with the Department of State that the two Governments are ready to transmit their correspondence to the other Powers with a request for exchanges of opinion. In advance, there is no doubt of approval in principle. M. Briand made certain of that during his last visit to Geneva, where he talked with the delegates of the other nations represented on the Council of the League of Nations. And officials in Berlin, in addition, have taken occasion to make it clear that Germany will gladly discuss Secretary Kellogg's proposal. Although Secretary Kellogg has raised questions about some of the reservations in the latest French reply to him, the decision to approach the other Powers leaves little doubt that the differences now existing are not serious and that a general agreement is considered practicable.

a proposal by Italy for Italian participation in the administration. On this latter point M. Briand has declared that "there is no question of radically disturbing the existing régime at Tangier." The Franco-Spanish understanding provided that Spain should control the policing of the Tangier zone-thus recognizing Spain's predominant interest in that part of Morocco-an understanding which Great Britain agreed to accept.

USSIAN GOLD to the amount of over $5,000,000-recently sent to the United States to finance trade-is being shipped back to Europe. The United States Treasury refused to accept it for assay, under an embargo placed in 1920 on Soviet specie importations. The Bank of France started suit to secure it as part of an amount formerly held in the Russian State Bank. Rumania also took steps for a similar action. So the Soviet authorities moved it out of danger. The French pursuit may follow it to Europe, but there is likely to be little satisfaction in playing "Button, button, who's got the button?" with the Bolsheviks.

Meanwhile, not in the least discouraged, they have hinted from Moscow that they would be willing at any time to discuss a debt settlement with the United States a hint to which Washington has neglected to pay heed.

"WE will pay you, but it wasn't our

fault," China's Nationalists have said to the United States, in regard to its damage claims for attacks in Nanking in March last year on the American Consulate and American citizens and property. The Nationalist administra

tion of southern and central Chinanow established in the same city-has come to an agreement with Ambassador MacMurray. The first settlement of the sort that has been achieved, it carries with it the obvious value to the Nanking officials of de facto recognition of their authority. That is a solid gain for them in their struggle with the Peking militarists.

The Nanking administration denies responsibility for the outrages-logically, since it was not in existence at the time --but expresses regret and agrees to pay reparations. Similar negotiations are under way with Great Britain and Japan.

The Peking Government, considerably weakened in the civil war, appears to desire peace with Nanking. But the attitude of the Nationalists and their ally, Marshal Feng Yu-hsiang, the "Christian General," remains uncertain. And Michael Borodin, the Soviet agent who organized the radical wing of the Nationalists two years ago, is now reported in Mongolia setting up another movement to make trouble for Great Britain and the other Powers in the Far East.

W

HAT does Al Smith see in Herbert Hoover, and what does Herbert Hoover see in Al Smith, that each should want the other as his opponent in this year's race for the Presidency?

There is the question by which political Washington, as it prepares for its quadrennial exodus to the National Conventions, is puzzled and pestered. No politician, or even political correspondent, has answered it.

The fact began to press itself into attention six months or more ago. It has become more and more insistent as the nomination of the two men has become, apparently, more and more nearly inevitable. Today there is no room for doubt that each is only less concerned with the other's success than with his own. Those in Washington who doubted have become convinced with the beginning of real political action in the States.

The names Smith and Hoover as here used have a broader than the individual meaning. It may be that neither man is troubling his mind with thoughts of the other, but those groups of men who go to make up the two candidacies certainly are.

yo man is interested in finding himself

a strong opponent. Therefore, that which Hoover (as a political entity) sees in Smith, and Smith (as a political entity) in Hoover, must be a weakness. At least, it must look like a weakness to the man who sees it. What is it?

Each has been, from the outset, strong in the strongholds of the opposing party. On the surface, that looks like strength. Indeed, it must. But it may be strength where strength will avail nothing. Hoover could be given a good many Democratic votes in Mississippi, for instance, without endangering Democratic success. Smith might lure a great many Republicans out of the fold in Wisconsin without gaining a single electoral vote.

Is each man considering the other's weaknesses and ignoring his own? If so, which is the shrewder appraiser? The answer will be given on the first Tuesday

By DIXON MERRITT

in November-if both Smith and Hoover are nominated. If neither, or if only one of them, is nominated, this will forever remain one of the tantalizing puzzles of American politics-a cryptogram whose key is forever lost.

