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MAGAZINE which which frankly represents a racial group may loudly proclaim that we are all hyphenates a favorite assumption of hyphenates. A psychologist would probably explain this as a sort of defensive pride asserting the same quality in others of which it is most conscious itself. But it is a little hard to see why Mr. Hendrik Van Loon, although he was born in Holland, should adopt it. Yet his article on "Big Bill Thompson" in The Outlook of February 8 is certainly founded on the premise that the stock of British origin is hyphenated.

I believe that premise to be wholly mistaken. The Census Bureau in 1922 estimated that 47,330,000 of us are descended from the white population of 3,000,000 here in 1790. The Presidential Commission appointed to determine our national origins under the Immigration Act of 1924 puts the estimate lower -at 41,288,570. Of this it estimated

By EDWARD R. LEWIS

"Big Bill," said Hendrik Willem Van Loon in his recent article in The Outlook, "appeals almost exclusively to the people who have a grievance. People with a grievance make the best of all possible constituents. And in the case of Thompson they are the people who during the war were allowed to do their share and who in return were denounced... as 'undesirable aliens.' Mr. Van Loon's contribution brought many responses, among them this able reply from Mr. Lewis. He is a resident of Chicago, a lawyer, and the author of a book dealing with immigration problems.

that about ninety per cent, or 37,000,- T

000, are of British descent. It finds that about 7,000,000 are descended from British immigrants who came here after 1790. But 37,000,000 of British descent have been here, all of them five generations, and some of them eight and nine generations. If they are still hyphenated, God help the country, for it will take even more than three hundred years to make Americans of the present immigrants who speak different tongues and come from more alien lands.

Most of these 37,000,000 people do not know whence their ancestors came. Last month the writer saw a local Connecticut history which stated that it is thought that the father of his seventhgeneration ancestor came to Lynn, Massachusetts, from England in 1634, but the belief can in no way be proved. There is a tradition that his mother's people came from North Ireland and, as the name is French in form, it is guessed that they were French Huguenots who went from France to Ireland. But that is all he knows. There are millions who do not know that much. They are Americans, they are rooted here, they are native, and they have no conscious background save that of America. They fulfill Barrett Wendell's definition of an

dominantly fought against England by men of English descent. The War of 1812 was also fought predominantly by men of British descent. The Civil War was likewise fought by a people predominantly of British descent, because the Census Bureau estimates that 73.5 per cent of us were at that time descended from the 1790 stock, and that stock was 90 per cent British. It follows that 65 per cent were then of British descent, and yet we hotly resented threatened interference by the British Government in that war. In the Boer War our sympathies were with the Boers. Always it has been easy to twist the Lion's tail and to talk of British gold. We have always been suspicious of England rather than trustful of her.

F the stock of British origin is hyphenated, when did it become so? In the war? It would seem strange that, after resisting all temptation to become hyphenates in one hundred and fifty years, it should become so at the end?

In 1914 Germany entered Belgium and France. From then on Belgium and France had the sympathy and good wishes of a large part of the American population. It was not because our people were descended from Belgians; practically none of them were. It was not because they were descended from the French; only two per cent of them were, while fifteen per cent were descended from the Germans. It was because the attack on Belgium was an attack on everything that America holds sacred, and one who does not understand that simply does not understand America.

Mr. Van Loon says that the stock of British origin reacted to its past, meaning its British past, and therefore naturally favored England, while the newer alien groups naturally reverted to their pasts and therefore some of them naturally opposed England. The native stock of British origin did react to its past, but it was to its American past, and every voice from that past told it that German success would be disastrous to the world; that if that vicious and wanton attack, animated by the slogan "World Power or Downfall," succeeded, there was no peace for America until

Germany was again fought and defeated, and nothing that has happened since has changed that opinion. The native American opinion does not forget that, while much remains unadjusted in Europe, nevertheless as a direct result of the war France, Belgium, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Poland now govern their own countries and are not oppressed by the old Teuton materialistic and militaristic despotism, and that Germany itself now has as a result of German defeat a republican form of govern

ment.

