The Contributors' Column

K. K. Kawakami (‘America Teaches, Japan Learns’) came to America in 1901 and has spent most of his time in Washington as editorial correspondent for leading Japanese newspapers. He is the author of numerous books upon Far Eastern problems, the most recent being Japan Speaks on the SinoJapanese Crisis, which was held to be so authoritative an interpretation of official views that the Japanese Prime Minister, Tsuyoshi Inukai, contributed the introduction to it. ▵ The author of ' Caught in the Trough ’ gives a full account of her life in the article itself. Francis Vivian Drake (‘Pegasus Express’) served in the Royal Flying Corps during the war. Surviving several bad crashes, he was thus prepared, no doubt, for the life in Wall Street which he now leads. His first Atlantic article was ‘The Flying Banker,’ published in March of last year. ▵ A friend of Josephine Johnson (‘ August Evening’ ) writes of her: ‘She is not quite twenty-three, and is, I think, the most beautiful girl I have ever seen. She lives on a Missouri farm with her family, who have had the sense not to push her through college. She goes to Washington University, where she attends classes in the Art School and studies whatever she feels might be useful to her. She is terrifically shy about her work, and very earnest.’ ▵ After graduating from Harvard, Philip E. Wentworth (‘What College Did to My Religion’) entered educational work, which, he says, is ‘the proper field for a young man with leanings toward the ministry whose misfortune it is to have been born too late to satisfy both his aspirations and his conscience.’ ▵ Like Humbert Wolfe and Richard Church, Freda C. Bond (‘Inland Voyage’) is a poet whose wings have not been clipped by the routine of daily work in the dusty offices of the British Ministry of Labor. Rollin Lynde Hartt (‘The Matter with New York’) began life as a Congregational clergyman, but has devoted the last thirty years to journalism and the writing of books. Curtis Billings (‘Accidents Don’t Happen’) is a member of the staff of the Public Safety Division of the National Safety Council. ▵ ‘Our Rim-Rock School’ is an episode from Robert Mack’s experience as a cattle rancher in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

Well known as a writer on economic and social problems, Stuart Chase (‘The Preaching and Practice of Mr. Broadback’) was one of the earliest exponents of economic planning as a method of flattening out the extreme highs and lows of the business cycle. A The advice of Sir W. Beach Thomas (‘On Understanding Children’) does not come, be it said, from that great authority upon such matters — the proverbial bachelor; Sir William can only speak with the diffidence of a man who has three sons and a daughter of his own. Douglas Malloch (‘Waking of a City’) has published several volumes of prose and verse. Nora Waln (’The War That Is Not War’) has lived in China for many years. In March she paid a flying visit to America, on her way to a brief sojourn in England. ▵ Widely known as an author and dramatic Critic, Walter Prichard Eaton (‘Sweets for Squirrels’) makes his home in the Berkshires. Louis Reed (‘God Helps the Poor Man’) practises law in a small town nestling among the mountains of West Virginia. B. H. Kizer (‘In Defense of the Sagebrush States’) is another lawyer; his home is Spokane, Washington. ▵ Graduating from Yale in 1920, Walter Millis (‘Prepare, Prepare, Prepare!’) has devoted the intervening years to newspaper work in Baltimore, London, and New York. He is the author of The Martial Spirit, a study of the Spanish-American War, published last year.

How safe is flying?

