It has now and then found the excuse of furthering warcharity, but as our boys have more and more gone overseas, it has seemed not quite fair to be gay in this manner. Professional dancers, the petted darlings of short seasons ago, who have not been quick to carry arms instead of shaking legs, have met with no end of opprobrium. But dancing has again returned, and is now going through a phase that takes on all the features of the real folkdance. The "Block Dance" has held sway in New York even to the extent of superseding the street festas that were so scrupulously observed by Italians, for example, on recurrent festivals of the Church. Now one will see young Americans of foreign blood costumed as Uncle Sam or Martha Washington dancing on the asphalt to strains of modern ragtime. The Jersey Journal (Jersey City) informs us that the block

It as an ideal war-time pastime. Chief among these is the gathering of neighbors for a night of patriotic devotion. No block dance is complete unless there is a service-flag raising or some similar patriotic ceremony, and this, along with the decoration of the homes in the national colors and the illumination of the streets by means of Japanese lanterns or strings of incandescent electric lamps, serves to keep alive not only the patriotic spirit, but also the spirit of neighborliness.

dance has "become an institution in Jersey City, and if there is any other city in the country where such events are held in like number, or with the same success, that city has yet to be heard from." We thus see the apotheosis of the dance:

"As a vehicle for the expression of patriotism Jersey City folk have found the block dance irresistible, as is attested by the crowds that turn out every time one is held. Nor does it matter whether the dance is held in the best residential sections or in the quarters where the poor dwell-the story is always the same: lavish decorations in the American colors, a good band, a big crowd, and a big sum of money for the local chapter of the American Red Cross. "Nor is it difficult to understand why this favorite amusement, in which lithe limbs keep time to music, and which formerly always required a waxed floor, should suddenly be transferred to the asphalt pavements of our streets. Every block is proud of the number of its young men who have gone forth to fight for 'Old Glory,' and it is but necessary to state that funds are required to provide things needed by these boys in khaki to command instant attention and cooperation. As a means of raising funds for the local chapter of the Red Cross the block dance surpasses everything else tried here. For instance, the residents in the Sparrow Hill section of Hudson City held a dance the other night and over $2,000 was realized. True, this was a record amount for such events, but the fact is not to be lost sight of that were these residents to attempt to realize $2,000 by any other means they would find the task a far more difficult

one.

And, then, too, when it is considered that many blocks have raised over $1,500 by the same means, it is easy to realize why the block dance gains in popularity.

"While the raising of funds for the Red Cross is the main object, the block dance has many other features to recommend

"The usual public dances in the halls have, in a large measure, been abandoned for the duration of the war, and a curb has also been put on entertainments and like events, so the block dance proves a most welcome substitute. As an institution fostered almost exclusively by Jersey City, let it continue on its useful course."

WOOING SIR WALTER TO EARTH-If the shades of old or forgotten authors glow over the tributes of later generations, Sir Walter Scott must have felt an imperative call to return to earthly scenes. So a writer in The Westminster Gazette (London) feels as he tells one of the most pathetic stories of the war:

"Apropos of Mr. Birrell's discourse about soldiers and books let me tell a story. There was a boy who lay dying for six months in an English hospital, one of the nicest boys I ever knew, a fair-haired, blue-eyed lad from the North Country. He had been brought back from France shot through the spine, and was a hopeless case from the beginning. For all the six months never a word of complaint escaped him, and he seemed always to be smiling. He had one great consolation: he had become acquainted for the first time with the Waverley novels, and in his last days he was reading 'Ivanhoe.' When he became too weak to read for himself the nurse took it from him and read aloud to him. She was reading on the last day of all, when the padre came and his father and mother were at the bedside, and being a good lad, he kissed his parents affectionately and listened very attentively to the prayers, but the moment they were over he turned to the nurse and said, in a whisper: 'Please go on reading, and as fast as you can, for I do so want to know the end.' And so she read him out of the world with the great fight of BoisGuilbert and Ivanhoe. I am sure the spirit of Walter Scott was at that death-bed "

that "It would be a blessing if we could turn the beast of Berlin over to God and say, 'Lord, inflict violent wrath upon this creature."" In looking in other directions both here and in England it is seen that complaint is made because violent wrath is not sufficiently invoked. A writer in the London Spectator inveighs against "British apathy" in respect to the true character of the German. "Even after four years of atrocities committed in the name of Kultur, hardly any