It is easy to guess-though, perhaps, erroneously that the so-called agrarian revolt of the West is the chief urge in the Smith longing for Hoover's nomination. The agricultural West is the section in which, normally, Smith would be weakest. But to many persons in that region Hoover is not merely not the farmer's candidate but is the author of the farmer's woes. It would not be difficult for the Smith generals to see in the West, with Hoover as the Republican candidate, an opportunity for making up for any losses that might be sustained in the South, where Hoover is reputed popular and Smith otherwise. That would leave the real fight to be waged in the East.

Tan

HE Smith men may, very likely, have an eye on a situation nearer home. The western end of New York State is a Republican stronghold-and an agricultural stronghold. Over a large part of it Governor Lowden has acquired a considerable popularity and Mr. Hoover a fairly corresponding unpopularity not wholly because of what his attitude toward the farmer is conceived to be, but somewhat because of what his attitude toward the New York route for the Lakes-to-the-Atlantic waterway is known to have been. He was right, of course, but-well, Smith may possibly need those western New York votes which he probably could not take away from any Republican except Hoover.

The desire of the Hooverites for the nomination of Smith probably grows out of the belief that the country is not wet, but just nicely moist-except the South, which is positively dry politically. Here, again, it is a case of trying to make up for something lost. If some of the Western Republican States are to revolt on the farm issue, it will not matter so

much if some of the Southern States revolt on the dry issue.

It may be possible, too, that somebody in the Hoover camp has been studying practical political history and come to the conclusion that a New York candidate has not ordinarily been very good for the Democratic Party.

S'

INCE the Civil War the Democratic Party has nominated ten men for the Presidency. Seven of the ten have been New Yorkers-Seymour in 1868, Greeley in 1872, Tilden in 1876, Hancock in 1880, Cleveland from 1884 to 1892, Parker in 1904, and Davis in 1924. True, Hancock was credited to Pennsylvania and Davis to West Virginia, but they were residents of New York and regarded by the country as New Yorkers.

The only non-New Yorkers nominated by the Democratic Party since the Civil War were Bryan, Wilson, and Cox. It elected one of the seven New Yorkers and one of the three non-New Yorkers. Both successful Democrats, New Yorker and non-New Yorker, were definitely untied from Tammany. Smith is definitely tied to Tammany-and Tammany to him.

Tammany is not, perhaps, a tin can. But there is something in it that scares a certain number of voters. It is not difficult to believe that good Republicans, such as the Hoover generals are, would like to tie something of the kind to the donkey's tail-particularly when the elephant already has a pack of firecrackers tied to his.

It is not often given to a candidate to select his opponent. But these two are reacting upon each other in a peculiar way. If Hoover should be defeated at Kansas City-by Lowden or Dawes, say the possibility of Smith's defeat at Houston would be increased. On the other hand, the Republicans, if they could be assured of Smith's defeat at Houston, would feel more free to do as they please at Kansas City.

There, after all, may be the reason why Smith wants Hoover and why Hoover wants Smith. Nomination comes before election.

I'

F Herbert Hoover and Alfred E. Smith are named as the opposing candidates in the Presidential election, the two great American parties will be represented by men who, respectively, personify the two parties' distinctive characters. It has sometimes been said, and it seems to be widely believed, that between the two parties there is no real difference. The late Frank Munsey, a born journalist, whose thoughts, even if not profound, were always lively and inquisitive, like the actions of a healthy child, once proposed that the two parties, being essentially alike, should unite. Indeed, as Dr. Edward McChesney Sait shows in his book on "American Parties and Elections," commentators on American policies have differed among themselves in accounting for the existence of the Republican and Democratic Parties side by side. "It has been said with some truth," Dr. Sait remarks, "that the two great parties exist in America, not because there are two sides to every question, but because there are two sides to every office an outside and an inside." Certainly such difference as there is between American parties is not the same kind of difference that we find in parties either on the European Continent or in Great Britain.