Dear Atlantic, —
In preparing my article, ‘Pegasus Express’ [published in this issue], I dug up some interesting figures bearing upon the safety of flying. They indicate, as one would expect, that there is a world of difference between flying on a scheduled transport line and flying with Tom, Dick, and Harry, even if they are licensed pilots. The government statistics for the second half of 1930, the last available at the time of writing, speak for themselves: —

Miles flown per passenger fatality

Transport lines . , . 10,021,238 Miscellaneous flying. . 543,284

All accidents have to be reported to the government for Federal inquiry. For the same period we find: —

Fatal accidents

Transport lines. 3

Miscellaneous flying . . . 160

This is not to say that you will have anything but a perfectly safe flight if you drive; out to your airport on a Sunday afternoon and take a joy ride. There may be no risk. You may happen upon a first-class ship, a crack pilot — the equal of any veteran in the Transport service. But, on the other hand, the risk may be deadly. The point is, the ordinary passenger has no way of knowing.
From the figures quoted I draw two main conclusions: —
First, that no one is justified in flying other than on a scheduled Transport Service over a regular airway, or in an airplane operated by a reputable company assuming full responsibility for the flight, unless he is prepared to take or to ignore the risk involved.
Second, that with all the technical aids now available, and flying over a regular airway, no company can excuse a serious crash; for such a crash can seldom, if ever, be truthfully attributed to an Act of God, but must be considered as the result of inefficiency or lack of foresight. Facilities have been devised which ensure safety, and the public has a right to demand their use.
FRANCIS VIVIAN DRAKE New York City

Sympathy from a Catholic mother.

The author of ‘The Road to Rome —and Back’ received the following letter, which touched her so deeply that she forwarded it to us, suggesting that we print it and thank the writer in her behalf.

Dear Traveler on the Roman Road, —
Your article in the Atlantic made quite an appeal to me, because I feel that you have been discouraged by an individual, — more than one, perhaps, — but thereby have become blinded to the magnitude of the Great Mercy.
To be sure, the law of the Church regarding birth control is inexorable, but in your case, where you had already experienced the pangs of motherhood eight times, you deserved sympathy and consideration, which you could not receive from a young, possibly ignorant, priest, such as you evidently had the misfortune to encounter. I consider your operation absolutely necessary, and feel that you had already contributed your share to the world and the Church. Your desire to live and bring up those entrusted to your charge was a very human and reasonable one.
There are those among the clergy, I am fully aware, so letter-bound that they are incapable of differentiating and suiting their judgment to the occasion. For these I have only pity; they are too pathetic for contempt.
I am only hoping that you may again find comfort and solace in the little chapel of the nuns where you first found it, and thereby once more travel on the road to Rome. May you have the health to enjoy your babies, forgetting the suffering they have caused in the joy over the fulfilllillment of your desires in their regard! I should so like to hear that you are again turning your head on the return journey. Your disturbance will be but a temporary one, I am sure, for I believe that you have real faith.
Very sympathetically yours,
A CATHOLIC MOTHER Washington, D. C.

Dear Atlantic, —
the author of ‘The Road to Rome — and Back’ seemed unaware of the comforting fact that , whatever may be the dictum of priest or pontiff, accommodations may be and are made with Heaven: witness the French.
R. H. JOHNSON Montrose, California

A priest reviews the ease.

Dear Atlantic, —
‘The Road to Rome — and Back’ demands notice. It is interesting, beautifully written, and singularly free from bitterness.
The writer’s first grievance is the failure of her Catholic employer to break his engagement to another and marry her. In this, she blames his religion, and especially his confessor. Apart from religion, that employer was bound to keep his promise or obtain a release. No doubt the release would have been granted had he told the young woman, as he should have told her, that he did not love her. Any confessor would have given that advice. The religion of the writer was not the cause of her employer’s perfidy.
The pastor who advised her to refuse to marry the atheist used good sense as well as good theology. Experience shows that al least 75 per cent of mixed marriages are failures. Then the Catholic wife would have been likely to lose her faith, and her children, if she had any, would have been atheists or agnostics.

