“LET US ALL SING THE LAST VERSE”

SO MANY COMPLAINTS have been raised against the “Star-Spangled Banner” as a national anthem that a new suggestion for its use is always welcome. A writer to the New York Herald points out that the last verse of the hymn, rather than the first, expresses American feeling and is the one that ought to be sung. Few who are able to repeat any words of the national hymn get beyond the first verse, which merely pictures a scene and does not touch our emotion until the refrain is reached. The last verse, as the writer Helen Elmira Waite, points out, is “filled with the purest of joy and thanks-giving to Him who ‘made and preserved us a nation.”

Oh, thus be it ever when free men shall stand

Between their lov’d home and wild war’s desolation;

Blest with vict’ry and peace, may the heav’n-rescued land

Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation!

Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,

And this be our motto; ‘In God is our trust!’

And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave,

0 ‘er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

“What are the men gathered at Washington to-day doing if not standing ‘between their loved homes and wild war’s desolation’? And is it only on battlefields that we can conquer? Are we to forget to give praise to that Power which made and preserved us a nation and gave peace and victory to that nation? And what of our motto? Is that to go into the discard?”

Source: Literary Digest for December 3, 1921

FLOATING HOMES FOR NAVAL PLANES

NO EXISTING BATTLE-SHIP, nor any that it is possible to build within the next ten years, can be kept afloat when attacked by airplanes using gas and highexplosive  bombs. At any rate, this is the announcement made by Gen. Amos E. Fries, chief of the chemical warfare service, to the Engineers Club of Baltimore. We should not include aircraft carriers in any plan to limit warship construction, General Fries thinks; but our naval architects should design these carriers to make a speed of fifty to sixty knots, and to accommodate as many bombing planes as possible. There should be several fleets of these speedy and roomy carriers. Realizing the importance of such vessels, Secretary Denby, on October 12th, list, notified the House Naval Committee that the Navy Department would ask Congress to build aircraft carriers for the Navy. Both England and America have already reconstructed existing ships to save the time required to build. The first British experimental carrier is the Eagle, while our first mother ship is known as the Langley. Regarding the former, Mr. C. G. Grey, editor of The Aeroplane (London), remarks as follows:

“This ship was in commission in 1920 for experimental work. She was built by Armstrong-Whitworths, as the Chilean Dreadnought Almirante Cochrane, but was taken over by the British Navy. She has a displacement of 26,200 tons and can steam at 24 knots. It was in connection with this ship that the Admiralty distinguished itself by forbidding the visit to her of a number of the leading British aeroplane designers, who had been invited by the Royal Air Force to go on board and study the problems surrounding the alighting of aeroplanes on ships, on the grounds that civilians must not be permitted to see the secrets of the Navy. The funnel and superstructure are on the off, right, far, or starboard side of the ship, leaving a more or less clear run from bow to stern.”

In January of this year the work was begun at the Norfolk Navy Yard of remodeling the collier Jupiter and changing her into our first aircraft carrier. In order to do this, her entire coal-handling machinery was removed and her coal bunkers were converted into storage space for planes and their accessories, ammunition, machine and wing repair shops, and various other storerooms. There are two decks—a lower assembling or hangar deck, and an upper, or flying deck. Beneath the latter there are traveling cranes, which hoist the planes from the hold and transfer them to the shop spaces and elevator. This raises them to the flying deck as they are wanted. On this upper deck, which is 65 feet wide amidships and has a length of 525 feet, there are catapults for starting machines and suitable stopping devices.  The regular smokestack has been done away with and two short smoke conveyors substituted, one on each side of the deck, adapted to turn upwards or downwards. When placed in a downward position, the smoke is passed through a water spray. By taking advantage of the two pipes the smoke may always be discharged to leeward.

Read more about the first aircraft carriers here

THE STUMBLING-BLOCK TO CHURCH REUNION

FEELING KEENLY that it would be a humiliating reflection upon the validity of their own ministry if they agreed to a reordination of the clergy as a requisite for church union, the Board of Bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church have formally rejected the overtures of the Lambeth Conference. As told in these pages several times, the Lambeth proposals, which were promulgated by a conference of Anglican and Episcopal bishops from all over the world in August, 1920, provide, in brief, for a reunion of the churches on the basis that priests of the Roman and Greek Catholic Churches would be accepted as priests of the Anglican Church if their own communions would reciprocate, while it is asked of the Protestant Churches that they should allow their ministers to submit to reordination by Anglican or Episcopal bishops. The proposals have not yet been accepted by any denomination, and their rejection by the Methodists is generally taken as indicative of the attitude of the other branches of the Protestant Church.

