they combined. They are equally powerless to command a majority at the polls. There are only two forces, that is unless a third force should join with them the force of what we vaguely know as the middle class. In its lethargic and justly despised past it has been conservative voting, joining with capital and the old-school Federationist to maintain the established order. But it is no longer lethargic, nor safely to be despised. It is rapidly becoming class conscious - which is to say that, as between the radicals and the conservatives, it easily holds the balance of power. Potentially it is the greatest fighting force in the nation.

On which side will the middle class ultimately array itself? There are two divergent tendencies. Already the new poor are honeycombed with socialism and they are beginning to be organized on a trade union basis. Strong bodies of school teachers, musicians, actors are affiliated with the unions of manual laborers, and subject to the authority of the Federation leaders. Among college professors and ministers, the radical tendency is stronger than many of us realize a radicalism that is blind to its own class interest. The Interchurch World report on the steel strike, though made by a committee including three Bishops, is a demonstrably partisan document, arraigning the Company for conditions which, though damaging enough, are only in part of its own making, and sophisticating or positively misrepresenting the radical aims of the strike leaders. Though these clergymen were engaged in a "drive" to relieve their own bitter poverty, they wrecked it by stepping aside for a partisan crusade in behalf of the old poor-most of whom have long received wages higher than the salaries of all but the most highly paid ministers.

The contrary tendency is that of the men who broke the coal strike in Kansas, the outlaw railway strike in the East. And with these we may ultimately find reason to include a quasi-middle-class element, also economically put upon by labor, the farmers. Instinctively these men realize that their own good, and the good of the nation, requires that they shall resist the threatened dominance of the radical. Decidedly, they are not of a mind to go down into the slums with Carleton in order to reclaim their own. They demand that life shall be made possible in the sphere to which they were born; they demand that it shall afford to them, to their children and to their children's children,

wholesome food and clothing, an inspiring social life and an education enabling them, when they are fit, to live onward and upward as their forefathers did. Are they not right? Is it not true that only thus can the character and brain force of the American people be continued? Instead of lavishing our resources upon the old poor, in the name of democratic equality, is it not wiser to grant a practical inequality and open up the opportunities of American life to those best able to give the nation an adequate return?

Is it a fact, either practically or theoretically, that all men are created equal? Ever since 1776 the question has been raised. John Fiske declared that no sound mentality was ever perplexed by it. But that was before we had extended its application from the loquacious forum of politics to the armed camp of industry, before the old immigration from the north of Europe had given way to the new immigration from the east and south. As applied to industry. the logical culmination of the doctrine of equality is, and can only be, Guild Socialism. All workmen would have an equal right to elect their foremen - and all others in authority up to those who control capital and invent new processes. Our incomparably efficient and productive corporations would be ruled, as our municipalities and our States and our national government are ruled, not by experts, free-handed and self-made, but by a party system and partisan leaders who hold their own intelligence and patriotic fervor firmly in leash while they prostrate their long and pliant ears to the ground. If our basic industries were as crudely conducted as our political state-think of it! That is the menace of Guild Socialism, and under the doctrine of industrial equality there is no other possible eventuality unless, indeed, Guild Socialism should develop over night, as in Russia, into the most hideous of all tyrannies. Is it not time that we searched a little more diligently for whatever truth there may be and falsehood-in the phrase of Jefferson?

In the century and a half since he declared a universal equality as the principle for which our forefathers were in rebellion, we have produced many men of the stamp of our first "philosopher statesman," but only one man who has rivaled Jefferson in scope and influence. The entire solution of our problem is contained, as the oak in the acorn, in a single sentence of Woodrow Wilson. In his campaign.

of 1912, speaking of the problem of Chinese and Japanese immigration, he declared that he stood for the policy of exclusion. His reason was the familiar and conclusive reason, that the Oriental laborer can always, as Lafcadio Hearn expressed it, "underlive" the American, and so either fatally lower his economic and social standards or deprive him eventually of his birthright. "The success of free democratic institutions demands of our people education, intelligence and patriotism; and the State should protect them against unjust and impossible competition. Democracy rests upon the equality of the citizen."

