of the minorities in Hungary was started by people living not on Hungarian territory but abroad, and that the assiduous propaganda kept up by the combined Czechish, Illyrian (previous name for the Yugoslavs) and Roumanian groups for almost a hundred years before the outbreak of the war was in the main responsible for a measure of discontent of the Hungarian minorities. It was never general, and these minorities have never desired the dismemberment of Hungary. This fact cannot be disproved, as there has never been a plebiscite to determine this issue. Second, all of the Hungarian minorities immigrated into Hungary long after the original Hungarian conquerors had acquired the land, more than a thousand years ago. They have therefore enjoyed the hospitality of Hungary. The immigrations occurred after Hungarians had bled to death during the Tartar and Turkish invasions, which lasted altogether several centuries and which really meant a blood sacrifice for the good of Europe. No other nation in Europe has brought a greater sacrifice to civilization than Hungary, which lost millions of her sons in these struggles to save Western civilization. Europe's thanks for past services rendered were handed to Hungary in Paris in 1920!

Third, although Hungary also in other ways often had to fight for her existence and language, schools, etc., it never has adopted the theory proclaimed first by Barrère during the French Revolution in 1794: "Let us cancel the means of damage and aberration, let us suppress the language of the foreign minorities!" Hungarians have always endeavored to use liberal methods of assimilation, as the great Hungarian statesman Francis Deák so aptly said: "If we want to win our minorities, we must not try to Magyarize them at all costs, but must seek to make them love the Hungarian conditions".

To charge that Hungary had oppressed her national minorities during a thousand years is grievously unjust, if for no other reason than that none of her minorities have lived on Hungarian territory for such a length of time. The earliest settlers after the Hungarians had taken possession of Hungary in A. D. 896 were the Saxons and Slovaks, who arrived in the course of the eleventh century. Hungarians and Slovaks were always friends and brothers in arms during the revolution of Prince Rákóczy in the

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1848 and in the World War they valiantly fought side by side. The Saxons were at once endowed with special privileges by the Kings of Hungary (Decretum Andreanum, etc.) which they retained for over 800 years Serbians immigrated to Hungary in the course of the fifteenth century (George Brankovics) and later in the seventeenth century (Archbishop Csarnojevic of Ipek). Roumanians first settled in the thirteenth century, when a handful of them arrived who were endowed with certain properties by the King in Székács, Transylvania. If a plebiscite had been granted to Hungary and her minorities by the winners of the war,—who allege that they fought this war for the liberation of the smaller nations,Hungary would never have been dismembered, because the great majority of the "foreign oppressed" nationals, in spite of all propaganda, would have voted in favor of Hungary, as against alien rule.

The present New Europe represents in no way an alignment on racial lines, as millions of people have been bartered away merely to please the whim of a few doctrinaires. The liberation of fifty or sixty millions is a myth. Nobody with any sense of humor who knew Europe before the war and has known it since the peace of slavery and attrition" would venture to make such an assertion. The present day New Europe is neither politically nor economically an improvement on former conditions. It plays favorites with a comparatively few people at the expense of a large majority of miserable human beings who rebel in spirit because the tyranny of the peacemakers has enslaved them. Economic and other conditions in the basin of the Danube are abnormal and will continue so until the interested people themselves see the light and readjust matters among themselves in a fair spirit of reconciliation. This does not mean a breaking up of the new countries, but a careful revision of that arch-enemy of peace, the Treaty of Trianon, and some of the other treaties. America was never greater than when she refused to ratify these treaties. She showed common sense when the Paris peace makers showed revenge and ignorance.

ERNEST LUDWIG.

VOL. CCXXIII.-NO. 832

32

THE NEW LEISURE

BY CORNELIA JAMES CANNON

I

We are a nation of passionate industry. In theory, and largely in practice, work is in the saddle and rides our citizens. We have our loafers and slackers, as every generation since Adam has had, but they excite no general admiration and are not held high in public estimation. Such prophets of leisure as Thoreau and Walt Whitman, who were satisfied with the simple life and an incidental pursuit of literature, have found few imitators in our midst.