66

"They have violated every treaty with the United States; they have lied from start to finish and to everybody. A treaty was a scrap of paper. This week the Prussian lords have dishonored a prince who was Ambassador to England at the opening of this war because he has published the truth saying that neither France nor England wanted war, Germany brought it on; and the

class in England, except our merchant seamen, would appear to have grasped the true character of our enemies." The same sort of thing in the United States leads Bishop Quayle, in The Northwestern Christian Advocate (Chicago), to point to "a moral flabbiness in discussing the German which has a sinister aspect." He speaks especially in relation to peace talk which periodically wells up after a German overture. "All this indiscriminate, flabby, spineless, godless talk about loving the Germans ministers to a wrong peace, to a peace which will not last overnight. . . . Sentimentality of the Henry Ford type will leave America not only the laughing-stock of Germany, but the imbecile in the German's ruthless hands." Prince Maximilian's bait is that he pretends he speaks in behalf of the German people, between whom and the German Government we have been wont to make discrimination. Bishop Quayle faces that fact too:

"Let us set down sternly that we are at war with the Germans, not the Junkers, not autocracy, not 'Prussianism, not the kaiser (spelled with a small 'k'). All that is camouflage and dangerous, because it obscures the truth. The German people is what we war with. The German people is committing the unspeakable horrors which set the whole world aghast. The German people is not and has not been conducting war. It is and has been conducting murder. Hold fast to that. The Supreme Court of New York declared the sinking of the Lusitania an act of piracy. Piracy is not war. All decencies, honors, humanities, international agreements, and laws have been smashed by them day and night from the first rape of Belgium; to now. The new atrocity which appeared this week was spraying prisoners with burning oil. This is Germany's most recent jest. It makes them laugh so!

Emperor has sustained the action. In other words, Germany in 1918 has put to public shame the one man among them who has told the truth in Germany about Germany - the truth which the whole world knows without any confirmation from Germany.

"Germany has ravished the women of Belgium, Servia, Roumania, Poland, Armenia; Germany murdered the passengers of the Lusitania and struck a medal to celebrate that German triumph, dating it two days before the horrible Geroccurrence; many has ruined cathedrals and cities in sheer wanton fury in such fashion 'as has not been

done in all the wars waged in Europe since the days of the building of the cathedrals; Germany has poisoned wells, crucified inhabitants and soldiers, burned people in their houses, and this by system; Germany has denatured men and boys, has wantonly defaced the living and the dying and the dead. An eyewitness tells of seeing women dead at a table with their tongues nailed to the table and left to die. Germany has stolen things little and big; playthings from children, finery from women, pictures of incalculable worth, bank-deposits, railroads, factories; Germany has sunk hospital-ships, has bombed hospitals and Red-Cross camps; Germany has disclosed neither decency nor honor from the day it started war nor has a single voice in Germany to date been lifted up against the orgies of ruthlessness which turn the soul sick and which constitute the chief barbarity of history; Germany remains unblushing and unconscious of its indecency; Germany's egotism still struts like a kaiser; and to climax its horrid crimes, Germany has inflicted compulsory polygamy on the virgins of its own land."

The English writer does not make his list of accusations quite so long, but he passes on to a conclusion that is calculated to stir whatever apathy is left in English nature:

"Since the first entry of the Germans into Belgium one fiendish atrocity has succeeded another. In the light of recent events the now almost forgotten Lusitania outrage seems venial. Hospitals crammed with our wounded and dying have been purposely blown to fragments, prisoners of war insulted, starved, tortured, and murdered, hospital-ships blazing with Red-Cross lights and emblems wantonly torpedoed, boat-loads of seamen of all nations turned adrift without food or water to face almost certain death, nuns and women of every age ravished, cathedrals and churches uselessly burned. Still the British public shows hardly, a sign of indignation.

