Increasingly we provoke his diatribes concerning our inferiority to a sophisticated Europe which he voluntarily abandons to dwell among us "boobs," as he airily designates us.

Our idiotic cheerfulness aggravates Mencken. Destitute of the acrimony which marks the superiority of the alien literati, we pursue our inferior bourgeois objectives with hopeful vigor, with candid and unseemly optimism. The world has been revolving on its axis since 1492, and America has not yet learned the proper attitude of cynical acquiescence to fate and of jesting unconcern for human responsibility. She insists on being useful and altruistic in spite of the oral and written precepts of our conspicuous intellectual, Mencken the Mentor. Full many a time he pushes us Yankees beneath the dark waters of pessimism, but unfailingly we bob up again on the life-preserver of our buoyant instinct for overcoming difficulties and dangers. In America apparently we cannot realize that conquering obstacles is obsolete.

Mencken deplores our antiquated regard for the sacredness of home, church, and history. We are so slow to learn that there is no such word as tradition in the lexicon of modern thought. Tradition implies affection for the past, whereas the Mencken school would have us understand that we have no past and no future worth cherishing, only the present for donning harlequin's attire and proclaiming the farcical futility of human endeavor.

Hero worship exasperates the cynics as the most foolish phase of tradition. To make a hero of an American is to imply that there is something fine in human nature and, worst of all, in American human nature. Acknowledging gratitude for a salient personality in public life runs counter to the sophisticate's assumption that gratitude is a weakness and that there is no greatness of character. Yet, in spite of Mencken's tutoring, incorrigibly stupid America continues to cherish her sacred memories and hopes. She persists in erecting monuments to her heroes, and in teaching her school-children to believe in Country and Flag-foolish America! disgruntled Mencken!

Patriotism heads Mencken's list of bourgeois offences. To be a patriot is to stir the risibles of advanced thinkers. How arrogant of America to value her experiences as a Nation, how

tasteless her self-reminders of her evolution as a Republic! Columbus might better have remained comfortably in Italy; as for the Puritans, if they had foundered in the deep sea, we should have been spared the record of their austere follies. England was well rid of us, yet we are none the better for our independence. This dollar-chasing America presumes to prate of patriotism, to sing the glories of her birth, and to seek divine guidance. Mencken sorrows over all these childish tendencies, sorrows because our Nation will not cast aside her preoccupation with reminiscent emotions. Patriotism implies team-work, the submersion of the Ego, the upward look, the strong right arm, the romance of history, whereas Menckenism puts the individual in a vacuum and tells him to exist without the atmosphere of enthusiasm expressed in national service and devotion.

America is incurably religious, although Mencken points inexorably to the signposts of modern intellectualism. She persists in putting faith and will power above barren mental cerebration. Underneath her crust of materialism she cherishes spiritual ideals. America's spiritual energy angers Mencken, because he makes himself believe that the religion of America is synonomous with hypocrisy, superstition and wrong-headedness. What right have we Americans to the consolations and inspirations of piety-we least of all peoples!

For the Mencken school faith is demoded, aspiration a weak delusion. Yet America refuses to repudiate religion. She makes it the foundation of her institutions, the motive-power of her charities, the keynote of her progress. Mencken sorrows over America's narrow conformities, so contrary to the self-sufficiency of intellectualism. The American bourgeois blunders onward and upward instead of reclining at full length in the dry lands of Rationalism.

As an alleviation for the crass stupidities of the American "booboisie", Mencken has founded a school of congenial spirits. A select inner circle of Americans choose him as their guide and pattern. Our Menckenites form an esoteric band of superior minds, whose special function it is to deride all things American. They reflect his prejudices and imitate his cawings and croakings at our absurdities. Chief among them in stereotyped implicit

obedience is Sinclair Lewis. Self-acknowledged star pupil of Menckenism, Lewis incorporates his master's theories into novels which put the dunce cap on America and condemn her to the dark corner as the world's most imbecile race.

Mencken's band of imitators-the bad boys of literatureconsole him for his grievance at sentimental America. He has imparted to them his swagger, his bravado. They jeer at the plain person, who in the grapple with life turns to sentiments which brighten the bleakness of an unkind environment by revealing a goal worth a struggle. Like street arabs pelting strangers in comely garments, they throw derisive epithets at the kindly virtues and gracious deeds which brighten sombre places.

