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same issue on The American Peril. I am sure she would have found it of value.

R. DECAMP LELAND

BOSTON

The American Peril:

Its Remedy

[TO THE EDITOR OF THE FORUM]

DEAR SIR,-As a people we are undoubtedly suffering from too much talk about woman-mostly from men.

Mr. Michael Monahan in the June FORUM writes of "the American peril-too much womanism." His first criticism is that the profession of teaching is so largely given over to women. "We abandon our children in the crucial formative years to weakness, hysteria, inferiority, and incompetence." Thus the future generation is being ruled.

The present generation is equally threatened by the dominance of women in journalism, which is consequently "generally silly and mediocre, but on occasion shameless and prurient," and displays "no real literary ability." Related to this dominance of feminine influence in journalism is the turning of the theatre" into a brothel, from that indecent boldness and perverted curiosity which the advanced female now takes to be a sign of her emancipation."

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All this is "the American peril." Like many propagandists, Mr. Monahan is in this connection a destructive philosopher only. He gives a vague hint at the solution of the problem in a reference to Schopenhauer's prophecy of the day "when men would be driven to make actual war upon women in order to keep them in their place." It has always been wonderful to me with what unerring instinct men recognize woman's place. However, that is beside the question.

From Mr. Monahan's eloquent exposition we may therefore properly infer that to avert the peril or to destroy it man must "keep woman in her place." She may not teach-not boys, at least. As there is apparently no thought of educating her out of her weakness, hysteria, inferiority, incompetence, vanity, extravagance, silliness, and prurience, we may assume that she will be permitted to teach girls. She may not write-she has already debased journalism and the theatre and through these the American public. Mr. Monahan is not so bitter against woman's spending, though he speaks rather slightingly of that as an occupation.

There are two references to our proper future. One lies in this sentence: "They (the Hearsts, the Pulitzers and the Boks) have held up to our admiration as literary artists women for whom there is an aching need in the laundry or the kitchen "; and another in this: "They (the same) have labored to bring about a so-called equality of the sexes, which is rather a monstrous inversion, robbing woman of her essential

flower and charm." So we may slink from the schoolhouse and the newspaper and magazine offices to the laundry and kitchen, where we are to cultivate flower and charm, and from which we may sally forth for an occasional spending debauch. In addition we may teach our daughters

our own occupations.

There is much truth in Mr. Monahan's accusations, but he unjustly exaggerates. The majority of women teachers are not weak, hysterical, inferior, and incompetent. Will my readers make a mental list of the teachers they know and answer honorably if they are these things? Possibly it would be wiser to have boys in the public schools taught by men. If the women teachers are what Mr. Monahan conceives them to be, certainly the girls, who are much more likely to imitate them, should be taught by others.

As for journalism, I deplore the copy that calls for Nell Brinkley illustrations as fervently as does the gentleman whom I have quoted, but reform is as much in the hands of the men as in those of the women. The demand for such unmoral and immoral literature comes, he assumes, from women. But men form the majority of readers of the newspapers. Why do they not protest against it? If you ride daily in a trolley car or on a suburban train, notice the number of men who read the Woman's Page, and, above all, note the number of men who are poring over the pages of The Ladies' Home Journal on the date of its appearance. Will the box-office man testify that the patronage of the sexual plays in the New York theatre is primarily feminine? Possibly the men who read sexual literature and hear sexual plays do so only in a spirit of sober research. But if such an avid spirit continues, they will defeat their own aim. The supply tends to meet the demand. If not research, what? Aha, we have it in their impressionable youth these men were taught by women. Mr. Monahan does admit that the situation is partly due to men, but they are feminized-the first source of the evil is woman. Let us, however, recognize small favors. The recent increase in Eurasian population draws a share of the blame. Presumably they were feminized too-way back.

But my chief quarrel with Mr. Monahan is not that he somewhat exaggerates or that he throws an unjust share of blame upon woman, but that he is apparently unwilling to give woman a chance to improve. He seems to wish to suppress-to "keep her in her place "--rather than to educate her. He seems to feel that the "peril" rests all within woman, but must be averted entirely by man. He probably thinks that she is incapable of education-many worthy men hold that opinion. He speaks none too cordially of "Jane Addamses and Ida Tarbells" and of "a few women of uncommon, that is to say, masculine attributes." Education toward wisdom and sanity, he probably feels will enhance the "so-called equality of sexes" and will destroy woman's "essential flower and charm."

And yet in the same breath he rails at woman's silliness, weakness, hysteria, inferiority, and incompetence.

Charm is not a sex attribute-it is an individual attribute. Mr. Monahan's word should be coquetry. Men have charm as well as women-often the charm of the latter is cheapened by coquetry. But in any case the exchange of charm for wisdom and sanity would be no monstrous calamity.

For it is in us to be sane and wise workers just as it is in men, but we have had much less encouragement. The suggestion that women exercise these qualities in the kitchen and the laundry is as absurd for the present day as an argument that every man should own a farm and raise stock, from which he should produce food and clothing for his family as men did in pioneer days when they could expect nothing from the outside world because there was no outside world. There is not room for us all in the kitchen and laundry just as there is not room or requisition for all men on the land. But we must have some business besides that of bearing children. Our growing intellect demands interests. If serious interests do not offer, it will spend its activity on mischief. There are occupations for which women are by disposition particularly adapted. If teaching and journalism are not two of them (I do not wholly agree with Mr. Monahan in this) then it is our duty to discover others.

