B FORCING COAL-ECONOMY Y AN ORDER of the United States Fuel Adminis- 15 per cent. of the fuel required to heat the average house. On "In our issue of March 27 we published directions for house- benefit by these persuasive governmental influences. He says: "Conceive, if you can, what could be accomplished in America in the way of increased productivity and economy if our Federal Government had the authority to make every individual and every company adopt any method or device that had been proved to be economic. No engineer acquainted with the application of the principles of the science of management can doubt that if the universal adoption of those principles could be forced upon producers in general, this nation could increase its productivity fully 25 per cent. That would alone add more than twelve billion dollars annually to the national income. But that is not all. The application of the principles of the science of management is only a fraction of the total enginery at our disposal. We have literally countless labor- and material-saving machines and appliances that are scarcely used, altho many of them are generations old. Does this sound incredible? Certainly not to any engineer who has a wide acquaintance with the literature of engineering. "Take so simple a thing as the heat-insulator for steampipes and boilers. It has been known to engineers for nearly a century that by encasing boilers and pipes with magnesia or other suitable insulators, practically all heat radiation and conduction losses could be stopt. Furthermore, it has been known to engineers that the saving in fuel thus effected would pay an annual interest of 20 per cent. on the cost of the heatinsulator. But go into the basements of steam-heated residences if you want to get a conception of how rarely this knowledge is applied. The landlord may know that heat-insulators . 600,000,000 tons of coal annually produced, about one-sixth is THE BOX CAR AS A RESIDENCE-Altho the utilization of old box-car bodies for the housing of railroad employees has been under criticism during recent years, the objections found usually arise, we are told by The Railway Review (Chicago), from the use of equipment in such dilapidated shape that it is not practicable to keep it in sanitary condition. Says this paper: "With proper attention to this matter, however, it is possible has found it necessary to furnish liv- would earn a big return on their cost, but since they would earn it for the tenant and not for himself, he does not cover the boiler and pipes adequately, if at all. The tenant, even if he knows the economics of heat insulating, will not spend the money for insulators whose use he may not enjoy for more than a year or two before he moves out. For similar reasons very few houses have double windows, altho double windows will save fully 1 T FRENCH GIRLS HERE FOR EDUCATION HE GERMAN SCHEME of educational exchange which failed so utterly to make the world love the Kaiser will be imitated for a better purpose and on a large scale by ourselves and our allies, and as an earnest of the scheme sixty-six French girls lately landed on our shores to take up their studies in American colleges. The emphasis is With a high sense of local disloyalty the New York Tribune felicitates the young ladies on the fact that they are "not going to any alien spots like Radcliffe or Barnard or Vassar or Bryn Mawr," but "straight to headquarters, to the University of Iowa, the University of Wisconsin, and so on, where education is corn-fed and Americanism is not diluted by any imported, FRENCH GIRLS TO LEARN YANKEE WAYS. This group of French college students are distributed through Western institutions to complete their education as guests of American colleges. They were received on arrival by Mrs. Stocks Miller and Mrs. Nicholas Murray Butler. These two ladies occupy chairs in the center of the group. put upon "American" by one New York paper, which feels that the real American qualities will be assured our visitors by their going to inland or Western colleges. They come on scholarships founded through the efforts of Dr. Robert P. Kelly, of Chicago, executive secretary of the American Association of Colleges, working in cooperation with the American Council of Education and French institutions. The purpose of bringing these French students to America was explained by Dr. Kelly at a meeting in the assembly-room of the National Training School of the Y. M. C. A., where they were gathered to receive their first words of public welcome. The New York Evening Sun thus reports the address: "It is the first chapter of a large program of educational reciprocity between the United States and the Allies and involves the exchange of students, both men and women, and also of faculty members, with the view of a close spiritual alinement of the various peoples of the Allied nations. "The two hundred and thirty scholarships which have been awarded will cover the tuition, living-expenses, and fees of the students during their courses. One hundred and twenty-eight girls of the two hundred and fifty who applied for scholarships have been chosen by Dean Mary Benton, of Carlton College, Northfield, Minn., and Mrs. Stocks Miller, of Denver, who were appointed to go to France and visit towns and villages, choosing from among the applicants with the aid of the Department of