England had the sympathy of many of our native stock, not as our own flesh and blood, but from an admiration of her spirit and a belief that her cause was just. But there was no pro-British sentiment as such. Although many of the native stock saw from the first that the interests and safety of America required German defeat, there was no demand that America take sides, no cry to fight for England or even for Belgium or France, until to the general feeling that German defeat was essential to world welfare was added our own specific cause -until the Lusitania was sunk, an act of war against the United States. As to that I am willing to be dogmatic and say that thereafter no normal, nativeminded American not warped by an alien bias could any longer wish for German success. It was only then that the pro-Ally sentiment became active, and even then there were no British-American alliances; no hyphenated groups masquerading under American names in behalf of the Allies. The sentiment was American, and each new aggression against American rights gave that sentiment new power. The attempt to attack us through Mexico, the sinking of ship after ship, the threat to collect the indemnity from us, and finally the blockading of our ports made the American issue unmistakable.

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We

ow what of the other side? have had an Irish vote and a German vote for almost eighty years. Rhodes notes that they were first heard of in 1852, when Winfield Scott was accused of nativism. Our politicians have catered to them and feared them. The county tickets have been filled by careful consideration of the German vote, the Irish vote, and the Swedish vote. Yet the older stock fondly believed that the melting-pot made all of the newer groups Americans. When the war.came, while great numbers of the newer stocks remained unaffected by hyphenated or alien propaganda, others,

with evidently great numerical power, organized from the beginning to aid Germany. They had their GermanAmerican alliance. They demanded an embargo on munitions, demanded that Americans be warned off of armed ships. They defended the sinking of the Lusitania. They praised the Kaiser and German institutions in preference to our own fulsomely. They threatened political death to politicians who opposed them and disaster to newspapers which were not neutral. The politicians heeded them in a way they never heeded the native stock. To give a small example, a United States Senator in 1916 was handed a petition from twenty-eight German-Americans asking the Government to refrain from action against Germany. He was also handed a moderate statement from one hundred and eightytwo native-stock Americans who said they would back the President in any course he took to protect American rights. He presented the GermanAmerican petition of twenty-eight with a speech in praise of their position and patriotism. He presented the petition of the one hundred and eighty-two without a word of comment. The twenty-eight represented a hyphenated group. The one hundred and eighty-two were simply Americans.

Congress consistently showed proGerman partiality. It passed a resolution asking clemency for Casement. None was passed for Edith Cavell. Congressmen and Senators savagely attacked England for interfering with our commerce, and said nothing against Germany or were very gentle with her for killing our people. They abused Americans for sailing the seas, but not Germany for attacking them.

In general, where German-Americans were numerous, anti-German sentiment was long quiescent. Partly this quiescence was due to the President's ill-fated admonition of neutrality in thought, partly it was due to mere kindly deference to the feelings of old neighbors and friends among the German-Americans, but partly it was due to downright political and business intimidation.

Theodore Roosevelt, and no one could have been less hyphenated, was one of the very few who braved these alien threats. The German-Americans then threatened to defeat him for the Presidency and boasted that they did. They said that no one could attack the German aggression and be elected President. Perhaps they did not defeat him, and yet the Republican campaign of

1916 was based on the strategy that nothing should be done to offend the German vote.

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HERE is no need to go into the long, painful history in this country in 1915 and 1916 of the attempted corrup tion of American labor unions, of the buying of newspapers, of the actual supplying of funds from Germany to finance pro-German organizations. Suffice it to say that the campaign was so widespread and energetic that it was little wonder that, in the heat of the war, some of the native stock were so affected by it as to have unfair suspicions of some persons of alien origin. Such acts are inevitable accompaniments of all

wars.

Nor do I say anything here to minimize the loyalty and devotion of the American stock of alien origin during the war, both on the fields of France and in this country.

