so on, for about an hour. He stalked up and down the committee room, waving his fists. Under his scorn the committee withered. From Dawes, a good Republican, it had expected sympathetic co-operation. Instead, he literally blew the investigation out of the water. His honest indignation struck a tremendously popular chord. The committee quietly shut down. Close observers

reported a twinkle in the blue eyes of the victoriously retiring General, and something like a chuckle issued from the region of his underslung pipe. The country had a new hero.

His next appearance in Washington was almost equally spectacular. President Harding had appointed him Director of the newly formed Budget Bureau, which had been assigned offices on the third floor of the Treasury Department. On the appointed morning Secretary Mellon walked down the corridor to

greet him. An astonishing spectacle confronted the shy and unobtrusive Secretary. Chairs had been catapulted into corners. Desks were piled in the corridor. New filing cases were being rushed in as if by the Fire Department. A wrecking crew and a construction gang were engaged simultaneously. The action was terrific. In the thermometer the mercury boiled. The General had arrived!

Presently there occurred a meeting of all the bureau chiefs. As a rule, bureau chiefs are meek in the presence of greatness. And the President and all his Cabinet were present. But a new spirit was in the air. Suddenly the bureau chief had realized that he was the keystone of the Government. Dawes made a speech. Rather, it was a sermon, in the well-known fashion of Billy Sunday. His voice was vibrant as he called on all wastrels to repent and consecrate themselves anew to economy. Eyes became misty. Old bureau chiefs, grown gray in the service, blew their noses as they went forward to give the Director their hands. It was a powerful spectacle.

When the organ peals had died away and the trail-hitters had taken their exaltation back to their bureaus, Dawes settled down to the business in hand, and when it was completed it was obvious that he had accomplished a firstclass piece of work in organizing and launching the budget system. Not one of Mr. Hoover's efficiency experts could have done better, and not all of them combined could have got one-tenth the publicity. Dawes retired at the end of six months in a shower of sky-rockets and pinwheels, and again there were reports of a satisfied chuckle.

N

EXT came his appointment to the Reparations Commission, whose work finally resulted in the Dawes Plan. There is no doubt whatever that this plan was almost wholly the work of Sir Josiah Stamp, an English economist, and Owen D. Young, head of the General Electric Company. But Dawes presided vigorously at the meetings, he made a spectacular airplane trip to get somewhere in a hurry, he smoked his pipe picturesquely, slapped Germans and

Frenchmen on the back and bade them be sensible, and so it was called the Dawes Plan. However, there is no convincing evidence to show that Dawes either drafted the plan or was mainly responsible for it.

So in 1924 "Hell and Maria" was nominated for Vice-President. In view of the circumstances, it is obvious that Coolidge would have been re-elected regardless of all other considerations. Nevertheless it is true that Dawes made the only effective campaign that was made. By picturing La Follette as an enemy of the Constitution, and by conjuring up dreadful visions of the chaos to ensue in the event of any candidate failing to get a majority of the Electoral College, he undoubtedly frightened thousands of voters into the Republican column.

It was an odd chance that the day on which he was nominated should have been chosen by the Illinois Supreme Court as the date on which to hand down a decision holding Dawes and his fellow-officers of the Central Trust Company partially liable for the failure of the La Salle Street National Bank. At once it was raised against him, and the New England group among the Republican managers were seriously alarmed. But again Dawes showed that he knew his United States.

"I will debate my character with no man," he briefly announced, and went right on denouncing "the enemies of the Constitution." What had seemed a nasty hit turned out a perfectly harmless dud.

His inauguration address is well remembered. President, Supreme Court Justices, diplomats, and all that distinguished assembly sat petrified with amazement when the new Vice-President launched into a violent assault upon the Senate rules amazement which, on the part of Senators, changed quickly into outraged indignation. As one present, I am confident that fully ninety per cent of those who heard him felt that Dawes had committed an egregrious political blunder, as well as an offense against good taste. I shall never forget Mr.