"The ordinary Englishman, totally ignorant as he generally

on the other hand, lost. There were also 13,117 more Romans in 1911 who profest no religion than there were in 1901. During the same period the number of those who refused to state what religion they profest had increased by 8,378. Finally:

"Not many years ago a Methodist minister prophesied that if Protestant propaganda in Italy were generously supported the near future would witness a separation of the Italian people from the Seat of Truth unparalleled since the inauguration of the Reformation in Germany by Luther in the sixteenth century. His wish, as the writer in Les Nouvelles Religieuses remarks, was father to his thought, but it indicates the aim and the hope of Protestantism, and, in view of the statistics given above, furnishes grounds for serious consideration to every loyal child of the Church."

PRUSSIANISM BALKED BY ARCHBISHOP

A

IRELAND

RCHBISHOP IRELAND dies at a time when current events bring into high relief the value of one of his great services to the country. It is not a Catholic journal which recalls this either, but the New York Morning Telegraph, devoted mainly to sports and amusements, which deals forcibly tho briefly with, as it says, "the most notable as well as the most unsuccessful of Prussian propagandas in the United States." The success of Archbishop Ireland, who led the fight against "Cahenslyism," as the movement to Germanize the parochial schools was called, throws a side-light on the present. "The spontaneous and instant manner in which members of the Roman Catholic Church in America submerged and forgot sectarianism and made positive juncture with all other religionists in the war of democracy against Prussianism," says The Telegraph, "is easier to understand in the light of the life and utterances of such churchmen as John Ireland, Metropolitan of the Roman Catholic province of St. Paul and Archbishop of that diocese." We read:

"The history of that Potsdam-inspired conspiracy to Germanize the Roman Catholics of this country by the extension of the Teuton arts and language through the German Catholic parish schools, teachers, and priesthood probably never attracted the attention of a majority of the laity in or out of the Roman Catholic Church. But it was a diabolically ingenious conspiracy which ramified from the kindergartens of the German parishes into the highest circles and professorial faculties of the Catholic University at Washington. If it had its origin among the Teuton Catholics of Berlin and Cologne, also it had a mighty lobby at the Vatican, and the College of Cardinals itself was not too remote for its machinations.

"How that subtle scheme to Prussianize American Catholics of German blood or affiliations was exposed and defeated is now an almost forgotten chapter in the annals of the Roman Catholic Church in America, but John Ireland, of St. Paul, was foremost in the fight to defeat it, carrying the issue in person to the Vatican itself and ultimately winning a complete victory for the Americanism of Catholics in this country. There were other churchmen and prelates of high degree who rallied around Archbishop Ireland, but he was their protagonist, and the almost universal loyalty to the flag which Catholics of America are now showing is intensified by his championship of the American idea of religious liberty as well as of political democracy.”

EPITAPHS IN FRANCE-To win the right epitaph may be said, perhaps, to be one of the actuating motives of the soldier. Hamlet's warning to Polonius was that he "will better have a bad epitaph" than an actor's "ill report" while he lived, shows what fears might beset the soul in the shades. The New York Globe is imprest by some of the inscriptions scribbled by soldiers on the little wooden crosses that mark the graves of other soldiers, which a Canadian officer has brought from over there. Here is one:

Here lies the body of Elmer Opp.

Who fourteen times went over the top;

And every time he brought a Boche,
Till a sniper got him at last, b'gosh!

"And another, markedly different in sentiment, reads:

Churchill funked it-he lies at rest;
Nobody grieved when he went west;
Whence he came or where he goes
Nobody cares, nobody knows.

"No leisurely literature, conceived and written in the silence of the sanctum or studio, in these lines. Here are the hatred and scorn which every real fighting man feels for the chap who turns coward. Here is the tribute paid to the unsung hero with his booty of Boches. Here, too, in the case of both coward and hero is the humor which is the never-failing, saving grace of the soldier, the humor without which he could never fight as he has fought and is still fighting.