Education of the French Government and various professors who are or have been teaching in universities in this country. The French Government appropriated 75,000 francs for the traveling expenses in this country and for personal expenses of the girls who could not afford them." transatlantic accent." It turns the matter this way and that: "This is quite as it should be. We like our East and are proud of it. But it is only a small part of America and not representative at all of much that is most American. If visitors from Europe could skip hurriedly over Beacon Street and Fifth Avenue and spend most of their time west of Pittsburg and much of it west of the Mississippi, they would not misunderstand us as much as they do. They might even then comprehend New York, which, despite surface appearances, is much nearer to Kansas City than it is to Paris-or even Kief. "It is genuine understanding between nations that should be gained from such transfusions as this very interesting educational venture. And understanding can come only from gripping essentials. Henry James is an American es sential, yes. But there ought surely to be Spoon River to supplement him, and it is just this intimate touch with an American West that these French girls can gain from life in our Western colleges. "A young Roumanian once did just this and wrote of it with rare frankness. His name is M. E. Ravage and his book bears the title, 'An American in the Making.' You can be irritated at his point of view or not, depending upon the stiffness of your American collar. But there is no questioning the clear look at America which life in a Western college, the University of Missouri, gave him. East, or rather the Old West, met the New West there with a will. Democracy, coeducation, our whole social system, were flashed on the screen with a vividness impossible to parallel in any other American community. Mr. Ravage was fairly scornful of our culture by comparison with East Side standards. He was warmly appreciative of much else. "So will our visitors from France be imprest, we suspect. It is a long jump from a French village, with its deliciously worn and mellowed beauty, to a raw Kansas town. Yet the war has made the Kansas soldier utterly welcome and thoroughly at home in any French village. We have surely not less faith in a poilu's sister equipped with the rarest of tact and the clearest of eyes." The Baltimore Sun does not take the flippant view implied in the New York Sun's characterization of "half a hundred packages of international cement": "After the war is over there will be millions of Americans coming home from France. What they will have learned of that land will be disseminated through their family circles, and perhaps beyond that; but it will be, to all but those who have been in France themselves, second-hand information. Likewise, it will consist of observations made through masculine eyes; and while the American woman will not distrust, perhaps, "These young Frenchwomen are coming to live here; they The Evening Sun was successful in gathering some personal facts about our new visitors: "Madelene Letessier exprest great interest in the submarine question on this side of the Atlantic and inquired anxiously whether the American coast had been gassed. All of the girls spoke excellent English, and many expect to teach English in French colleges after their graduation, others to teach French in English colleges. "Mlle. Edmée Hitzel, of Paris, had studied English for some years with a view to teaching it when this scholarship offer came. Now she is to attend the University of Colorado. She says: 'France is quite animated now that the American soldiers are there. "Mme. Marcelle Bloucher, of Paris, a slight, dark-haired girl who is the widow of a French soldier who was gassed two years ago, will go to the State College for Women, Denton, Texas. "Four students have scholarships to the Carnegie Foundation. They are Mlle. Fernande Helie, of Paris, who attended the University of Rennes for two years and also a school for girls in Sheffield, England, for one year; and Mlle. Paule Bureau, who studied in the University of Bordeaux for three years and has been in England the last year. Both will go to the University of Wisconsin. "Mlle. Mouly and Mlle. Preivet will study at the University of California. Mlle. Helie told of the French universities. 'Our universities have few men in them. At Rennes we had but two rooms for the lectures. Now the wounded men discharged as unfit for further service are coming back to study. There were men of the Foreign Legion on our boat coming over for the Liberty Loan drive. We heard, too, of your war-work drive. It is splendid, so many organizations representing such different interests and religions going together in one big drive. It helps us French so!' "The drive referred to was the United War Work Campaign set for the week of November 11, when the seven organizations -the Y. M. C. A., the Y. W. C. A., War Camp Community Service, American Library Association, National Catholic War Council (K. of C.), Jewish Welfare Board, and Salvation Army-will combine to raise $170,500,000 for war-work." WAR'S SHOT AT "LA GUERRE"-The mystic may find comfort in the symbolic accident of battle about Amiens and see the shot that tore a fresco by Puvis de Chavannes as war's detestation of war. The added fact