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gious belief or none at all, and the leading citizens both of American and foreign ancestry, have resumed their influence and have called a halt on the wild exaggerations. If ever there were needed a proof of the essential soundness and common sense of the American people, we are seeing it today. The Klan is just about as lively a national institution as the ghost of the Know Nothing party might be supposed to be, after about eighty years' decent burial. About sixty or seventy years from now there probably will be another like organization, but we of today need not worry much on that score; and probably the infants of the present day later will show the usual American aptitude for dealing adequately with such a problem when it arises.

There is another side of the question, however, which should not leave us in any too complacent a frame of mind. That is the continued existence of the same fanatical intolerance, the same desire for group autocracy on the part of various minorities, that has been the dominating spirit and controlling influence of the Ku Klux Klan. While it is forsaking more formal organization and the "mass play" of bizarre and fantastic regalia, yet it is as much awake as ever and can only be overcome by the two-fold process of education through the results of calm discussion and pitiless publicity, and the circumspect action and frank acceptance of unreserved loyalty to this country and its institutions on the part of various racial and religious enclaves that have sometimes shown a tendency toward selfish or unpatriotic aggrandizement.

It may seem a small matter, but it may be said in this connection that one of the great causes of anti-foreign prejudice among our farmers and other country people is the crowds of "owner-drivers" of automobiles that swarm out of the cities upon every road within a radius of fifty to one hundred miles upon practically every Sunday and holiday of the year, and especially during the summer months. These people, often of foreign birth and comparatively recent immigration, not only "hog the road" and drive in the most reckless manner, but commit wide and serious depredations upon the gardens, orchards, woods and private property of the rural dwellers. The strength of the Ku Klux movement in these sections is probably a direct result, and only better policing of the roads, with better manners upon

the part of the visitors, will allay this prejudice that is visited without discrimination upon all those whom the farmers are pleased to designate as "foreigners". It is the seemingly small thing that so often has a great effect upon public opinion.

In dealing with a wider phase of the subject, mention should be made of another condition that but few people realize. While the overwhelming majority of our people have reached the point of willing acceptance of our membership in the so-called World Court, yet there is a widespread opposition, intensified to the nth degree with regard to the League of Nations, due to the fact that both these world-organizations are potentially, at least, under the control of the Latin and Catholic nations of Europe and Central and South America. Arguments based upon the wellknown truth that there are no proofs of ill results from any such situation are met by the calm reassertion of the potential facts, and it looks as though we are about to meet renewed opposition to an adequate and expanding American policy in world affairs, and one in accord with the position of the United States as a world Power, by localism and provincialism of a new order. Our international position no longer will be based upon an historic policy of isolation and non-interference, but upon the questionable and degrading influences of racial and religious prejudice. Although we may have every confidence that our people again will recover from this new form of the malady, yet it contains possibilities of dangerous results and of international complications that are disturbing to say the least.

Another influence, and one that cuts athwart all the lines mentioned above and applies alike to Jew and Gentile, Catholic and Protestant, is so-called Fundamentalism. The Scopes trial of last summer was a ghastly and humiliating spectacle of the clash of two types of fanaticism, extremely radical and conservative and, in the opinion of the writer, personified by protagonists alike ignorant of the real principles of the case, and totally incapable of understanding the relative meaning and merits of either science or religion. This renewed attempt to legislate a person's belief, or control the subjective processes of an individual mind by objective authority, is going to fail as surely as the intolerance of the Ku Klux Klan is failing, for it is merely the turning of the

same type of prejudice and fanatical emotion into another direction. The early settlers in this country in large part were driven to take refuge here from autocratic attempts of the same kind, and for that reason they finally so modelled the institutions of this nation as to preclude the success of any later attempt to revive such outworn mediæval action. Any such movement, therefore, is even more opposed to the real American spirit than the racial and religious prejudice fostered by the Ku Klux Klan. At present, this spirit is manifesting itself in a perfect debauch of mandatory legislation-at the hands of Congress, State legislatures, and even the ordinance-making authority of local governments. The extent of this mania has recently been summed up by Professor A. F. Pollard of the University of London as follows:

To Americans, Acts of Congress were not so much a means of change as a method of putting on record moral aspirations, a liturgy rather than legislation; and the statute book was less the fiat of the State than a book of common prayer. The Constitution was the ark of a covenant with more than a mere contractual sanction. It was almost a national church into which, in default of any other, Americans were baptized; and it was once described by a President as "the greatest government that God has ever made".1

It is not too much to hope and believe, that when any such movement reaches a final test before the bar of public opinion, the decision will be in exact accord with the essential American conviction as summed up in the old Virginia "Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom"-"that the opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction". This principle is put into practical application in the following adequate words, which should always be the guiding star of the American citizen of whatever faith or creed, when in doubt as to the proper mode of action:

It is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order.... Truth is great and will prevail if left to herself; . . . she is the proper and sufficient antagonism to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate; errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.

1 Factors in American History; pages 83-84.

WILLIAM STARR MYERS.

NOCTURNE

(After the French of J. K. Huysmans)

BY R. L. MÉGROZ

The wan moon kindles a fermenting of fire
In the sun's mirror, that now glimmering sea.
All sleeps. One bulbul swooning with desire,
Alone, sings yet his lovely melody.

The night wind, muted by the moon, no more
In the green mystery of branches heaves;
Stars wordless in the silent gloom downpour
Pale blue kisses through the parted leaves.

Long luxury of dreaming upon death

Drowses the soul of things where slow seas range:
Sometimes this forest hardly stirs a breath

Under the furtive shudder of seasonal change.

Now blur the leaves in mist. With gathering crystals
Dews dropping from the azure zenith coat
In close-encrusting pearl the lifted pistils
Of nenuphars that on the dark pool float.

The gloom yields nought—nor wings, nor wind, nor voice,
Except, in the remotest woodland shades,
A brook on tree-drift dropping with quick noise,
From which uprise fresh echoes of cascades.

NATIONALISM AND THE VERNACULAR

IN CHINA

BY LOW KWANG-LAI

PEOPLE in this country are more or less familiar with the political and industrial changes that have taken place in China through the writings of prolific journalists and the perennial stream of books on China, issuing from the protean press. But however important these changes and however valuable these publications, there is one great change, one great movement, about which there is a conspiracy of silence on the part of the writers on China in this country, and yet it is a movement fraught with the most serious consequences and exercising an unparalleled influence on the intellectual and spiritual life of the Chinese people. If the transformation of the Chinese Monarchy into the Chinese Republic is an event politically significant, the change from the classical Chinese language into the vernacular, the language as it is spoken today by the people, is nothing short of an intellectual and spiritual revolution, which arouses the creative energy of the Chinese people and awakens the dormant national consciousness of the four hundred millions. It is through this medium of the spoken language, newly discovered and exalted to the plane of time honored language, that the Chinese people are giving expression to their emotions and feelings, hitherto suppressed because trammeled by the restraining influences of the classical language. Hostile criticism may say that the Chinese students who are the cause of the Shanghai trouble and are behind most of the anti-foreign agitations need sound chastisement by the Chinese Government. But in looking upon Chinese students as mere school children who have escaped the salutary influence of the rod, the critics have failed to understand the psychology of the new Chinese language and the significance of the whole movement. For the fundamental difference between the classical Chinese and the vernacular is that the for

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