Coolidge's face as he watched his running mate whirl and gesticulate on the Senate rostrum. But again Dawes was' the best guesser. A public long (and, I believe, falsely) taught to regard the Senate as a collection of incorrigible windbags howled its approbation, even while Jim Reed was making scathing reference to Kipling's "Injy rubber idjit on a spree."

N fairness, let it be added here that

the Senate, in three years of association with Dawes, has grown, not only to like him, and not only to recognize the -uniform fairness of his rulings, but actually to respond to his influence in matters of legislation-a circumstance which had not occurred for more than a generation. The outstanding example of this was when he conceived and executed the agreement in the last Congress whereby the McNary-Haugen Bill was permitted to come to a vote. No episode better illustrates his political shrewd

ness.

The farm bloc was demanding a vote, and the Administration was eager to prevent one. The "banking bloc" wanted a vote on the McFadden Bill, granting unlimited charters to Federal Reserve banks. Dawes brought the two groups together under an agreement which provided for votes on both bills. As a potential candidate for President, he was interested in the farmer vote. As a banker, he was interested in the McFadden Bill. He knew perfectly well that President Coolidge would veto veto the McNary-Haugen Bill and sign the McFadden Bill, as, indeed, he did. Thus Dawes got the friendship of the farmers and the gratitude of the bankers. Mr. Coolidge, it has been said, almost got apoplexy when he realized how neatly the buck had been passed to him. A mutual distaste was considerably heightened, and this may eventually cost Dawes the Republican nomination and the Presidency.

Politicians generally like him, because he speaks their language and because they know he will "play ball." In contrast is Mr. Hoover, who cannot, or will not, do either. By his zealous and militant advocacy of the "open shop" Dawes has earned the just enmity of union labor; nevertheless, I think he would be an immensely popular candidate even with labor, which always forgives the man who puts on a good show. Heaven help them, however, if he is elected! and Heaven help the Nicaraguans, the Filipinos, the Bill of Rights, the advocates of peace, and the big bass drum! "Hell and Maria" will bust them all.

T

HERE was once an American

poetess whose æsthetic sense was offended by the sight of. herself. She had grown too fat for her profession, and she knew it, but she had an idea that the flame of her genius was in some way fed by the oil of her physical excess, and she absolutely refused to try to reduce. Instead, she banished all the mirrors from her home and never left it without taking along a supply of cheesecloth to cover up any lookingglasses that might confront her in the hotels and guest-rooms that she visited.

This idiosyncrasy of hers represents the popular impulse to censorship as the artist sees it, and it is against the absurdity of such an impulse that all his indignation rebels. Freely translated into terms of mirrors and cheesecloth, his arguments run something like this: "Life isn't always beautiful. Far from it. And the artist insists on holding the mirror up to nature, and the censor runs around with bolts of cheesecloth, covering up the mirrors that are too true. He doesn't interfere-the censor doesn't -with the false mirrors that are cunningly made to beautify the uglinesses of reality in their reflection. No. He applauds those. 'Let us have a picture of life,' he says, 'that cheers, uplifts, and makes us better' meaning 'makes us feel better.' He can even enjoy the trick mirrors of the comic artist when they give a burlesque picture of life, after the manner of the reflectors in the House of Fun in an amusement park. He never censors what he can laugh at. It's the deadly reflection of the realist that he hates. And particularly the reflection made in the mirror of the reforming realist. 'You're ugly,' the reforming realist says to life. 'Look at your reflection here. You're horrible to behold. How did you let yourself get into such a state? Why don't you do something about it?' And the horrified public screams: 'What an obscenity! Even if life does look like that, who wants to know it? It's difficult enough for us to live with ourselves, without having mirrors like that around us. Smash it! Suppress it! Cover it up!'"