W

HAT EASTER SUNDAY brought to an American serving in the hospital corps of the British Army is told in a letter from Lieut. Otto P. Sharp to his father,

a clergyman of the Methodist Church in Massachusetts. Lieutenant Sharp, who has been wounded, has received the Croix de Guerre from the French Government for gallantry under fire and for giving his blood through transfusion to help save the life of a seriously wounded soldier. This passage from his letter printed in Zion's Herald (Boston) is a good illustration of the practical religion of the trenches:

"Good Friday found me in this country, after a long and tedious journey. Stopt for the night in a little town which was filled with French and English and several thousand fleeing folk. Left next morning early and installed ourselves fifteen kilometers farther on-eight kilometers from the advancing enemy -in a tremendous metallurgical factory. At five the first wounded arrived, and we had our hands full until two o'clock in the morning, when the bombardment got so bad that we had to move back to the town we came from. Here we found a hat-factory which we took over at nine o'clock Easter morning, and at three it was cleaned out, fumigated (five buildings, two stories), operating barracks set up, beds put in, and all. The old priest of the town scared up several hundred shirts, men's and otherwise, the mayor found some stoves, we got our boxes unpacked, and at three the first cars arrived.

"At five we had 250 wounded, at nine we were simply swamped. Every conceivable corner of the place was covered with stretchers, and the poor fellows who could walk were lined up along the walls waiting for attention. Finally, we overflowed, and at one time had thirty automobiles waiting to be unloaded. The serious question was that of evacuation.

The cars couldn't

go fast enough, and there were not enough of them. Every single man had to have an injection of serum (antitetanus), and the majority had to be rebandaged. We were a bit busy, five of us and myself, and it was morning before we knew it. I took all the English lads, except the very, very bad ones, for I could talk to them and find out what was the matter and know whether I was hurting them or not. Lots of them died—we just

could not save them, there were too few of us.

"I'll never forget that Easter Sunday and night-that big hall where the wounded came in first, the smell of the blood, the nauseating odor of the gangrene-gas, that horrible thing that kills so many of them and works with such rapidity, the cries of the suffering, the wheeze of those hit in the lungs, the yells for something to drink, the crash of rain on the roof, the calls for stretcher-bearers, the trickling of sweat in my eyes, the unconsciousness of everything but the little detail of the moment, the pulling out of a piece of shell or a bullet with the accompanying groans, the fall over a stretcher-handle, the deathstruggles of one poor lad, the ravings of another, the lack of hunger, the absence of fatigue, the burning of the soles of my feet, the call for the priest, the continuous recurring thought that this was Easter-peace on earth, good will!-the coming of the morning, three hours of oblivion in sleep, and the same thing over again."

M

OST OF US have had a chance to observe, at one time or another, the case of a poor person who suddenly "comes into money," through a legacy or similar unexpected occurrence. As a person of small income he has always been thrifty and foresighted, painstaking in paying his debts and in maintaining a savings-bank account. And he is often equally wise after the advent of his new wealth. But not infrequently he is dazzled by the sudden change in circumstances; he lets all his old habits go by the board, squanders his money, overlooks his creditors, and in general "blows himself," with the final result that he finds himself in more desperate financial straits than he had ever known in his days of slender income.

One may try to gloss over this man's folly on the ground that the choice was his, and that his wastefulness hurt no one but himself.

But as long as this war continues, no such excuse can be given in this country for overconsumption or waste of food, because such acts hurt others besides ourselves. fact, they actually endanger the Allied success in the war.

Meats and Fats (Beef, Pork, Dairy, Poultry, and Vegetable Oil Products)

Bread Stuffs

(Wheat and substitutes in terms of grain).

In

Sugar

(From United States and West Indies) Feed Grains

1

it-like rats attacking a pile of grain-furnishes an inestimable advantage for feeding other countries, and leads to smoothness and speed of action. Fires have been put out by extemporized bucket-brigades, but with nothing like the ease afforded by a reservoir, which feeds pipes and hose.

A reserve stock helps to keep up a full head of steam. A locomotive might conceivably run without a tender, if it stopt every mile or so for coal or water; but the tender carrying a reserve stock of both is what enables the locomotive to keep up steam at all times. In like fashion, a large stock of food sent

Average 3-year

Shipped

Prewar Shipments

Must Ship Year ending July 1, 1919

Increase this year

over

last year

Tons

Tons

Tons

Tons

(Mostly Army Oats)

Totals

750,000

NO TIME TO LET UP-And yet there are actually people today who have the idea that at present there is less need to practise food-conservation in this country than during the past. They somehow think-that is, if they take the trouble to think that because we have successfully helped feed the Allies for the past year, and because this is the season when crop reports come in, that gives them the right to slacken in their efforts to save food.