On the Continent of Europe parties are divided from one another on questions of policy or political beliefs.' In Germany, for example, there are in the Reichstag ten parties represented the Social Democratic with 131, the National People's with 110, the Catholic Center with 68, the People's with 51, the Communist with 45, the Democratic with 32, the Economic Union with 21, the Bavarian People's with 19, the National Socialist with 7, the Völkische with 6, and besides three independents. Under this system of party division, every separate policy tends to be embodied by a separate party. In the Czechoslovakian lower chamber, besides the minorities, there are fourteen separate parties, each with its own program and leaders. In Poland party division has gone even further. For there there are not only sixteen separately organized parties but also a number of independents and minor groups. In France, as might be expected, this tendency to party division has been brought to its logical conclusion, for there there are not only parties but parliamentary groups which are not parties in the sense of having their own funds and organization, but are factions, each with its own policies and tendencies. Thus the American party system seems to be the very antithesis of the prevailing European system.

Yet equally distant from both the prevailing European and the American system is that which prevails in Italy and Russia. Under the Fascist régime and under the Bolshevist régime alike no opposition party to that in power is tolerated.

In Great Britain, as in America, the two-party system has

1 See "A Political Handbook of the World," just off the press, edited by Malcolm W. Davis and Walter H. Mallory, and published by the Harvard University Press and the Yale University Press for the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.

prevailed, but there is no really recognizable resemblance between British and American parties. In different forms and under different names there remains in Great Britain the old distinction between Whig and Tory, between the progressive, the sanguine, the radical (for the time being divided between the Liberal and the Labor Party), on the one side, and the conservative, the cautious, the reactionary, on the other.

It is impossible to find any such corresponding differences between the Republican and the Democratic Parties in this country. There are conservative and progressive Democrats, conservative and progressive Republicans.

The essential difference between the two American parties has never been better stated than it was by William Garrott Brown in his essay on "A Defense of American Parties." It is, he points out, a difference of temperament. The one, the Democratic, is "the party of ideas and ideals, the party of liberty;" the other, the Republican, is "the party of practical achievement, the party of authority and order." Or, as he states it in other words, it is "aspiration and utopianism against purpose and opportunism, genius and eccentricity against common sense and self-interest, the universal and the visionary against the specific and the practical, the kingdom of the air against the kingdom of the earth." The citizen, minded to be independent, will be governed in casting his ballot by the party as well as by the candidate, and will employ that party which best serves the times.

But there is another characteristic of American parties that distinguishes them from parties in other countries. Each of them is not a national party in the European sense, but a federation of State parties. The Republican Party of Michigan can do nothing to control the Republican Party of Indiana, nor can the Democratic Party of New York control the Democratic Party of Mississippi; but because of this principle of federation the Republican Party of Michigan doubtless suffers for the sins of Indiana Republican politicians, and the Democratic Party of New. York undoubtedly suffers the loss of Negro votes because in Mississippi the Democratic Party is committed to white supremacy. Thus across party lines run issues on which there can be no National party division. Even the tariff is no longer the party issue it once was. It is by this federative principle that the people of the United States are saved from the bloc system of Europe and at the same time find that in choosing their Government they must choose, not between policies, but between temperaments.

If this distinction is sound, and we believe it is, and if Smith and Hoover are nominated, the country will see the character of each party represented at very nearly, if not quite, its best in its candidate. In Governor Smith the Democratic Party has a leader of fertile ideas, representing the Democratic temperament, but steadied by administrative experience. In Secretary Hoover the Republican Party has a leader of great practical intelligence, representing the Republican temperament, but elevated by a record of idealism. They are worthy foes.

The D. A. R. Black List

T

HE President-General of the D. A. R. has stood sponsor for an amazing list of people and organizations to be barred from a hearing by chapters of this historic organization. This list is generous enough to include both the Y. M. C. A. and the Y. W. C. A. It takes in the Federal Children's Bureau and the Foreign Policy Association. It includes David Starr Jordan, William Allen White, Felix Frankfurter, and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise.

Many Daughters of the American Revolution are wondering why this list was compiled and why their President-General thinks they are not mature enough to judge for themselves the type of speakers they would like to hear. It appears that the President-General has fallen under the spell of the witchhunting gentry who were so alarmed lest America turn Communist after the World War.

It is William Allen White who suggested that if the ancestors of the present members of the D. A. R. had adopted the present policy of the President-General, the Society today would have been known as the Daughters of American Tories, instead of Daughters of the American Revolution.

Apparently, there are still some sections of the United States which cling to the old doctrines of free speech. We might remind the D. A. R.'s that when ex-Senator Wadsworth, who is an emphatic wet and a pronounced anti-suffragist, visited Honolulu this last winter, he was cordially invited to address the League of Women Voters. We think that the D. A. R. can at least afford to listen to that terrible radical, William Allen White, without loss to its essential Americanism.