Such is the case against censorship as the artist sees it, though, of course, it is not his whole case. Not, as you might say, by several books full. But it covers his chief point, and he goes on to argue

By HARVEY O'HIGGINS

"Laurel" would seem to be a pleasantly suggestive word, but a young woman fainted at the sound of it. Therein, as Mr. O'Higgins points out, is the source of the impulse to censorship and the reason, as well, why no single individual is competent to exercise it.

that point something like this: "There are backward communities, even in Kentucky, that are slowly working out their evolution a hundred years behind the times, and they still censor science, as they censor art, and try to keep Darwin out of print. But no district attorney in New York city, for example, would think of prosecuting a physician for writing the material of 'The Captive' in a medical text-book, even though "The Captive' was driven from the Broadway stage. Art is censored, but not science. And what sense is there in that? Why should the common facts about sexual perversion be tabooed in drama, but not in medicine? We have to live a life in which such perversions are a frequent disease. Why shouldn't we be warned about them in the theatre in words that we can understand, instead of having to go to medical books to puzzle out the truth about them where it is hidden in a language that baffles us?"

And here, it seems, the artist is a bit wall-eyed. He fails to see that the question of language is important. He also fails to see why comedy is permitted a freedom which the serious drama is denied. In both instances he overlooks an element of shock in the situation, and yet this element of shock, speaking scientifically, is the secret and the essence of the whole problem. Any sensible psychiatrist can tell you that.

HERE is a natural censorship that is older than law, older than civilization, older than intelligence. Historically, it is seen among primitive people as the fear of the omnipotent word. They seem to believe that to know the name of a thing is to have some magical power over the thing itself. The real names of their gods are not allowed to be known except to their priests, who guard the secret as a source of power.

Among some savage tribes a wife is not permitted to speak her husband's name in public, and so many words are tabued to her, and she invents so many substitutes, that a man of the tribe, when he overhears the women talking together, cannot understand what they say. Even among civilized people there are such superstitions—the superstition, for instance, that to speak of the death of a living person is to endanger his life. It is as if by the tabu of the terrible word some magical security were obtained.

The emotional state of mind that incubates this impulse to censorship arises in the deepest levels of human nature. It is transmitted from parents to children, generation after generation. The words which the parents fear are words that, for one reason or another, are liable to bring down on the speaker some supernatural evil, but these words become, to the children, words that incur the parent's wrath. The child finds that if he speaks such a word he throws the parent into a state of panic. The panic would be communicated to the child even if the parent made no explanation, but he is usually told, of course, that the use of such a word alarms society or angers God, and this warning is enough to establish in him the mood of censorship. He finds, however, that the tabued words are used freely among his young companions when their elders are not within hearing, and his first censorship is practiced merely to protect himself from parental anger.

Once established, the fear of the tabued word remains at the bottom of his mind, beyond the reach of argument, irrational, emotional, and, as it were, instinctive. To hear the word used gives him a shock of horror. The horror may have no intelligent origin, but it will be intelligently explained as due to blasphemy, to obscenity, to an offense against good taste. The degree of horror will differ in different persons, according to their early training. Some may not feel it at all. Others will feel it for words that are innocent to most people-like the school-teacher in Barrie's novel who censored the word "love" wherever she found it and substituted for it the phrase "word with which we have no concern."

I once knew a young woman to whom the word "laurel" was so unbearable

ed

that at the sound of it she fainted. She was the patient of a psychiatrist who discovered that, in the innocence of her childhood, she had been guilty of an offense at which her parents had been insanely shocked, and the offense had been committed in some laurel bushes. Her whole life had been ruined by the incident. She had repressed the memtory so deeply that for a long time the h doctor could not discover from her what had occurred, and it was, unconsciously, to escape the returning recollection that ch she fainted when she heard the word "laurel." He had another patient who reacted almost as painfully to the word "mother-in-law." This man considered that his life had been wrecked by his wife's mother. thought of it. grew pale and sound of the

en

He could not bear the He was nauseated, he dizzy at the sight or word. The ordinary mother-in-law joke was horrible and shocking to him. He could no more laugh at it than he could laugh at a disgusting obscenity.