The “implied inferiority or insufficiency of their own authority and ordination” under the Lambeth scheme is regarded by the Methodists as an insuperable obstacle to the proposed reunion, and the Newark. News remarks that “doubtless the Methodist Bishops are correct in feeling that their ministry and laity would resent the intimation, however lightly laid, that the church, one of the largest Protestant denominations, has been without the pale of authoritative Christendom. One hundred and eighty long years have passed since John Wesley became the founder of Methodism as it endures to-day, and in that time the Bishops point out that the Church has been blest of God. Deeply as they are convinced of the unity of purpose of the Anglican Church and their own, they can not, even as a form, subscribe to a theory that Divine authority has not been theirs.” On the other hand, ” there can be no doubt of the sincerity and warmth of the union proposals which have been broached by a number of the eminent ministers of the Episcopal Communion,” says The Christian Century (Undenominational).

“The World Conference on Faith and Order, the proposed concordat with the Congregationalists, and the Lambeth Conference are all evidences of the spirit of what The Christian Century is pleased to believe is a majority opinion of the men and women of the Episcopal Church. Yet these various overtures have not been received with very much warmth by the evangelicals of this country. There has been courtesy in the replies, and a studied avoidance of anything offensive, but nothing that looked at all earnestly toward closer fellowship.”

Problems with Church Reunion continued here…

STEEL AND DISARMAMENT

THE PATH TO DISARMAMENT, they used to tell us, would be blocked by the makers of munitions. Yet we now hear the Gunpowder King of America declaring, as quoted in these pages two weeks ago, that the war business of the DuPont’s does not pay. “I am at the head of the largest war materials manufacturing works in the world, but,” said Charles M. Schwab, the other evening, “gladly would I see the war-making machinery of the Bethlehem Steel Company sunk to the bottom of the ocean,” if the burden of armaments could be lifted from the nations. Judge Gary, of the United States Steel Corporation, declares that disarmament would be a good thing for all business, the steel business included. Leading organs of the iron and steel trade, too, welcome the Hughes program for naval reduction, denying loudly that the continued piling up of armaments is a good thing for the steel business. And the statements from steel men and steel journals are echoed and applauded in the daily papers of New York, Boston and Philadelphia. 

But since we fight with steel guns, steel bayonets, steel projectiles, and since our battleships are 85% steel and iron, the steel business can not be entirely unaffected by what is going on at Washington, and that unsentimental recorder of values, the New York Stock Exchange, witnessed a drop from one to four points in steel stocks on the first business day after the Hughes announcement. It is explained in the New York Times that the selling of steel shares was based on the belief that the disarmament; plans would compel a readjustment in the industry and would bring lower prices as a result of the release of additional manufacturing capacity for industrial purposes. But steel men were heard to say that while there will be more or less troublesome readjustment, in the long run the industry will benefit, as there is very little profit in armament business; they also called attention to the fact that while the consumption of steel for armament purposes during war is naturally large, such consumption during peace time is of small proportions as compared with the production of steel in general.

Steel and Disarmament continued here…

TO EDUCATE THE NEXT GENERATION AGAINST WAR

GREAT WARS RECUR at intervals that suggest that they are started by new generations who have forgotten the evils of the conflicts fought by their fathers. The present generation seems fully determined that wars shall cease, but in a few decades new hands will be at the helm. Will they carry on the anti-war crusade, or will they embark on new conflicts with new inventions that will devastate humanity? To help forestall such a failure of our great peace endeavor, Governor Cox of Massachusetts makes the inspiring suggestion that all college and school students in his State follow the doings of the Armament Conference as part of their education, and to extend the benefit of this idea throughout America, we at once telegraphed the Governor of every State for his opinion of it. Replies have come from all but a very few, who may be absent from home or prevented by other reasons, and all are filled with an enthusiasm that insures the success of this far-reaching plan. Some had even forestalled the Massachusetts Governor in calling upon their schools to study the Conference. Governor Cox said in his message:

“In the Armament Conference the political and economic history of the modern world is to be studied. All of us hope that the future political and economic history of the world may be given new direction as the result of it. I can conceive of no better way to train the citizens of to-morrow for the discharge of their most important duties than by encouraging their study of the proceedings of the great Conference.”

