Y

BERKMAN IN DENVER

BY GERTRUDE Nafe.

ES we have heard Berkman. And I despair of telling you what it was like. When it was over a few said, “A great lecture," but not many. Most of them said nothing at all about the lecture.* They said, "That is the greatest man we have known.' And there were others who said nothing, boys, some of them too young to give words to their feelings. But I wish I could translate the flame in their eyes. We had not been hearing a lecture, we had been meeting our own souls through one, great enough to interpret us to ourselves.

Quietly, so easily and simply and gently that you scarcely knew that it was happening we were taken up and forced to look upon this world as we have made it. And when we were through we thought of Shaw's saying, "For many of us death is the gate to hell, but the gate out of it, not into it."

And yet I do not know how he did it. There were so few terrible details, all were made quiet, simple, incidental, almost commonplace. Any of us would have been sure that we could have told those events with more effect. We could have made it much more lurid. But when he sat back, lighted his cigarette and asked questions, there were no questions. We had seen the kingdom of the devil and walked in it, and we had no wish to talk. Yes, more important, underneath it all was the lyrical triumph that is underneath all great artistic tragedy. "This too, the human soul may look upon and conquer."

And it all seemed so quiet! But to each it was so personal so intimate an experience. We were like children who confidently approach a fire which neither flames nor smokes and find a bed of anthracite coals. Now I believe in purgatory, for my soul has been taken through a fire that it could not endure, so that the past which could not endure should be burned away. We should not be the same people we were before he came. And from the depth of souls made stronger because he touched them, we love and honor Alexander Berkman.

* Crime and Punishment.

T

AN APPEAL FOR FINANCIAL HELP!

HE Ferrer School is facing a crisis, and appeals to its friends for immediate financial relief. At the present moment it is staggering under a load that is greater than it can bear. All of our friends know of the great improvements that have been made in connection with the School this winter. The teaching staff of the Day School has been increased from two to four; a number of visiting instructors are assisting in the work; lunch is being prepared and served at the School every day; our monthly bulletin has grown to the proportions of a magazine; the Art Class has been extended from two to four evenings a week; new classes have been added in voice culture, piano, singing and other subjects; a Free Theatre has been organized and considerably developed; a Summer School, on land owned by the Ferrer Association, is in prospect. But these innovations have enormously augmented our expenses during the present "hard times," and we are finding it impossible to meet our obligations. We need $1,000 to carry us through the winter, and we have devised several plans for raising at least part of this sum. But we need $250 to meet our immediate and pressing debts. We cannot continue without this $250. At a meeting of the Association, specially called to consider the critical financial situation of the School, it was decided to insert this appeal in the February-March issue of "The Modern School" and to ask every reader to send without fail one dollar by return post to the organizer of the Association. Such a contribution will not fall heavily on any individual. In its totality it will save the School. We call upon each one to do his duty. If you respond to this appeal as you ought to, the $250 will be raised within a week's time, and our immediate crisis will be tided over.

FRANCISCO FERRER ASSOCIATION,

63 E. 107th St., New York City,

JOSEPH J. COHEN, Secretary.

T

THE STATUS OF THE SANGER CASE

BY LEONARD D. ABBOTT

HE trial of William Sanger, arrested by Anthony Comstock on January 19th for the "crime" of having handed to a visitor a copy of a pamphlet by Mrs. Sanger on "Family Limitation," has been set for March 15th. A jury trial is being applied for. Gilbert E. Roe, it is expected, will handle the legal end of the

case.

Mr. Sanger's friends are busy at the present time raising the funds necessary to provide him with a proper defense. At least $500 will be necessary. If he is defeated in the lower courts, his case ought to be carried to the Court of Appeals. Contributions from all over the country are beginning to come in, and should be sent to Leonard D. Abbott, President of the Free Speech League, 241 East 201st Street, New York City. At the time of this writing about $80 is in hand.