that the shot may have been guided in vengeance for the wide-spread ruin suffered by art itself may give the mystic a firmer basis for his faith in the future peace of the world. The London Evening Standard prints from a correspondent the following account of a rather remarkable coincidence: "Such descriptions of the havoc wrought by the German bombardment of Amiens as I have read from the pens of the special correspondents who attended the impressive thanksgiving service in the cathedral make no mention of one of the most remarkable feats of salvage accomplished during the war. I refer to the rescue from the partly demolished Picardy Museum of the world-famous mural paintings by Puvis de Chavannes. "The work was accomplished in May, under an intense bombardment, by Mr. Felix Boutreux, a leading art-expert, assisted by four sappers of the 'camouflage section,' under the supervision of the Military Governor, Colonel du Teil de Havelt. "Altogether well over 200 square yards of canvas had to be detached, inch by inch, from its foundation, and rolled on cylinders for removal to a place of safety. Despite the continuous and deadly peril of the working party, every one of the masterpieces, including the great panels, 'Pro Patria Ludus' and 'Ave Picardia Nutrix,' was got away undamaged, with the exception of the panel, 'La Guerre,' the canvas of which was slightly torn by a shell-splinter." tion," says Rebecca Drucker, in the New York Tribune, who represents the actor as convinced that Barnum's "irresistible humanity is a part of the permanent American spirit." From Mr. Wise's presentment of the character, The Tribune's critic thinks that if theater audiences never know anything else about "P. T." they will "always believe his country did well to have loved him." The play built around the actor, tho it presents Jenny Lind, Lavinia Warren, and Gen. Tom Thumb, does not fare so well at the New York critics' hands. Their complaint is that the real aroma of the circus is not given. Upon this point Mr. Wise wonders what New York knows about a circus anyway? When asked by Miss Drucker if he was disappointed at New York's greeting, he replies: "No. I have the fun of doing it. Besides, New York isn't a circus town. It doesn't know what it is to get up at five o'clock in the morning to see the circus come into town-and to have every one knock off work. on circus day-or the feel of being under circus canvas. It only knows the Garden. New York doesn't get much thrill out of a circus." The play, which was concocted by Mr. Wise himself, assisted by Harrison Rhodes, has an interesting history: "The idea first came to him almost ten years ago, while he was playing 'The Gentleman from Mississippi.' For years people had been casually remarking 'How much you look like Barnum!' Then one day he chanced upon the 'Recollections,' and the naive self-revealment of the Connecticut Yankee fascinated Wise. He began to dig-into the newspapers and periodicals of the time, in the anecdotes extant of him and in the biographies of himand found a mine of character. A thousand stories of him music, but he undertook the tour of Jenny Lind at what was then considered a fabulous risk. She accepted his management because on the letterhead on which he proposed negotiations there was printed an ornate picture of his house. She was sure that a man who had such a fine house must be a very substantial person. Not many people now recall how he enriched his native city of Bridgeport, Conn." The critic of the New York Sun shows that he himself could respond to the allure. perhaps because he is less of a New-Yorker than the others who refuse to be pleased. He writes: "If Phineas T. Barnum had returned to the flesh last night on the stage of the Criterion Theater he could scarcely have filled his skin better than it was done by Thomas A. Wise. There was not a wrinkle to deplore. He might have been somewhat surprized at the aptness of circumstance and the immediateness of cause and effect, but doubtless he would have raised no great ructions at any slight improvement contrived by the dramatic biographer. "Numerous attempts have been made to shadow forth the glamour of circus life on the stage, but it remained for Harrison Rhodes and Thomas A. Wise to conceive the bright idea of making it but the nimbus of glory surrounding America's greatest showman. When to these factors are added the appeal of such illustrious characters as Jenny Lind and Gen. Tom Thumb, it would seem strange that it took five years to get a production after the play was written, but the death of Charles Frohman put the plans out of joint until Charles Dillingham became interested. "Nothing short of four acts would have been adequate to the essential phases of the subject. Besides the personality of the Yankee showman, his geniality and shrewdness, there was a whole gallery of portraits to introduce, from that of the Swedish nightingale down to the living skeleton, the prize fat woman, the snake-charmer, and the woman midget. The complete cast numbers twenty-five. The dramatic turn of the plot grows out of Barnum's land speculation in Bridgeport, which came illustrate the man's audacity, and yet his essential simplicity; his highly personal code of honesty, coupled with a fundamental morality; his love for bigness and his small-town kindness-the contradictions that make a