The pastor made an error of judgment in advising her to marry the Catholic man. But that man seemed to have character, affection, and devotion. It would have been wrong to tell her to marry, even had she loved him. But priests are not infallible.
She says her husband was considerate and kind. This does not appear in the story. A ‘considerate’ husband would not ask his wife to bear eight children in as many years. No husband may be unreasonable with his wife.
The demand of her parish priest for a certain sum to enable him to build a school was unreasonable. She took the right attitude — to go to him with the facts. He could not force the family to give more than they could alford. If pride kept her husband silent and induced him to run into debt to pay a parish assessment, he was a fool.
Finally, she does not tell the nature of the operation she had to undergo. She does say that her physician told her it had to be done to save her life. If the operation was necessary to save her life, sound theology teaches that it was not only permissible but advisable, unless it involved the direct destruction of another life. The confessor who forbade it made a sad mistake. It may have been due to misinformation or ignorance. In any event, he was wrong. The pity of it is that the lady did not consult another or appeal to the pastor who had been so good to her.
From what she writes, no good reason appears for leaving the Church. The tone of her article is so fine that it has inspired this letter.
(RT. REV.) JOHN L. BELFORD Nativity Rectory
Brooklyn, New York

I,too, once liked tuberculosis.

Dear Atlantic, —
The article by Ruth Reed in your April number interested me, for I, too, have known those first frantic moments when one vainly clutches at the rapidly disintegrating fabric of one’s life. I, too, have experienced the transition from despair to a dull acquiescence, to a faint interest in the lives about me, and finally to the bewilderment of realizing that I actually was enjoying tuberculosis.
After my cure I felt a great need to understand tins. Partly through this need within myself, partly through the circumstance of my coming in contact with the investigation being carried on in the laboratory of the Lifwynn Foundation, I have been led to feel that in this very enjoyment of tuberculosis, which is a common matter for observation, lies the deepest secret of the disease.
In the months before my own breakdown, I was aware of a tension within myself so intolerable that the peace of death seemed beautiful to me. Yet, objectively, my life was no more difficult or unsatisfying than the average. I believe that this is the subjective experience of the majority of tubercular patients. It is with us a slow courting of sweet death, that lovely, beckoning phantasy of distressed minds, and the inner citadel has capitulated before the outworks are attacked. It would seem as if the problem presented had to do with a much more complicated and subtle subjective situation than the mere physical encroachment of a foreign organism on living tissues. Koch approached this physical aspect through the laboratory. The cure of the disease has been shown to be a social one. Would not a similar laboratory approach to its subjective aspect yield as significant developments?
ARFREDA P. SILL New York City

Credit where credit is due.

Through an oversight last month, no mention was made in these columns of the sources from which were derived the significant figures of the Federal Government’s balance sheets for 1832 and 1931, which were compared under the heading, ‘What a Hundred Years Have Done to Us.’ The figures for 1832 were first called to our attention by Mr. Martin Beckhard of New York City, who copied them from Harriet Martineau’s Society in America. (London, 1837, Saunders and Otley, Vol. III, p. 321). This statement was submitted to the Treasury Department in Washington, which checked it over and corrected certain errors, and also sent us the figures for 1931. We wish to thank both Mr. Beckhard and the Treasury Department for their courtesy and helpfulness.

THE EDITORS

Mr. Knollenberg has the last word.