The saying is stupendously, though perhaps unconsciously, significant. In order that men shall be economically and politically equal, they must be equal in fact. Those who are not equal in fact must be excluded from the country. Democracy rests upon the equality of the citizen! All men are created equal, in short, excepting only when they happen to be unequal. Following out the logic of the phrase, might we not discriminate against "unequal" men of any race or color, even excluding them from the franchise? Does the South need any other warrant for its treatment of the negro? In brief, we have another of those gigantically self-revealing phrases - which reveal a self so different from the one intended. A bright, new, shiny idea has been caught for a moment in the filmy mesh of a phrase - but escapes before it can be woven into the durable fabric of thought. John Fiske had a sense of humor; surely his ghost must be laughing at himself and at one other.

Let us not be rudely hilarious. Every true American knows in his heart that there is a deep thought, a high aspiration, in our racial doctrine of equality. None the less, when it comes to a concrete predicament, whether of Chinese cheap labor or of social revolution, every true American, whatever the chaos of his thinking, feels as Woodrow Wilson felt. We cannot permit the ignorant alien, whose ways are not our ways and whose God is not our God, to underlive us and outvote us. Somewhere and somehow there is a principle above equality. Until we find out what it is, and how it is to be reconciled with the spirit of our republic, we shall have no defense of reason against those who with "Carleton" laud the abasement of true-born Americans in behalf of the old poor.

JOHN CORBIN.

NEWSPAPER ENGLISH

BY TALCOTT WILLIAMS

BERGDOLL " got what was coming to him," said the Philadelphia Public Ledger in an editorial and straightway apologized for the phrase. Unnecessary! The phrase was good English, good newspaper English. John Dewey is a philosopher foremost in our day. Few living, I think none, have more affected teaching for the better. The world of thought is his debtor; not the world of action. In his last article he says of the war:-" Most of the talk about justice and self-determination was bunk." He would not and should not apologize over the last word; though the future may challenge his utterance. A prophet is not without wisdom, save in his own time.

Over the use of "bunk" in an editorial many a good leader-writer would have a creepy distrust. We shun crisp diction, fresh from the people. So all speech began. When a tongue ceases to spawn new words, fresh phrases, novel images, thought and progress stop also. Keats added over one hundred and fifty new words to the vocabulary of verse. In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel "Lewis Carroll" (Charles L. Dodgson) added at least two-score. These are of imagination all compact. New thought; new words. The closer to daily life and speech is the writer's pen or the click of the type-writer keys, the more active, the more efficient, the more effective is the utterance of the writer and the life of the people. So long as accepted and acceptable writing accepts and shares the daily changes of the vocabulary of the market-place; so long as both live and move and have their being in the sun of passion, action and achievement, the more lasting, pungent and penetrating is the literature of the period.

The reverse has been but too often tried. We know through human experience long and wide what comes to

land and people when the writer's pen separates from the speech of the soil and of the current day. These fossils of literature are built into the dead annals of the history of many lands and letters also. They exist at the present time in the mummied tongues of today.

Invasion or isolation, new contacts with foreign trade. or internal development bring into being at some spot a new language. Shock or struggle within or without, the inspiration of a new faith or a new civilization straightway add one more to the world's literature. Happy he who writes in a tongue untouched, with diction unused and words unsullied, with the bloom and sharp edge of fresh-minted coin. Out of these conditions came Mohammed's Koran fount and foundation of a new faith and a new literature in a new tongue, in which before, no one had said anything save seven short poems, as long as Lycidas or Venus and Adonis. The best of the Koran matches any creative work in the same field, the field of Job, Hebrew prophecy and Psalms at their best. This one book, two-thirds as large as the New Testament, created a new religion, a new code, a new philosophy of thought and action, a new empire, new history, unto this present hour.

"God gave the book to those who love Him," said Mohammed. So of all great letters and so of the newspaper daily, dear in making and reading to those who desire morning and evening to know the day's divine event, newly made. But all the varied mélange of the Koran, lofty verse, philosophy, legislation, folk-lore, tales of the market, legends, Rabbinical and Christian, half understood, these for all the centuries to come were made the sole, sufficient and final guide in Arabic on words, meanings, phrasing, sentencing, locutions, paradigms, syntax and rhetoric. All writers, save the happy "large few stars" that create a new literature, are oppressed with authority as to words, sentences, subjects and method. We are always looking back instead of forward to see how the man who is dead did it. Writers carry through life the uneasy consciousness that somewhere, somewhen, somehow, there is a formula. Authority and precedent have their value to society. Even there, they do harm. To the writer, they are fatal. A school of journalism swarms with young men and women who expect to be shown how to write. It is the business of the school to fill them with knowledge, to