T

Immortality

O the question of immortality there are three familiar attitudes. One is the attitude of the dogmatist; another is the attitude of the scientist; the third is the attitude of the man of faith.

For the dogmatist the question is settled by what he regards as ultimate authority. He may find that authority in a Church. He may find it in a Book. He may even find it in what he regards as the historic sayings of a Man. In any case, his mind reposes on what it accepts as an external and sure foundation.

For the scientist, as a scientist, the question is referred to the evidence of the senses. If he finds the evidence favorable, he accepts immortality as an established fact; if unfavorable, as a myth; if neither favorable nor unfavorable, as a hypothesis to be neither accepted nor rejected.

For the man of faith, immortality is not a question of evidence or a question of authority. It is rather a part of that world of ideas and of life, like the idea of beauty or of truth or of right, that cannot depend upon anything external

whether it be of authority or of evidence, but is a part of one's self. Evidence may support it or not; dogma may truly express it or may misrepresent it; but neither evidence nor dogma can of itself either establish or disestablish it.

These three attitudes are to be found in a group of statements about personal immortality published on Easter Day in the New York "Times." Dr. Manning, Protestant Episcopal Bishop of New York, Dr. Ryan, Roman Catholic professor, and Frank P. Walsh, Roman Catholic layman, and others rest their belief ultimately on authority. Clarence Darrow, the famous attorney, John Dewey, the well-known philosopher, W. E. B. Du Bois, the eminent Negro leader, take the view of the scientist, the first regarding the evidence as against the idea, the other two taking the position of agnosticism. But others, among them the scientific layman Dr. Robert Andrews Millikan, the distinguished physicist, and Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, the eminent clergyman, regard immortality through other eyes than those of evidence or dogma. Man, says Dr. Millikan, is incurably religious, because "every one who reflects at all must have conceptions of the world which go beyond the field of science." In this sense immortality is not merely the survival of bodily death, it is rather an attitude toward life and a way of living.

Alice Stays in Wonderland

L

AST week, at Sotheby's auction rooms, in London, a woman, old and poor and alone since her sons were killed in the war, sat and watched the sale of a precious manuscript. It was the manuscript of "Alice in Wonderland." The old woman, the seller, was Mrs. Hargreaves, the original Alice to whom the story was told and the manuscript given by Lewis Carroll "in memory of a summer day," some sixty-five years ago. The buyer was Dr. Rosenbach, purveyor to American collectors. To different people the manuscript means different things. Chirographers may find in the formation of its letters and the slant of lines some indications of the author's character. To psychologists corrections in the text may hint of how his mind worked. For the collector it is another curious stamp, another rare bird's-nest. To Alice Hargreaves herself the folded papers were the tangible evidence that a summer day, years ago, had been—had been, like her home and her sons and her youth; that it was not the figment of a lonely heart. To us they are only the christening dress of an immortal child. The manuscript of "Alice in Wonderland" may go to a gracious oblivion in the glass cases of the British Museum or behind the carved doors of a millionaire's cupboard; but neither public nor private hands can be laid upon Alice. She is safe, out of reach in a permanent wonderland. The door is not locked. It is a little door, and to go through it you have only to find the bottle labeled "DRINK ME." But take care; when you have drunk, when you are small enough to get through, you will find that there is deep water about your knees. To reach wonderland you must swim through a flood of your own

tears.

I

N the United States today there are slightly over 700 broadcasting stations, nearly 10,000,000 receiving sets, and a total radio audience estimated at 30,000,000 to 50,000,000. In all the rest of the world there are but 431 stations. Only eight years ago, in 1920, there was only one station, KDKA of Pittsburgh, and a few thousand sputtering, head-phone amateur sets. Who pays for all this American broadcasting? In the United States, advertisers pay, directly or indirectly, for the great bulk of radio broadcasting. In England and on the Continent, a license tax upon every receiving set pays the cost of radio broadcasting. The Government collects the tax, controls the air with a few noninterfering stations, and arranges the programs.

Broadly speaking, an inquiry into radio advertising is synonymous with an inquiry into the whole subject of American broadcasting.