I cannot resist a somewhat irrelevant paragraph before closing to call attention to Mr. Monahan's designation of eugenics, prohibition, and female suffrage as "foolish febrile agitations." It is true that these movements have been exploited, but we must admit that their underlying principles are sincerely constructive.

Is not this then the solution? Not that men shall suppress women to keep them in their place, but that women shall keep themselves in their place as the best of them see it and that the sexes shall work together for knowledge and rationality and seriousness of mind. Let us call a truce. Why waste in a sex war the ammunition that we sorely need for war against silliness and crime? Let all thinking men and women unite in a campaign against extravagance, indulgence, vanity, dishonesty, selfishness, and vice, and work to build up a nation in which sober habit, merry disposition, wise judgment, self-control, perfect justice, and social consciousness and sympathy shall as much as possible prevail. HAMPTON, VIRGINIA

MARY HASKELL

The Art of Everlasting Life

[TO THE EDITOR OF THE FORUM]

DEAR SIR,-Professor Beyer has presented clearly, in his article in the April FORUM, a most definite view on a subject near to human interest and particularly to our ideas of universal justice. To a great many people

it must appear as the analytic presentation of a thought many times expressed in modern literature and art. Tomlinson presents the need of some claim as needful to entering any sort of eternity. Peer Gynt, who must be melted up and poured into the button-mould unless he could prove that he had developed a fully definite personality, is perhaps the ancestor of the thought. And we cannot better interpret Rodin's The Thinker than as typifying that birth of soul which is the commencement of immortality.

The same thought is given a wider signification in M. Maeterlinck's essay, The Mystery of Justice. Here, it is developed that justice, found only in the soul of man, lodges there in face of nature and of brutishhuman life, which is without exception cruel and unjust. M. Maeterlinck suggests, then, that this most incomprehensible of "determinate variations," the "leap to soul," is in reality no less than the evolution of God, miraculously, out of hostile, unfair nature-force. The nature god must indeed be admired for his glorious and savage beauty; but God is other-whether he be product of cumulative evolution or but newly realized power directing the long development, out of injustice into clearing ideals of right.

Yet, whatever the essential meanings and thought-filling implications of his fundamental thesis, one wonders at Professor Beyer's final development of it: that only in the fleshly life upon just this pinwheel planet can human beings attain to that spiritual birth at which immortality sets out. Does not this suppose too full a comprehension, and too limited possibilities in the macrocosm? We are not yet prepared, certainly, to set definite bounds to the occurrence of energy forces in inert matter. May there not be also, quite beyond this physical embodiment, possibility of further determinate variations, as incomprehensible to us as is still the "leap to organic life," or even this leap of flesh-cased life to soul? The Brahmanic wise men a long time ago made precisely the distinction between mind and the common human dog-conscience, on the one hand, and soul, on the other, which Professor Beyer states. The whole matter of evolution of soul they explained by the theory of transmigration. Possibly theirs is merely too concrete and imaginable an explanation. But in view of the utter uncertainty of all that lies beyond the miraculously extended five senses of the modern scientist, it is difficult to conceive why Professor Beyer's excellent and, no doubt, widely acceptable groundthesis necessarily argues inescapable extinction of all the undeveloped potentialities and misshapen developments which hourly meet death on this earth. Probably there is no escape from the machine of the universe but by character, as some one has put it; but surely it is quite possible that all the entrances to character are not known or travelled by fleshly embodied men. STERLING ANDRUS LEONARD

MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN

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EDITORIAL NOTES

Becker

O Charles Becker has returned to the death house at
Sing Sing, to wait for what may come.

No doubt, there will be further long delays; the stupid procrastination of the law will continue to stultify justice. The punishment-if we must have punishment-should be as swift and decisive as the crime was deliberate and abominable: but the months have gone by, and will go by; and lawyers will wrangle, and judges will strain fine points, until there is an end at last, and the doom can no longer be averted.

An evil man, this Becker: unscrupulous, unprincipled, avaricious, domineering: a man who deserves his punishment, if any convicted criminal ever did. And even now, perhaps, the community does not recognize fully what his trial and conviction have meant-or, rather, what immunity would have meant. If Becker had escaped, if he had been able to continue his nefarious practices, with the prestige of a little czar, with the power of life and death in the underworld, no limits could have been assigned to the development of the system of corruption that has disgraced the police force and enriched the Tammany type of politician.

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And yet, though facts must be faced and the truth acknowledged, there will be found very few throughout the country who regard the condemned man with bitterness, or with any desire to add to his personal burden. He has sown, and must reap. For some time he has been garnering the harvest. Though his mind has been occupied with the details of his fight for life, he has lived familiarly in the shadow of death; he has waited in his cell while man after man went to the Chair; and the sombreness of the caged has struck deeply and harshly through brain and body. Well, he must dree his weird: but God help most men if an accurate reckoning were exacted from them for their deeds and misdeeds!

It almost seems as if life were staging another of its little ironies. There can surely be no hope for Becker now except in executive clemency, and this could only be extended for reve

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