Occasionally a rich man's son has abandoned the making of money and spent his time in ways personally satisfying but commercially profitless. Such apostasy is anathema to our conscientious Babbitts. Early to arrive at the haunts of business and late to depart are the accepted habits of the God fearing and the self respecting American.

It is undeniable that strict attention to business gives results. Our steel tonnage production has become enormous, the cotton manufactured in this country could doubtless encircle the world, and travelers tell us that our automobiles rattle on every continent.

But what of it?

Suppose we are the biggest and busiest nation on earth, does it bring us any incentive save to become still bigger and busier, or offer us other reward than that of our surpassing size and activity? No one denies the essential importance of labor or its multiple values to the individual, but it is not without reason that the generations have reiterated that "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy". Though we are a feverish nation and make a good deal of noise, must we not admit that we are somewhat like Jack at his worst?

Circumstances are, however, conspiring against our remaining dull as a consequence of a continuing preoccupation with work. Almost unnoted, leisure is bearing down upon us from every side. The eight hour working day is rapidly spreading from industry to industry. The entire working world is fighting for a short day, and the politicians are lending helping hands. No one, laborer or idler, who is at all familiar with the type of daily job upon which the great majority of workers are engaged, could wish for anything else.

The new sources of physical energy, which are being increasingly developed, are certain to reduce still further the hours of work necessary to supply the actual needs of the community. The shortened hours and the substitution of mechanical power for that of the muscles of man will, in addition, more and more remove physical fatigue as an accompaniment of work. Men and women are beginning to return from the performance of their daily tasks, no longer so jaded as to require complete inactivity or abnormal stimulus as a counter to the exhaustion of toil, but fit to fill their leisure hours with activities of a different kind.

One other factor is certain to play an important rôle in the future. Prohibition is doubtless here to stay, and will be more effectively enforced as the will of the majority makes itself increasingly felt. That means that the chief anodyne of idle hours is being eliminated. We shall no longer be able to delude ourselves into thinking we are having a pleasant and profitable time when we are merely a little befuddled by alcohol. We shall know unmistakably when we are bored.

These large social changes are bringing about a condition of affairs for which we find ourselves unprepared. In our national recognition of the worth and dignity of labor, and in our devotion to its pursuit, we have neglected the uses and significance of leisure. Our educational system, which is a barometer registering the pressure of our enthusiasms, has for years stressed vocational training. Not only have we taught vocations in the classroom, but of late we have sent our teachers into the factories and shops to teach the worker on the job. Our commercial courses and our trade schools have been designed to feed the young people, trained to the last detail, directly into industry.

Those schoolmen who have protested against such rank utilitarianism have been denounced as old fogies, or have been mere voices crying in the wilderness. Efficiency has demanded results, and we have allowed the pay envelope of the graduate to become the criterion of a school's success.

This might be all very well if men were mechanized, or if work occupied the whole of life. But human beings have so far resisted all attempts to make them into machines, and the fortyeight hour working week, even after hours for sleep have been deducted, leaves, to be disposed of at the individual's will, sixtyfour hours of freedom. The modern workingman, in the most advanced industries, has now many more hours for leisure than for work. Every effort of the community has heretofore been devoted to preparing him for efficient performance during the forty-eight hours. The use of the sixty-four hours has been largely left to exploitation by the commercial forces which profit by the idleness of resourceless humanity.

There is a challenge to our whole educational system in this development of a new leisure class. Ours has been a vocational educational system in a vocation-minded civilization. We have never been whole-heartedly in sympathy with the educational frills forced upon us by educators who would not admit that earning a living was the be-all and end-all of life. We have ignored germinating enthusiasms, we have not cultivated a love of life's diversities, and we have subordinated training in appreciation of the beauties and mysteries of the world about us to mastery of the mathematician's table, the surveyor's transit, the typewriter, the forge, and the turning lathe.

We have seen our national duty as that of developing our country and opening up its resources. Felling the trees for the clearing, organizing the mine for rapid production, rolling the steel into sheathing for ships, has kept us busy. We have tumbled into our beds, exhausted but triumphant, to sleep off the day's weariness and be fresh for the next day's strain.

Such hurried plowing and harrowing of the capacities of youth has not mellowed the soil for the seeds of leisure. We find ourselves unprepared to display the graces of an advanced civilization, which, so far in history, have not been the product of a