After the war alien group action and propaganda became active again. On the League question alien groups spoke as alien groups. The Greeks obtained a resolution from Congress in favor of the annexation of twelve Ægean islands and part of Asia Minor. The Irish obtained two resolutions of sympathy for the Irish republican movement. The Republicans, in 1920, encouraged both Italians and Yugoslavs to think that Harding would give each of them Fiume. It is significant that both in the Senate and House hearings on the Irish question references were made to Irish Senators, Irish citizens in this country, and a boast was made that the A. E. F. was thirty or forty per cent Irish-not IrishAmerican or of Irish descent, but pure Irish-although there are no records. available of the birthplaces of the A. E. F. On every foreign question that has arisen since the war we have seen alien groups acting as alien groups in our politics, on the war debts, on the FourPower Naval Treaty, on the World Court, and on the immigration question itself.

A prominent Republican leader in explaining his opposition to the nationalorigins clause and his preference for the 1890 foreign-born basis for determining immigration quotas, said that the origins basis offended alien groups, while the 1890 basis discriminated only against native Americans of British descent who had no political consciousness or political power.

On every hand we see the deference paid to the alien voter and to the repre(Please turn to continuation, page 438)

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VER since I can remember

the Woman Question has existed; and ever since I can remember the common method of settling it has been to shove it into the Biological Pigeonhole.

Excellent! In a day when all the biological words were tabu, when a "nice" woman couldn't say "conception" or "pregnant" even in a gathering strictly of women, and approaching motherhood had to be referred to—even between women-as "expecting a little stranger" or "an increase in the family," the Biological Pigeonhole was thoroughly effective. The moment that a hard-pressed conservative, male or female, said, stiffly, "There are certain natural facts," a deep stuffy silence enveloped the debate. How could it continue? There were no respectable words in which to continue it; even the euphemisms became indecent if they took on any argumentative clarity.

But how slow the human animal is to realize that times have changed! All the words are respectable now, provided you use them respectably. Even the children today know "where babies come from," and their touchingly pure and serious acceptance of the biological fact shames the snickerers.

Yet as recently as within the last six months at least two of our leading periodicals have treated the increasingly irrepressible question biologically, with the very evident idea that the mere assertion of woman's rôle in nature as a female animal designed for maternal duty still puts the old quietus on discussion.

The biological factor is undeniably the fundamental of the Woman Question, but-God be thanked!-we can at last discuss fundamentals; and this particular fundamental is blessedly reliable. There are secondary issues which admit of endless argument, but here there is no argument.

We know that if children are to be born none but men can beget them and none but women can bear and suckle them. We know that the man can beget a child fairly incidentally between the close of one day and the dawn of another, with no appreciable depletion of the powers needed for his work. We also know that for the woman to bear

By GRACE KELLOGG GRIFFITH

the child, and more especially to rear it, is a matter of months' and years' devotion. Biology takes a small toll from the human male; on the human female it levies heavily. The issue is practical and clear-cut; a matter definitely of time, energy, and place. Obviously, no woman can be in two places at oncehome and office. No woman can give her whole strength to two widely separated objects-filing cabinet, say, and bassinet. Yet divided she will probably fail in both places and at both occupations.

There are exceptions-kinds of professional activity, such as writing, which may be done at home; extraordinary home-making assistance, a mother, say, or a spinster aunt. But, under typical conditions, the effort to run a career and a young family tandem is doomed to failure if not tragedy.

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HE biological factor cannot be ignored. All enduring civilization must be in harmony with natural laws; and any social system which ignorantly or consciously runs counter to those laws will sooner or later meet the fate of the head that butts a stone wall. Any scheme of individualistic feminine development that disregards or disobeys the biological fundamental can only result in the destruction simultaneously of the woman and the race.

"Thou shalt bear children." The one commandment given to woman is graven on something more enduring than stone; it stands complete in every element of her body. A hard commandment because, historically, it has meant self'immolation.

