Johns Hopkins University was selected, both because of its distinguished history in scientific inquiry and because Page was one of the original fellows when that university first opened its doors. The authorities welcomed the proposal, and a committee of trustees was formed to undertake the task of raising $1,000,000 to endow the school. The fund will provide a yearly income sufficient to maintain three professorships and six fellowships, to pay the traveling expenses of fellows engaged in research abroad, and to defray the cost of publishing their findings.

The scope of the school, as outlined by the committee, is wider than any course of study or combination of courses now

available in any university. It will include not only international law and history, but unique studies in the fundamental elements of international relationships, such as the effects of different racial psychologies, variations in national economic structure and economic aims, the influence of the geographical peculiarities of modern states and their political organization. The school will not aim to train men in the arts of diplomacy. The purpose is the deeper one of studying the modern world, analyzing underlying causes of friction between nations, and studying the common bonds between them that tend to keep relations friendly and stable. This new and systematic knowledge, as it is accumulated, will be published.

Its practical value to statesmen will be great, but will by no means be limited to them, for it will be useful to business men engaged in international trade, to farmers' organizations that are concerned with an exportable surplus of food products, and to citizens generally who wish for more exact facts about the world.

The school will not be committed to any particular foreign policy. It will not be its function to engage in controversies. Its function is purely scientific-dispassionate research, by trained men, for the sole purpose of providing the now unavailable information upon which to build a science of international relations.

Mr. Owen D. Young is the Chairman of the Board of Trustees. The list of his associates on the board is printed among the advertising pages at the front of this issue of this magazine, along with a statement of its purposes and an invitation to the public to join in founding the school.

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The Cabinet Before Congress

O

BY ANDREW J. MONTAGUE

Member of Congress, 3rd District of Virginia; formerly Governor of Virginia

N APRIL 7, 1913, and each session since then, the writer introduced a bill in the House of Representatives providing that the members of the Cabinet should have seats in the two houses of Congress, with the right of debate in matters relating to their respective departments, and with the duty to respond to inquiries propounded by either house, or the members thereof, under proper rules of procedure.

The bill is a copy of a measure twice introduced in Congress, and twice unanimously reported, namely, on April 6, 1864, by a select committee of the House, and on February 4, 1881, by a similar committee from the Senate.

Several bills of more or less similar character have been introduced in the House and Senate in the last ten years. The general purpose of the legislation and procedure was favored by President Taft, Mr. Root, Mr. Hughes, and others. President Wilson advocated this reform, and many years since contributed an illuminating discussion of the general subject.

The chief opposition to the measure is

the contention that such a reform is a violation of the separation of the three powers of our government-executive, legislative, and judicial. No discussion of this "separation" theory is possible here, save to bear in mind the observation of Justice Story, a careful student of our Constitution, that its

True meaning is that the whole power of these departments should not be exercised by the same hands which possess the whole powers of either of the other departments.

Walter Bagehot, the English historian and economist, thus interpreted the relations of the executive and legislature:

The efficient secret of the English Constitution may be described as the close union, the

nearly complete fusion, of executive and legislative powers.

In commenting upon the extinction of the separation practice in this country, Professor Henry J. Ford truly says that

Everywhere else in the world the principle upon which constitutional government is founded is the connection of the powers, and not the separation of the powers, of the government.

Our written constitution, with its prescribed coöperation of executive and legislative powers in several vital particulars, refutes the rigid "separation" theory, and thereby recognizes that the connection and coördination of legislative and executive powers is at once the necessity and the excellence of modern political institutions.

Montesquieu, the eighteenth-century French jurist who argued in favor of the "separation" theory, made a philosophical observation when he said that in a democracy the citizens may not be capable of knowing politics, but—what is of more importance they are capable of becoming interested in politics. Do our

institutions as now administered excite or hold this interest?

Bagehot remarked that the American Cabinet "does not educate the nation,"

but "may corrupt it." We should employ common sense in working our institutions. The executive or his representatives should be brought face to face with the representatives of the legislature in a common public forum, thereby substituting publicity for privacy, and direct for indirect coöperation, educating the Cabinet, the Congress, and the people, evolving leadership, and dissipating abuse and suspicion. The atmosphere of government would be cleared, and the legislature and administration would move upon a higher and nobler plane.

Tragic Europe

I. THE REALITIES OF FRENCH LIFE

BY SIR PHILIP GIBBS

STOOD with a young Frenchman some time after midnight on the terrace below Sacré Cœur, that great white basilica on the heights of Montmartre. Below us lay the whole of Paris under a red glare, through which clusters of lights showed brighter than stars. In the foreground the black pointed roofs of old houses-older than the French Revolution of 1789-were like a shadow picture with that red curtain as its background. The music of a circus down there in the Boulevard de Clichy blared up to us, and from afar, like elfin horns, came the "honk honk" of many taxis.