Dear Atlantic, —
I have your letter of March 15, 1932, enclosing Mr. B. H. Kizer’s paper, ‘In Defense of the Sagebrush States,’ which is intended as an answer to my article in the March Atlantic. Mr. Kizer writes delightfully, and, in addition, has raised some interesting questions. His points are, I take it, as follows:—
1. There is no such disproportion between the Federal appropriations for roads in the West and in the East as is indicated in my article.
2. It is in the national interest to have a network of good roads throughout the country, and it is therefore good business for the East as well as for the West to secure the construction of first-rate roads in the West..
3. My figures as to the amount of income tax paid by the Eastern, as compared with the Western, states are misleading in that the figures include the income tax paid by corporations which happen to have their head office and pay tax in New York, but the slock of which is distributed throughout the country.
4. The average population of the ‘sagebrush states’ considerably exceeds the average population of the five Eastern states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, and Delaware, so that these Eastern states have an even greater over-representation in the Senate than the sagebrush states.
5. There is no reason to believe that the thinly populated Western states will get together with the other states having a relatively small population to defeat legislation proposed by the larger states, such as New York and Pennsylvania, or to enact legislation opposed hy these states.
6. Even if the Western states are now behind the Eastern states in population, in a few more decades their population will have grown so much faster than that of the Eastern slates that the epithet ‘rotten boroughs’ will no longer be applicable to them.
7. Even if the sparsely populated states should unite against the larger states in matters of legislation, the Senate could not accomplish much without the concurrence of the House or the President.
8. The smaller states need the protection given them by the two-Senators-per-state provision of the Constitution to protect them against the unconscious arrogance of the big states, as reflected in the article by me — a resident of one of these big states.
My answers to these various points of Mr. Kizer are as follows: —
1. Mr. Kizer states that a comparison of Vermont and Idaho indicates that the West, far from getting an undue proportion of the Federal road subsidy, gets less than its share. He declares that in 1929 Vermont, with a population of 360,000, received Federal highway aid of $2,041,000, while Idaho, with a population of 450,000, received Federal highway aid of $478,000. Upon receipt of Mr. Kizer’s letter, I wrote to the Bureau of Public Roads of the United States Department of Agriculture concerning this point, and received the following reply:
‘The apportionment of Federal aid to Vermont was $365,625 for both fiscal years 1929 and 1930; to Idaho for fiscal year 1929 was $932,962, and for 1930, $933,902.’
I cannot imagine where Mr. Kizer obtained his figures. However, whatever the correct figures may be, Vermont falls in the same category as the sagebrush states in that that state, likewise, is greatly over-represented in the Senate and the economic interests and attitude of its people run counter to those of the under-represented masses in the large Eastern states.
2. Of course it would be of national benefit to have good roads throughout the country, but this does not disprove my assertion that, given a certain amount available for road expenditure, it would be for the greater good of the greater number to have the money spent in the East — say for a trunk road from Boston, via New Haven and New York, to Philadelphia — than in the development of the relatively little used highways of the West.
3.Mr. Kizer is in error in thinking that the disproportion between the Federal income taxes paid by the East and those paid by the sagebrush states would be reduced by excluding the figures of income taxes paid by corporations. If the individual income tax figures alone are taken, the disproportion (Mr. Kizer to the contrary notwithstanding) is even greater. The following comparison of the individual figures alone, as compared with the combined individual and corporation figures used in the illustration in my article, speaks for itself.

FISCAL YEAR ENDED JUNE 30, 1931

	Total Income Taxes, Including Corporations	Individual Income Taxes
12 Sagebrush States	$ 34,000,000	$ 11,000,000
Connecticut	35,000,000	18,000,000
New York	814,000,000	306,000,000

4. I have indicated above that, even though her flora and geographical position place her technically in a different category, Vermont is, to my mind, essentially a sagebrush state. The same applies, although in less degree, to Maine. As to New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Delaware, they are so predominantly industrial that, for the reasons pointed out in my article, the practical result of giving them two Senators each is probably not seriously unfair.
5. The evidence is indisputable that the Western agricultural states, in fact, frequently combine with the Southern agricultural states to advance legislation favorable to these states, collectively, at the expense of the heavily populated industrial states.
6. I pointed out in my article that not only are the Western states thinly populated at present, but their rate of increase in population has for a long period been less than the rale of increase in the Eastern states. Mr. Kizer fails to point out any reason, and I perceive none, why the relative rate of increase in the future should be materially different.
7. Money has to be voted, or the machinery of the government would soon stop. Money cannot be voted without the Senate. The Senate therefore holds the whip hand, and can, to a large extent, impose its will on House and President.
8. My observation indicates that most of us in the big states, far from being ‘arrogant,’ are painfully conscious of our helpless subjection to the Western and Southern rural minorities who control the Senate, and, through it, the federal government.
BERNHARD KNOLLENBERG New York City