They have the brawler's delight in destruction-the instinct to break the bright wings of idealism, to silence the song of hope, the flutter of expectation. They love to tease, to worry, to injure the purposeful citizen pursuing the round of homely existence. "What's the use!" they sneer; "your work is futile, your faith nonsensical, your courage childish-you poor dupe, you preposterous bourgeois!" Thumbing the nose, they scoff at the harmless effusions of life. Parades, both literal and figurative, with the old fellows in uniform, the young ones beating the drum and playing the fife, the applause and enthusiasms of the crowd as an outlet for human ardor, offend the superiority complex of the Mencken coterie.

Mencken, critic in perpetuum, assuages his vexation at our perverse Americanisms with the cup of malice which he prepares for himself. His caustic middle age will pass into tart old age spent in the America he disdains but refuses to desert. For, were he absent from foolish America, his occupation would cease. With no America to berate, his career would vanish, his mentality atrophy. Having stored up for himself no gentle thoughts, no mellow traditions, no mild benignant pleasures of the mind, how could he live in a land he did not despise? How could he endure a congenial environment after the bracing air of antagonism to all things American? On his peak of scorn he noisily bewails America; but he enjoys his sorrows.

FARM PRICES AND THE VALUE OF GOLD

BY JOHN R. COMMONS

Professor in the University of Wisconsin

I

In the public discussion of so-called "Farm Relief" problems attention has been drawn to many of the causes of the present disparity between the prosperity of the industrial world and the distress in our agricultural region. The disparity has been attributed to the lack of foreign demand for the farmers' products, to the tariff, to excess production, to the inefficiency of the farmers, to the inability of the farmers to organize, and to other causes. In this discussion, however, another factor is usually overlooked-the effect of changes in the value of gold upon farmers' prices.

The value of gold, like the value of cotton or wheat, is its power to purchase other commodities offered in exchange upon the markets. In the case of other commodities we measure their value by a standard unit of a single commodity, gold, which a standard unit of the given commodity, a pound of cotton or bushel of wheat, will purchase. This is its "price". Price is the gold value of an arbitrary unit of the specified commodity in exchange for an arbitrary unit of gold. In the case of gold itself, however, we measure its unit value, not by a single commodity, cotton, wheat, iron, etc., but by an average of the prices of all commodities. This is the so-called "index number" of prices, or commodity price level. Inversely, it is an index of the changing value of gold.

The monetary disturbances since the beginning of the World War have familiarized the public with the changing value of gold. Taking the year before the war, 1913, as an arbitrary base, and calling the then average of all commodity prices in America 100, the index number rose to 247 in May, 1920, and fell to 138 in

January, 1922. That is to say, the value of gold, which changes inversely to the price level, fell from an arbitrary 100 per cent. in 1913 to 41 per cent. in May, 1920, then rose to 72 per cent. in January, 1922. Again by March, 1923, prices had risen to 159, meaning that the value of gold had fallen to 63. There then came a fall of prices to 145; then a rise to 161, and a fall to 145 in July, 1927. Inversely the value of gold rose to 69, then fell to 62, then rose to 69, for the corresponding dates.

Of course, individual prices do not move up and down uniformly with the movement of the average of all prices, and herein lies the problem of farmers' prices. The total gold value of the farmers' crops is the product of the quantity produced multiplied by the gold value per unit of that quantity. In general, a large crop brings a low price and a short crop a high price, so that the total gold value of the crop does not change uniformly with changes in the gold value of a unit of the crop. This depends upon the law of supply and demand of the particular commodity relative to supply and demand of other commodities and of gold.

But this law of supply and demand has had curious distortions during and since the war. It is commonly spoken of as though the value of gold remained stationary. This error is serious, because gold is not only the common measure of the value of commodities, but is also the legal tender instrument through which the law of supply and demand operates. By means of the gold value of the cotton or wheat crop the farmers of cotton or wheat buy all other commodities, and thus they convert their gold value into the quantities of other commodities which they need. Even more important, the gold value of their crops is the means by which they pay their taxes and debts.

Realization of the error of a stationary value of gold will help us to understand some of the otherwise queer distortions of the law of supply and demand. Thus, in 1919 the world's cotton crop was twenty-one million bales and the American producers received an average for the year 1919-20 of 35 cents a pound at the farm. In 1921 the world's cotton crop was only fifteen million bales. In view of this, we should have expected the price to rise above 35 cents. But it fell to 17 cents for the crop year. A decrease of over one-fourth in the supply did not bring an increase