In January, 1928, the Dodge Brothers brought out a new Victory model, and heralded its birth with a Victory Hour on the radio. That hour cost the motor manufacturers $60,000, or $1,000 a minute. Will Rogers in his California home, Paul Whiteman and his band in New York, Fred and Dorothy Stone in a Chicago theatre dressing-room, and Al Jolson in a New Orleans hotel at the four boundaries of the Republic, west, east, north, and south-all contributed to one unified program, and their voices. blended in the biggest hook-up ever attempted. The four artists split a purse of $25,000, with Al Jolson-grumbling all the way to New Orleans, where he did not want to go-receiving $7,500. Forty-seven stations were linked by 20,000 miles of special telephone wire, and, at an engineering cost of $35,000, simultaneously delivered the program to the whole country. David Belasco sent the following telegram to Edward L. Bernays, who, as counsel on public relations for the Dodge Brothers, had initiated the gigantic hook-up:

As a sales and merchandising event the announcement of the Dodge Brothers Victory Six car from fortyseven radio stations is an achievement which beggars the imagination. The realization that some 30,000,000 people may be approached at the same time about the same proposition,

By STUART CHASE

Stuart Chase asks and answers the question "What do manufacturers get when they pay $1,000 a minute for a National hook-up?" He was, with Mr. F. J. Schlink, a joint author of "Your Money's Worth: A Study in the Waste of the Consumer's Dollar." His trenchant study of the advertising problem serves as a background for this article on advertising and radio.

whether it be concerned with merchandising, amusements, politics, education or religion, is an accomplishment which only the thought of this age could conceive. I am inclined to sit in admiration of the mind or minds which could vision such a stupendous undertaking.

Some of us are not only inclined to sit, we are inclined to complete prostration. The event was unparalleled. The only question remaining is whether the Dodge Brothers sold any more cars by virtue of it. But of that more anon.

The total outlay by the American public for sets and accessories is now $550,000,000 a year. In 1922 it was $60,000,000-a ninefold increase in six years. But the saturation point is far from reached. Only about thirty per cent of American homes are as yet equipped with radios, in contrast with forty per cent equipped with phonographs, over sixty per cent with telephones, and sixty-seven per cent with motor cars-figured on the basis of dividing total machines by total families.

In 1922 the Telephone Company established WEAF in New York. In the same year the art was greatly expanded by employing telephone wires to carry outside events into the station, where they were then put upon the air. Before, the speaker or the singer had perforce to go to the studio. Now the studio could go to the artist. Soon after, telephone wires were employed not only to hook in the artist, but to hook up separate stations, and thus release an identical program at widely separated points. As the maximum normal good delivery range of the most powerful (50,000 watt) station is only between 100 and 300 miles, de

pending on the character of the territory covered, it is obvious that the hook-up technique was invaluable in giving a costly or unique program the widest distribution at the lowest operating outlay. Thus momentous political speeches, prize-fights, football games, symphony concerts, the birth pangs of Victory models, could be delivered clearly and well all over the country at one fell swoop.

T

HE lion among the hook-up circuits is the National Broadcasting Company. It operates one station of its own, WEAF, and two stations owned by the Radio Corporation, WJZ and WRY: and daily sends out programs to nearly fifty more stations, using 9,300 miles of special wire. These stations, furthermore, are combined into the Red Circuit and the Blue Circuit, each with special programs. The company is owned jointly by the General Electric Company, the Radio Corporation, and the Westinghouse Electric Company, who between them make perhaps fifteen per cent of all radio sets and accessories. There are about 500 persons on its payroll; 14 studios are operated in New York, Chicago, Washington, and San Francisco; each month it brings 5,000 faces to its microphones, and each month it receives (and diligently classifies for advertising purposes) 85,000 letters from its far-flung audiences. It is housed in a great office building in New York, where on the floors devoted to the purpose the astounded visitor may see high-vaulted studios furnished in a style to inspire envy in Mr. Ziegfeld's heart, with batteries of colored lights to play upon the emotions of the performing artists; he may see magnificent attendants in the boldest and bluest of uniforms; a lordly sales department with rows of conference rooms and a great many-colored wall chart of the whole hook-up system; a dark cave lined with emerald batteries; a machine for recording automatically the temperature of every study at tenminute intervals; and, most impressive of all, the central engineering room, where the miracle of transforming sound into ether waves is performed and the beautiful, intricate work of linking station to station consummated.

The nearest competitor to this company is the Columbia Broadcasting