It is safely granted, I suppose, that a woman may be married and pursue a career if she is willing to remain childless. The true issue, so old that academically it is stale, yet in real life per-I petually young, has been phrased so often that it has settled down to its lowest verbal terms; and these, without any effort at originality, I use:

Can a woman successfully raise a family and pursue a career?

Stale-yes. But academic discussion is happily unnecessary, since society itself, the vast inarticulate mass which expresses itself not in futile words but in virile actions, is giving its answer daily: No.

The negation is expressed in two opposite decisions.

One set of women when confronted with the opportunity of motherhood definitely relinquish all idea or plan of undertaking or continuing a career, and settle down to conventional family life. Another group confronted with the same oportunity choose sterility and the career. The choices are opposite, but, without pausing to consider which is the wiser or happier, I may simply point out that the answer implied by them is the

same.

Must it mean that forever?

BELIEVE not.

The fact is that the race of man, operating almost entirely through men, has been mainly occupied throughout the ages in conquering biological limitations and rising above the position of a rather inferior animal.

In man alone of all life forms there is a strange spark which will not let him rest content with cloddishness. It cannot be defined-this unnamable something which I have, with no delusion of originality, called a spark; this something that has made him other than an extra-sagacious dominant animal; that has pushed him to build ships to cross the oceans that he cannot swim, submarines to explore the depths in which he cannot breathe, engines and motors to annihilate space; and that will not let him rest till, despite the terrible toll, he shall have conquered the air, which, of its own nature, will not bear him up. Alone of all the animals, man seeks to perceive and to create beauty, to discover the laws of the universe, to form organizations which beehive and rat colony,

ant-hill and wolf pack, foreshadow only as the wings of the bat foreshadow the airplane; finally, to speculate about his own nature, the nature of God, and the meaning of life.

It cannot be defined, but doesn't this word "spark" suggest a very small but very sudden and vivid agent which starts off something infinitely greater than itself and unlimited in potentiality? A blaze that may consume a city? a motor that may breast the clouds above a frozen pole?

In refusing to be held down to the level on which nature started him—a mere minute impregnator invented to secure variety of type and perishing when his humble duty was performedman has developed himself spiritually, mentally, and physically. Some of his senses, notably smell, he may have atrophied, his sinews may have lost the ape prowess, but, on the whole, he is a far comelier, better-poised, and generally more admirable and adaptable creature than the Neanderthal Man or Pithecanthropus erectus. Nature has approved his rebellion.

Will she approve the tardy but deeper and more passionate rebcllion of woman? Or is woman a hopeless serf to the race, for whom revolt is death? Can woman achieve the self-development on which she seems determined, not at the price of self and race destruction, but in harmony with nature's dictates and, like man, with attendant racial benefit?

"Yes," say the radicals. "No," say the conservatives. It is an endless wrangle.

Meanwhile the real "woman movement" the surge of girls into offices, the surge of mature unmarried women into two-room apartments and makeshift relations with the men who were meant to be their husbands, the rush of married women, childless or with evaded responsibilities, out of a house which has been too heavy a burden-goes steadily on, slow, blind, rather terrible.

Transportation facilities minimize the danger of famine. Wars, floods, fires, and poverty still operate, but happily with reduced force. Although statistics are, naturally, not available, a glance at the modern family of from one to four hearty children suggests, at least, that the chief check on population at present is birth control.

This has a bearing on the biological aspect of the Woman Question.

Justifiable or not, desirable or not, the deliberate limitation of procreation is with us, not as a doctrine, but as a practice.

Industrial and economic conditions the expensiveness of shoes and schools and food and roofs, plus a higher standard of living for the poorer and middle classes-necessitate it. At any rate, they cause it.

Consequently, whether they wish to be or not, women are debarred from having many children. Most of the thirty years of potential maternity must be frustrated; and, unless the whole industrial and social fabric can be made over, that frustration must continue.