The messages of the other Governors follow, arranged geographically:

WHY THE ARMIES CAN NOT DISARM

AS ARISTIDE BRIAND, powerful of frame, with shaggy head and bushy downward curving mustache, arose to state the case of France before the Arms Conference, he seemed to one press correspondent to be a perfect living type of the old-time Western sheriff; and he might well have claimed for his country the role of an officer of the law who must keep his hand on his gun lest the powerful desperado he has just captured and disarmed should spring upon him and overpower him.

Many a Frenchman has informed us that France can not disarm on land while she faces across the Rhine a Germany, beaten and disarmed, but potentially strong in manpower and industrial equipment, and not yet proved to be either repentant or genuinely inclined to peace. But outside France are those who find in the German situation no justification for the French military policy, and their views are quoted further on.

France’s view-point, however, as one of the correspondents reminds us, has never wavered. “It considers the fact that it is obliged to maintain an Army of between 700,000 and 800,000 men as one of the great tragedies of the war.” It believes it has cut this Army down “to the lowest point compatible with its colonial and mandate responsibilities and its national safety,” and “no Government which agreed at Washington to reduce the size of the Army without procuring some tangible form of cooperation guarantee could stay in power in Paris a single week.”

With France’s position what it is, with the United States thought to be averse to a guarantee treaty, correspondents and editors hold little hope for a solution of the land disarmament problem at the present time. Moreover, as the New York Globe correspondent points out, whereas the great naval Powers are all here, the chief land Powers are not. Russia, Jugo-Slavia, Roumania, Poland, Czecho-Slovakia are absent. Italy, for instance, “can not very well reduce its Army unless it knows what Jugo-Slavia and even Hungary are willing to do.” So while our press agree with the Washington Post that “it is the ardent hope of man-kind that a plan will be evolved at the Conference which will do away with large standing armies and perhaps abolish conscription,” many can foresee no early fulfilment of that hope. The outlook, declares the Syracuse Herald, is far from promising; and the Houston Chronicle finds reason in the facts above noted “to believe that little can be accomplished at this time by way of reducing land forces on the continent of Europe.”

Problems with Disarmament continued here…

AGNOSTICISM IN THE SCHOOLS

A RELIGIOUS REVIVAL may be on the way, as some believe; but against this optimistic theory lies the charge that some of the country’s most prominent universities and colleges, and even many high schools, have become “incubators of agnosticism,” and are busy turning out atheists. Among the lecturers and writers who are alarmed over the present methods of teaching biology and Biblical history in some of our institutions of learning is William Jennings Bryan, who recently alleged in a public address, according to press reports, that professors of biology had led their pupils away from the Bible and had even advised them to disregard the Biblical account of the world’s history. On the other hand, we are told, the responsibility for much of the present-day atheistic tendency rests with the Church, since “its obscurantism has been making infidels faster than Mr. Ingersoll ever could.”

At a recent meeting of the Ministerial Union of Philadelphia the Rev. Dr. B. F. Daugherty, pastor of a Presbyterian Church at Lebanon, Pa., cited by name two leading colleges for women in which he alleged that professors systematically seek to convert their classes to atheism. In one of these, he declared, according to press reports, a professor teaches definite denial of the Deity and then has his pupils vote on the question: “Is there a God?” showing satisfaction when the vote is in the negative. The same doctrines are being taught, said this pastor, in grammar schools and high schools, as well as in many colleges and universities other than those he named. And yet, declares The Catholic Universe (Cleveland), “an education that is not merely non-Christian but actively anti-Christian, is destructive of character and antagonistic to every institution by which America has been made great. . . . The denial of God is the denial not only of authority but of any sense of moral responsibility.”

Agnosticism in Schools continued here…

Condiments, Their Use and Abuse

FRANCE IS THE LAND OF THE FLAVOR and the sauce. Few articles of food are there regarded as sufficient unto themselves.

Writers in other lands, jealous, doubtless, of the well-deserved reputation of the French for toothsome cookery, have slyly suggested that this is because the foodstuffs of that land, flavorless in themselves, require outside aid.