That dam is the shocked feeling which makes for censorship. If the shock be too great, the dam will hold and the audience will be unable to laugh, but if the dam gives way the shock is dissipated and the impulse to censorship is relieved. That is why the censor allows comedy a freedom which he denies to the serious drama; he arrests the actors in Shaw's "Mrs. Warren's Profession," while a farce around the corner exploits the same theme unreproved.

man threatened by the diabolic. They are overcome with a superstitious fear. They feel, irrationally, that they are in danger, and the feeling spurs them on to irrational mechanisms of defense. All this goes on in the deep emotional strata of the mind. Above it, in the conscious intelligence, a rationalization takes place. They declare that the art is dangerous, but the danger is not described as the danger of vengeance from an outraged divinity or his surrogate, the shocked parent. The danger is declared to be a danger of the demoralization of society by the encouragement of vice and

crime."

It is useless to argue against this declaration that outspoken art should be censored because it encourages vice. It is useless to argue against it because it is the issue of an irrational feeling that cannot be reached by argument. One might as well argue with the girl who fainted at the sound of the word "laurel" and try to prove to her that there was nothing to be shocked at in the sound of that word. The impulse to censorship being irrational, the artist could only placate it in every individual by expurgating the words, the pictures, the pantomimes, the scenes, that are the symbols of evil for that particular individual. The word "laurel," for instance, would have to be expurgated from the English language to make English literature safe for the unfortunate girl whom the psychiatrist treated; and other words, almost as innocent, would have to be expunged for other neurotics suffering, as she suffered, from some psychic disaster. The impulse to censorship is a reaction that is specific to the individual and conditioned by his individual. training, and to placate it in every possible case would be to destroy the value of all art.

VOCIETY has handled the situation

and one man will

ter beside another whose face is stern with disapproval; or perhaps, if pathos is used to make the dam, half the audience may be laughing, wet-eyed, while the rest sit suffering with sympathy.

To speak in the solemn language of psychiatry: "The impulse to censor an art arises in people when the art uses any symbol that evokes in them an emotion of horror. The symbol may be a word, a picture, a pantomime. When they see it, or hear it, their horror makes the symbol seem as if it were a visible emanation of evil. They are thrown back into the panic of childhood, or, beyond that, into the panic of primitive

way that it has handled the horror and the impulse to revenge that are aroused by a crime. Originally, that shock of horror led to the private action which we call lynch law. Among savage communities, if a man were murdered, his friends and relatives avenged his death, driven by a superstitious fear of injury at the hands of his ghost if they failed to avenge him. Civilization has long since forced such people to leave their vengeance to the officers of society. Lynch law has been modified into the procedure by which a crime is submit

who place the guilt and decree the punishment. The friends and relatives of the murdered men are compelled to accept the judgment of the court by the power of majority opinion; and the satisfaction of the majority, by a sort of mass suggestion, produces a sense of satisfaction in the revengeful individual.

In the same way, society has handled the horror that is aroused by the evil symbol in art. The symbol is taken before a judge and jury, and if it excites the same horror in them it receives a vote of punishment. In a small and homogeneous community the prosecution of the symbol rarely fails. Since the horror of the tabued symbol is kept alive by transmission from parent to child in a society where all children have the same sort of training, the jury will generally feel the same shock of horror as the complainant. But in a heterogeneous community this is not so. And America today is markedly heterogeneous. One of our juries may be made up of men and women of various nationalities, of different, religions, raised in alien homes, and trained to discrepant standards in their childhood. They are not likely to agree in horror at any evil symbol in art. And when they disagree with the horrified complainant he will feel that the law is lax.