This case may become a historic one. The time is ripe for fighting out the issue that Mr. Comstock has raised. If Americans, even of the conservative type, are ready to stand for Mr. Comstock's latest performance, we shall be disappointed. In England, forty years ago, efforts were made to imprison Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant for disseminating Neo-Malthusian pamphlets of the type of "Family Limitation." The charge was dismissed, the Lord Chief Justice declaring that so ill-advised and injudicious a charge had probably never before been made in a court of justice. A steady decline in the English birthrate began in 1877, the year following the trial.

The London Malthusian for January devotes generous space to an article entitled "Neo-Malthusianism in the United States." It notes the activities of Dr. W. J. Robinson, Margaret Sanger and others, and finds that there have been very decided signs of late that the people of the United States are getting restive under the diabolical Comstock law against dissemination of knowledge concerning contraceptive measures and under the Post Office censorship that Mr. Comstock exercizes. The Malthusian says: "It passes ordinary understanding how

a country which has proudly proclaimed itself 'the land of the free' should have meekly bowed its head for years under a law which imposed five years imprisonment and a fine of £1000 for the sending out of every individual description of contraceptive devices, and under a Post Office censorship which keeps a large staff of officials opening letters and instituting prosecutions."

On the cover of each issue of The Malthusian appears a printed form, to be filled in and signed, by means of which adults may obtain from the Malthusian League a free leaflet entitled "Hygienic Methods of Family Limitation." Each issue of The Malthusian also carries the legend: "The Malthusian League regrets that it is unable to comply with applications for this leaflet from the United States."

Some day America will throw Comstock overboard and catch up with the rest of the world. It is to be hoped that the Sanger trial will mark the beginning of the end of his power, and will initiate a movement to remove from the statute books the odious laws for which he and his associates are responsible.

POLISH JEWS' APPEAL TO THE CIVILIZED

WORLD

OME journals in this country, even those Social

inclined, maintain the romance of the

miraculous conversion of the Russian bureaucracy to humane ways-by virtue of the present holy war. It is sheer fiction. The foreign committee of the Union of Jewish Workmen of Lithuania, Poland, and Russia (the "Bund") have issued a heart-rending appeal which shows up the humbug of this pretended belief in the humanity of the Russian authorities. The appeal starts with a general reference to the reactionary rule in Russia, and especially to the measures for the suppression of autonomy in Finland, and then comes to the question of the Jews:

"We shall not say much about the general situation of the Jews. It has not changed. The most barbarous regulations remain in force, such as the prohibition against living outside certain quarters, the hampering of

careers, the restrictions in the matter of entry to the schools, and so forth. The administration continues the confiscation of Jewish property, night raids to track down Jews who have not the 'right of sojourn,' etc. These are the usual miseries of Jewish life in Russia.

"The point to which we wish to draw just now the attention of the civilized world is the fact that there are atrocities unprecedented even in the annals of Tsarism which are being committed against the Jews under the pretext of military necessity. In the region of the armies, the campaign which the government has undertaken against the Jews has every appearance of being dictated by a policy of extermination. The theatre of the war in Russia is especially Poland and some provinces of Lithuania included in the 'territory of residence' of the Jews. The Jewish population of these regions is completely ruined by the war, and to a large extent is literally starving. Thousands of Jews have been forced to fly before the invaders, and the devastation resulting from the invasion; but the government is taking precautions to prevent any Jew going beyond the limits of the Ghetto; and those who have been able to find asylum in the towns situated outside the Ghetto are arrested, punished for breaking the law, and sent back to their devastated homes. Often exemption from these measures is refused even to Jewish soldiers wounded on the field of battle, so soon as they leave the hospital. All attempts to obtain permission to live outside the Ghetto, in order to find the means of existence, have come to nothing. The reply is formal: there is no legal pretext for such permission.

"The people of Europe will be astounded at the information that, while France, England, and Switzerland are receiving with great solicitude Belgian and other refugees, the Russian government refuses to those of its own nation the right to move from place to place, and thus condemns them to utter wretchedness.

"That is not all. Under the protection of the military and civil authorities, the soldiers, demoralized by antiSemite propaganda, as well as the dregs of the Polish population, are organizing in Poland a series of pogroms. The Jews are assassinated, their property pillaged. Even