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"Paris!" I said. "Down there is the same old drama of life- unchanging. The spirit of Paris is the same as before the War."

of Montmartre, that one sees the realities of French social life or gets one glimpse behind the scenes of that daily drama of work, economy, and small cares which form the character of the French people.. To the foreign tourist it still appears the "Gay City" of old tradition. Watching the pageant of Parisian life from the terrasse of the Café de la Paix or from a

Sir Philip Gibbs, most famous of war correspondents, was asked by the WORLD'S WORK to write the real story of everyday life in Europe six years after the close of the Great War. This article is the first of his series—a series which promises to be as noteworthy as were his brilliant dispatches from the battlefronts of Flanders and France. Nobody has yet told, as Sir Philip now tells, the story of those vast changes which have brought new thoughts, new manners, new sufferings, an entirely new life, to the present generation on the European continent.

The young Frenchman laughed, rather gloomily.

"It has all changed," he said. "It is not the same Paris as before the War. The problems are different. The tragedies are greater. The old gaiety has gone."

I knew it was true to some extent,

though I argued with him.

table in Ciro's, it seems to him a city of frivolity and luxury. The motor horns of the Paris taxis sound to him like the blowing of bugles in a chase of pleasure. The shop windows dazzle him with a display of every treasure of fashion and art produced by a nation supreme in taste, devoted to beauty, audaciously defiant of narrow moralities. The Eternal Feminine wafts an aroma of Ambre

Antique to the senses of the male animal in this city of seduction. Theaters, hotels, gilded restaurants, amusing side-shows, give to the visitor an illusion of gaiety, wealth, lightness of spirit, in which he finds relief, maybe, from his own normal routine of duty and drudgery.

"After all," he thinks, as he catches the roving eyes of a painted little lady, or

Paris, and France, have different prob-watches the tide of traffic rushing to the lems, sharper anxieties. They are not

apparent to the tourist

who comes to Paris for a week or two. It is not on the

rendezvous of expensive gaiety, "Paris is the most amusing city in the world! France has recovered from the War. The

Grands Boulevards, nor in the night clubs - shadow has been lifted from the spirit of

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Americans Are the Gay Ones

the French people. They are making pots of money-in American dollars, English pounds-and they know how to 'rook' the foreigner. It's a fine art with them! Well, it's good to see France so gay again, after the years of sacrifice and slaughter."

Not wonderfully gay, I find, and not all wallowing in wealth, in spite of a great recovery from the wounds of war, and that art of fleecing the foreigner. Penetrating into the minds of Frenchmen by sympathetic questions, and and looking around France as well as Paris, I find the same wit but more melancholy, much prosperity but more financial anxiety in many classes. The cost of life, it seems, is hard on the average man and woman. The future of France is uncertain in their minds. Enormous problems bear down on them.

All that gaiety of the Grands Boulevards, that night life in Montmartre, is but a circus show for the foreigners with leisure and money to waste. We went into a Russian cabaret in the Avenue de Clichy, and paid 110 francs for a bottle of bad champagne. The company was made up of Americans, English, Argentines. In Ciro's it was the same. It was hard to hear a word of French. American ladies in French toilettes greeted each other across the tables. It was an overflow meeting from the Plaza in New York.

ONLY FOR STRANGERS TO SEE

ET'S go to one of the old haunts," I

LET

said. "Surely the students font la bombe now and then?"

We went to a little old house like a French cottage, in a back street of Montmartre far above the Place Pigalle. In the old days it was a Bohemian haunt known only to the Latin Quarter from the other side of the river. Painters and poets came here to hang their coats below a life-size figure of Christ from some old church gazing down on their revels with pitiful eyes. It was still there, surrounded by old paintings and caricatures and bits. of sculpture, in a low, dim room. By the fire crouched some men and women in Russian dress. One of them, a Russian

lady of the old régime, recited some of he own poetry in French. I heard her story, which was tragic because of former luxury and present poverty. An old man who looked like the last survivor of "la vie de Bohème" sang songs in the argot of Paris. There was an illusion of the past, but it was only that.

"It's another fake for the foreigner," said the young Frenchman by my side. "The students of the Latin Quarter do not faire la bombe over here, or anywhere. They are all too poor-and desperately serious."

It is strange, that new gravity of student life in Paris. I remember their revels at the Rotonde and the Dôme in the old days of Montparnasse. That spirit passed in the War when Youth marched out of Paris to the shambles of the Marne, the Somme, Verdun, and a thousand places where Youth was mown down like grass before the scythe. During the War the Dôme was the rendezvous of neutrals, decadents, "defeatists," and spies. It had to be closed by the police. Now, like the Rotonde and other places, it has been made more elegant, charges higher prices, caters for the American colony, with clean tables and jazz bands.

It is the American colony of students which has the most gaiety, as well as the most money, and the exuberance-and self-conscious pose of Youth. Young Americans from New York, Chicago, Kansas City, with handsome allowances, wear big black hats and long black ties, and play the part of the traditional French student according to "Trilby" and the "Vie de Bohème." Young American girls abandon the Puritan traditions and make laughing parties in the Boule Miche, and drink too many cocktails-some of them-and feel restless and exiled when they have to go home again after this life of adventure and artistic liberty.

The French students retain their wit, their zest for knowledge, their incurable desire for the adventures of art, their gift of satire, some of their dreams; but the economy of life is hard on them, and the rather grim realities which lurk beneath

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