Of recent years such laxity has been greatly complained of in America by the more Puritanical citizens who are most easily shocked. Again and again, judges and juries have failed to be horrified by books and plays and pictures brought before them for censure by the prosecuting officers of the law. Hence the cry for a censor. What is that cry? What does it ask? It proposes to take the trial of the evil symbol in art out of the hands of the judges and juries who represent the whole community and put the prosecution in the hands of individuals who shall represent the complaining members of the community. It is, in fact, a modified form of lynch law. It asks direct action without the intervention of judge and jury or the benefit of judicial procedure. The wise artist, instead of arguing about mirrors and cheesecloth, will say: "You may pass all the laws you please against moral turpitude in books and plays so long as you leave the enforcement of those laws to judges and juries. I don't expect to move any faster than the civilization in which I live. But don't set up a private Judge Lynch to censor me according to his personal sense of shock. That is a return to barbarism which the commu

ted to the decision of a delegated few-
that is to say, to a judge and a jury- nity may come to regret."

several mothers who fill out the rest of the day with an excellent nurse and feel safe in going to business.

everything from psychology to sunbaths, with several hundred times more benefit to their charges than days spent in a dingy tenement. They are open from seven-thirty in the morning to six at night, and children are taken care of for as little as ten to twenty cents a day.

What nursery schools do for mothers of the professional class the free or semicharitable day nurseries are beginning to do for the rest. For the current craving to escape the restrictions of the home is not confined to females debauched by Er hundreds of mothers who would Yike to use them are unable to. higher education, but is permeating the whole social structure. One nursery in a city tenement district found recently that the proportion of families using it while both parents worked had increased in four years from nine per cent to fiftyfive per cent. These mothers were out to pay for the extras. They wanted to lighten the burden of illness, keep the children in school longer, or bring a relative to the United States.

Blessing though they are to mothers, however, the day nurseries, like the nursery schools, are far from being a complete solution as yet. Greater New York, for instance, has over fifty run by an Association of Day Nurseries and a few others maintained by settlements. Many of them are admirable institutions, real nursery schools, which follow the approved modern procedure in

There is the difficulty I have mentioned before that a child may be frequently kept out with slight colds. Again, some women find that the daily routine of getting the children ready and taking them to the nursery is too much of a strain when it is added to marketing, dishwashing, and a job-especially if the nursery is in one direction and one's place of employment in the other.

But the principal difficulty in New York seems to be that most of the nurseries are closed Saturday afternoons and many all day Saturday. This is all very well for domestic and industrial workers who get Saturdays off, but it often serves to place the nursery and the job itself out of reach for another class of women. These are the office workers, waitresses, telephone operators, and

the like. As they are higher in the social and financial scale, they are less likely than the industrial class to be employed after marriage because bitter necessity drives them. Instead, they tend to reflect the recent inclination of wives to work because they like it and the extra income it brings. The nurseries have not yet adjusted themselves to this particular demand, and, although they have talked vaguely of remaining open all day Saturday, they have not done it.

Partly as a result of this, the Children's Aid Society is constantly getting applications from women who want to board their children out because there is nothing else they can do with them. The Society has a department of boardinghomes through which it places children with approved families in the country for six dollars a week. This is a pretty desperate measure, designed for those cases in which the mother is responsible for her children's bare support and can't possibly keep them with her. Consequently, it is disconcerting when a young woman walks into the Society's office, as occasionally happens, and blandly states that, though her husband can support her, she would like to board her baby because she is temperamentally unfitted for infant care and would rather go back to her job.

No doubt these young women should never have had children, but there they are. The Society does not feel called upon to moralize at them, but believes that, as boarding-homes are usually at a premium, the more urgent cases should be considered first.

By this time I think we may safely conclude one thing: that as soon as there are more nurseries, more mothers will use them. Incidentally, when that happy day comes no one will profit by it more than, the full-time housewife. Cleaning, cooking, dishwashing, mending, and marketing will go more smoothly when the little darlings are bestowed elsewhere for part of the day.

The somewhat inadequate arrangements I have described so far are limited to large cities. But a very interesting community experiment in Northampton, Massachusetts, is already demonstrating what can be done in a smaller town. Under the direction of Ethel Puffer Howes, the Institute for the Coordination of Women's Interests is trying all sorts of co-operative schemes for giving wives and mothers some time off.

Started a little over two years ago, the Institute has had great success with its nursery school, which is co-operative in

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