It operates at both ends of the potentially maternal period. The age of marriage has been pushed back, within the memories of our grandmothers, from fifteen to seventeen to twenty to twentyfive, to twenty-seven, and on. What shall a woman do with the years that precede the bearing of her first childyears when she is an adult and capable of being a useful citizen?

Similarly, what shall she do with the long, long span of years that remain after the last child has been taken out of intimate dependence upon her? Household tasks have lightened. Women are no longer mentally atrophied at thirty-five. They are no longer in a dotage at sixty or even seventy. What shall they do? What shall the women who never marry do-if you reduce all feminine life to a biological formula?

The shortening of the maternal period for married women and its'non existence for the unmarried mean that they are denied a normal outlet for the strong constructive impulse inherent in the anabolic sex. To condemn them to an inchoate round of "social and civic activities" is to disintegrate the character. Jumping from this to that-dancing, dressing, clubs, charities, committees, golf, bridge, shopping, entertainingwith no continuity of interest or purpose, a woman forms habits of scattered attention and superficiality which unfit her for a settled life either within or outside marriage. She becomes one of those un

fortunates who have brought upon a whole sex the adjective "restless."

I

AM all for the sturdy development of character and perspective that comes with holding down a good, hard, eighthour-a-day serious paid job. If the job can be a profession or an art stimulating in itself and well rewarded with money or honor, that is so much velvet. But any real honest-to-goodness job will do.

It won't make angels of women. Who wants it to? But it will make a great deal finer, solider, more trustworthy and livable product than a life filled with polite make-believe. The natural cravings for pleasure, love, and ease will still produce their eternal complications, but they will find a sturdier fiber to combat them.

And during the maternal period?

During the maternal period the "career" will probably, except in unusual cases, have to be laid aside. No woman who has known the joy of steeping herself in motherhood after ten or fifteen years of barrenness will regret the hiatus. And if it is not a hiatus but a full stop?

The only solution I can see (and it is that most difficult kind, a psychological one) is that employers must be educated to the idea that when the maternal ten or fifteen years are up society should give the voman back her job if she is still capable of filling it, just as if she were a soldier who had been away at the war. They won't do it-just as they' didn't give all the soldiers their jobs back. But in time everybody will become more intelligent in this matter. The woman who is in earnest about her career will keep in touch while she is away from it so that she won't be too rusty to come back to it. The business and professional worlds will learn to evaluate maturity and sound judgment correctly in the case of women just as they are learning slowly to do in the case of men. These are matters of adjustment-details that will and must work themselves out in practice. They can't be worked out argumentatively. It is part of the upward struggle of the spark.

The career for women is with us. It undoubtedly needs regulating in its relation to family life; but, unless the whole present structure of society should be revolutionized and early marriage together with prolific motherhood should be made possible, that career, whether or not it is economically desirable, biologically is a sound proposition.

The Laugh

IN the still pale hours of the early

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morning a policeman was making

his rounds in New York. The blocks included in his beat were in a district much used by humanity. The neighborhood, neither new nor ancient, was given over partly to struggling business, partly to cramped and dingy homes. At this hour it resembled a woman of uncertain age, worn out and sodden, waking from a frowzy sleep.

Through the depressing stillness the policeman heard a sound. He stopped, on the alert. It was a strange sound for that time of day. Woman's voicemight have been a low scream. There it was again! Not a scream? No, by God, it sounded more like a laugh. It was a laugh; low, uncertain, and a little terrified, like the laugh of some one who has just caught on to the point of an ugly joke. The breath was caught, and the laughter came again, louder this time. The policeman had spotted the doorway by now, and was running down the street. Out of the darkened hallway came that strange laugh, louder and Houder. The policeman plunged in. Well, there was nothing the matter here. Nothing in the hallway but a woman, staring at him, catching her breath and laughing. She looked at him with frightened eyes. "It's a funny world," she gasped, and could hardly catch her breath for the joke of it. "Where d'yuh live?" asked the policeman roughly. She lived round the corner. "It's a funny

world," she gasped again, and this time doubled herself so with laughing that she fell against the policeman. "Dead drunk!" he muttered. "Here, you come along with me.”