However this may be, it is interesting to find that a French physician. Dr. Raoul Blondel, writing in L’Echo de Paris, is careful to discriminate among his country’s flavors, and especially condemns the use of the “hot” ones, such as pepper and mustard. We need the outside flavors, he admits; but he bids us be careful with them—one may become the slave of mustard, he says, as truly as of alcohol. He writes:

“Our appetites would soon flag if we should eat only unseasoned food. Salt and sugar are still our simplest flavors and our commonest. They are also the only ones that play a legitimate physiological part. All others are only artificial ingredients, intended to excite the appetite by stimulating the mucous coating of the stomach and by pleasing the taste. They may become dangerous by abuse, which habit makes too easy. In any case, when the stomach membrane or the liver do not work properly, the first thing that the physician has to do is to cut out condiments pitilessly.

Condiments, Their Use and Abuse continued here…

ANOTHER RUSH FOR TREASURY OFFERINGS

THE oversubscription of the twin Treasury offers for September seems significant to the press as another evidence of the plentifulness of investment funds and of the success of the Government in putting its indebtedness on a lover interest basis with consequent ultimate saving to the taxpayer. Two offerings were made, it will be remembered, both dating from September 15, one of $250,000,000, in 3 per cent. certificates due in six months, and the other an offering of $250,000,000 of three to five-year 3 1/2 per cent. notes for cash, plus enough to cover any second Liberty 4 1/4s offered for exchange. Incidentally, all the Second Liberty Bonds are called for redemption on November 15. The oversubscription of the 3 per cent. certificates, of which the Government could have disposed of twice as many as it did, does not seem so surprizing to the New York Times. True, this was the lowest rate on any government loan since June, 1925. But money rates are now very low, and there is a great demand for these certificates for the temporary employment of surplus funds:

Treasury Fund-raising continued here…

Good and Evil Effects of the Drought

SOMETHING LIKE A MYSTERY ROLE is being played by the drought in the business drama. It’s an ill drought that brings no good, reflect some commentators, thinking of the rise in grain prices, the use of that burdensome wheat surplus for feed instead of corn, the encouragement given to bullish activities in grain and other markets, the lesson given by nature on the subject of crop reduction, and the focusing of nation-wide attention on the farmers’ problems thought likely to eventuate in a more intelligent future handling of agricultural relief.

But no such wide-spread catastrophe can be “a blessing in disguise, ” insists the Secretary of Agriculture, and many an editor agrees with him as he reckons up the loss to the farmers living in the great central region most seriously affected by drought.  They point out that the individual farmer’s crop loss is not made up for by higher prices received by other farmers. They point to losses not only in crops like corn and hay, but in pasturage and in cattle rushed to market to be sold at almost any price because of the lack of feed. And naturally there is a large section in which buying power is seriously affected.

This two-faced role of the actor that has been occupying the center of the national stage these recent weeks seems to puzzle equally two sets of experts—the editors of farm papers, and the Wall Street commentators.

Thus, the opinions of farm editors gathered by the Boston Christian Science Monitor show a surprizing diversity. The editor of Wallaces’ Farmer (Des Moines), for instance, is inclined to think that the drought has been a blessing; the Little Rock Arkansas Farmer sees “benefit generally in the long pull”; the editor of the Detroit Michigan Farmer thinks there will be probable gains for agriculture, “indirectly”; the St. Paul Farmer thinks “agriculture as a whole may benefit”; “Drought May Be a Blessing” runs a Prairie Farmer (Chicago) head-line.

On the other hand, the editor of The Ohio Farmer (Cleveland) does not see “how any condition which leaves farmers in the poorer sections without an appreciable income, can be regarded as beneficial”; the situation, according to an editor of The Missouri Ruralist (St. Louis), “is not one to make either farmers or city people dance with joy”; the effect will be bad “despite rising prices,” insists The Kansas Farmer (Topeka); and The Progressive Farmer (Dallas) has no patience with the “blessing-in-disguise” idea—”it is just as logical to say the boll-weevil or shiftless farming is a blessing.”

“Drought News Confusing to Wall Street” runs a characteristic head-line on the New York Herald Tribune’s financial page. A New York Evening Post financial writer calls attention to the way the stock market showed first a bullish reaction to the upturn in grain prices, then a selling movement caused by pessimism over the farmers’ buying power, and then a change toward more optimistic sentiment with the thought that “smaller crops will be offset by higher prices” and that “an outlet will be afforded for the troublesome wheat surplus.”

Read more on the 1930 Drought here…