personality. But the task of digging He called a play out of all this material was too much for Wise. in Harrison Rhodes, and together they began the laborious work of elimination. When all had been eliminated that they thought they could spare they found they had material for four plays. They wrote them all. For years, in off seasons and in obscure places, Thomas Wise has been producing one or another of these versions-testing, cutting, combining, discardinguntil he thought the present play worthy to bring to New York. In the discarded versions was one that showed Barnum at the zenith of his career, when as proprietor of the 'greatest show on earth' he was astonishing the world with his three-ring circus, his menageries, and the splendor of his shows. But this Barnum was an institution that it was difficult to galvanize to life-so they went back to the time when as proprietor of the All-American Show of Freaks he floated up and down the Mississippi. "Wise mourns the stories of him they could not put in-one can see that. There was an advertising exploit in which Barnum promised to show a horse with a head where his tail should be, and when the reporters came they found a horse turned about wrong side before in the stall. He did not know or care about near breaking him and smashing the tour of Jenny Lind under his management. "The first act was in the office tent of the circus at Eutawville, Tenn., where all the characters were introduced with considerable comedy, and Barnum adopted a French girl who had run away from a drunken father. How she was transformed from the hoodoo of the company into its idol, how Tom Thumb wooed b Lavinia Warren, and how Barnum rose-superior to bankruptcy and T MORE CONDEMNED BOOKS HE ARMY "INDEX" has had some notable names list may be seen the name of an ex-Mayor of New "In the new list, which makes a total of seventytwo books placed under the ban, is 'Two Thousand Questions and Answers About the War,' edited by J. W. Mueller, American representative of The Stars and Stripes, and containing a foreword written by George Creel, chairman of the Committee on Public Information. "Other books barred because of containing proGerman utterances, or found to be salacious or morbid and thus 'unfit for American soldiers,' were written by Bernhard Dernburg, chief propagandist of the Hun in America; Edward Lyell Fox, writer of laudatory articles of the Central Empire; David Starr Jordan, pacifist and antiwar spokesman, and George B. McClellan. "The books were barred from every army camp and from every post where American soldiers are located because their influence tended to make the soldier who read them a less effective fighter against the Hun,' it was explained when publication of the complete list was authorized. "The inclusion of the Mueller-Creel book in the list of volumes blacklisted was due to the many passages in the publication that military censors declared were Simon-pure German propaganda, ranking alongside the Dernburg volume carrying "The War and America," Hugo Münsterberg. "Understanding Germany," Max Eastman. The special objections urged against the "Two Thousand "It is a masterpiece of German propaganda. The German Government could not have devised anything more insidious, the telltale title, 'Germany and the War,' and Edward Lyell Fox's boastful work with the apparently undisguised title, 'Behind the Scenes in Warring Germany.' "War and Waste,' written by David Starr Jordan, was characterized as another one of those 'vicious pacifist books intended to emphasize the wastefulness of war and subordinate the real purposes of the United States in the war.' "In the list also are numerous religious publications opposing war and emphasizing the views of pacifists. Other publications were barred because they were unfit from a moral standpoint." 66 The sixteen new undesirables are: "Behind the Scenes in Warring Germany," Edward Lyell Fox. "German Empire's Hour of Destiny," Col. H. Frobenius. "Jesus is Coming," Anonymous. "Outlook for Religion," W. E. Orchard. "Short Rations," Madeline Z. Doty. 64 "The Searchlight," Lawrence Mott. more calculated to destroy our faith in our allies and to insinuate into the American mind excuses for Germany." Some "strikingly propagandist paragraphs" quoted from the work in the League's report are these: "Q. How did Prussia become militaristic? A. As a result of being licked too often. Whenever France wanted to fight Russia or Austria the road led through Wurttemberg, Bavaria, or Prussia. . . . At last the Prussians determined grimly to fight for themselves, and it was under the inspiration of a burning zeal and love for home and country that the seeds of militarism were sown. "Q. Has war ever produced so much hatred as this one? A. Always much the same kind of attacks as now on the Germans. "Q. Were German soldiers worse than others in the march on Peking? A. According to revelations made by correspondents who managed to get through to Peking, and by officers after the trouble was over, there seems to have been very little to choose between the troops. . . Of all, the Japanese emerged with the cleanest record and the Tonkinese troops of the French with the worst. "Q. What is the German people's attitude toward the Kaiser? A. With the exception of the Radical Socialists, the German people hold the Kaiser in the highest esteem." |