She laughed all the way to the stationhouse. By the time she got before the magistrate tears were running down her cheeks. "Judge," she told him, and was by this time convulsed, "it's a funny

world."

She looked around the room, still laughing, and shouted the joke to the others. "It's a funny world-you hear me?—a funny old world."

The Court was contemptuous, but inclined to let her go. "Stop that racket," she was told, "and you can go." But the woman laughed harder than ever. They sent her down to a cell to recover from the joke. Even down there, laughing and gasping, her voice was heard throughout the building. "Funny old

By IBBY HALL

world!" she shouted, and stopped suddenly, her hand on her side.

Every one about the court-house was concerned. They all did what they could, but the joke had been too much for her. She had died of it.

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The Passenger

YOUNG captain of the British Air Service, living in India, recently became ambitious to fly to Australia. His companion was to be a young woman whose coolness and courage, like his own, could only be taken for granted. Airship travel probably resembles marriage in this respect-the proof lies in the emergency.

The airship was to take off from the race-course at Rangoon. Next, there was to be a stop at another Indian town a few miles to the south; after that, Australia. The crowds arrived on time. The young captain and his fair companion took their places, he in the pilot's seat, she in the cockpit. The airship rose gracefully and expertly, leaving the earth, clearing the grass, rising above the trees, until it was a speck in the blue air above. The captain looked about him with satisfaction—looked about him and became transfixed. There was no enemy of the air he had not encountered, but here was a new one. Crawling slowly from under the very seat on which he was sitting, was a large brown snake. There were no stones convenient to the captain's hand. There were no trees from which to tear a branch. There was nothing left for him to make use of but his feet. The young British captain stamped and kicked in his fragile airship as valiantly as a bucking bronco. The snake merely looked at him and turned away. He was a resourceful snake, and he proceeded to the cockpit.

What the lady had expected to find up there in heaven is doubtful, but she had been thoughtful and far-sighted enough to provide herself with a stick. She was probably just beginning to wonder about these new and sickening vibrations when she beheld the enemy.

It was a long struggle, seeming up there in that airy space to continue in terms other than minutes. Her pilot could give her no assistance. There was

nothing for it but to fight it out with that snake. She used her stick, and she fought it out.

When the airship made its first stop, an anxious pilot and a triumphant passenger disembarked. Before continuing to Australia they removed a yard or so of corpse.

Art

N America a burglar is a business man

Iwith his eye on results; but in

France he appears to possess that nice mixture of perception and discrimination associated with the artist.

A young American student, whose struggles had led him to the Latin Quarter, was returning home one midnight through the Paris streets. He was tak-. ing his art seriously; so seriously that it was a great event to have in his pockets the means of another day's sustenance. His hands closed over twenty-five francs. Well, he could still eat! The young student whistled exultantly through the darkness. Suddenly a shadow on the left materialized-two shadows emerged from blackness. "Hands up!" came the order, and then with true Latin contempt, "You young American millionaire!" The American student opened his mouth to speak. "Quiet!" warned the second shadow, and the bandits fell to work with genuine French efficiency. They went over him once, they went through him twice. Was it a new kind of American tailoring? Where were the pockets that held all the money? They put it fairly to the young student. He must understand that twenty-five francs was scarcely a sufficient reward for an evening's work. Considering the risk and difficulty of their trade, it was ridiculous! The American was sorry. Twenty-five francs looked more to him, probably, than to them. For himself, he was a student. His risks were not so great, but his rewards were small.

The French bandits, much disturbed, drew apart for consultation. They returned to the young man. "We are sorry," said the spokesman with a sweeping bow, "we apologize but of course it is necessary that we make something in our business. We return some, we keep the rest. Is that satisfactory?" The bandit pressed five francs into the palm of the young student. "My American brother," he urged, "go and buy yourself a drink.”

The Outlook