No notion can be more false. None more actively mischievous in slowing up Allied accomplishment in the war. And, since it is our war, none more lacking in patriotism.

Suppose you have been living up to your patriotic obligations in your eating habits since we entered the war. That does not give you the right to relax now-just when extra efforts are needed.

Food problems have not ceased abruptly. They never cease abruptly, with a clock, as it were, like turning off a light or an engine. And they are not going to during this war.

That is why nobody must get into the way of thinking that our food problems are suddenly at an end, and that personal responsibility is no longer necessary. Quite the reverse is true. Some-not all of our crops have come up to expectations. But a large crop in itself does not possess any special magic. It does not mean that the war will therefore end automatically, or that there will be more ships or fewer submarines, or that the soldiers and civilians in England, France, and Italy will be less in need of food from us.

WHY RESERVES ARE NEEDED—It should constantly be remembered that the Allies are all of them eating bread which contains a mixture of other cereals besides wheat. Certainly the least that we can do we whose actual hardship in the war is so much less than theirs—is to use other cereals besides wheat in our bread and in all cooking in the same ratio that the Allies are forced to do. Only in this way can we justly claim that we are sitting down with them at a common table.

Now, of course, one great advantage afforded any country which has as large a food-growing acreage and as large foodproduction as ours is the possibility of a working margin in foodstuffs. That is, it produces an annual food-supply which provides great variety and flexibility in usefulness.

The food-production of the United States, provided people do not immediately begin to make unscrupulous inroads upon

from this country will help the Allies to keep up steam during war-time.

MORE FOOD MUST BE SHIPPED-And it is necessary to keep up steam constantly in order to bring this war to a successful conclusion. Every ounce of food, like every ounce of fighting energy, will help to achieve Such this just that much sooner. speed means shortening hardship among the Allies and lessening the final toll of life for them and for our armies.

By contributing foodstuffs from our store to the limit of our power, we permit the Allies to get food by the short haul from the United States. And thereby we release just that many more ships to take over our soldiers and their equipment. In other words, by giving our food instead of forting the Allies to look elsewhere for provisions, we secure the utmost possible use from every ton of available Allied shipping.

During our first year in the war we sent over a large quantity of foodstuffs. But during the coming year we must be prepared to send still more. The Allied armies and civilians, our own army, the Belgian Relief, and certain neutrals who are dependent on us will require, as nearly as international food-councils have been able to estimate, 5,730,000 tons of food-supplies more than we sent them the first year.

That is, we must ship nearly half as much again as our last year's exports. Or, in other words, more than three times as many tons of foodstuffs as for the last three annual prewar shipments.

Clearly this is no easy task, to be accomplished offhand by any sort of mere, casual conservation or semisacrifice. On the contrary, it is the sternest sort of task, more difficult even than last year's. Yet it can be accomplished successfully provided the effort be earnest enough and universal enough. To accomplish it, this nation must reduce its consumption of the breadstuffs, and of meats and fats-that is, beef, pork, poultry, dairy, and vegetable oil products. But this does not mean curtailment in the use of milk for children.

BUILDING THE RESERVE-For all these reasons, where there is any surplus food in this country, it is necessary to export it overseas. More important still, it is necessary to create this surplus. That will lessen the hardship of the Allies and prevent their anxiety over future food-stringency; it will counteract a continuous and steady withdrawal of our men from food-production to other necessary war-activities; it will get the maximum of usefulness from Allied shipping tonnage; and, finally, by all these means it will speed final success in the war.

Therefore, no one nowadays should consider the present as a time to slacken conservation measures or to abandon wisely formed habits of eating. This is no time to "take off the lid," but rather a great opportunity to save staple foods, which can be shipped at any time or to any place where most needed. That is an ideal and a task for each individual to make his own during the coming months.