ton, pastor of the Bluffton Baptist Church, near here, asked each farmer in his church to stake off one acre and give the proceeds to the church. Seven pledged themselves to do this and signed the following agreement: "We the undersigned farmer members of the Bluffton Baptist Church, do agree to stake off, plant, cultivate, and harvest one acre of our respective farms. The prod uct of said acre, when in marketable condition, is to be turned over to a committee appointed by the church to receive and sell, and the proceeds of said acre to be used in the work of the Lord." Through the acres devoted to the Lord, the church expects to raise money enough to pay its pastor's salary. ILLINOIS MAKING the bride an honest woman in Chicago, as described by the local newspapers: The Chicago meat packing industry and the University of Chicago, long rival attractions shown to visitors as examples of the city's industrial and cultural activity, are to be united. Meat packing is to take its place in the curriculum of the university, along with Latin, economics, psychology, and the rest. IOWA COLLAPSE of the work of the Sulgrave Foundation in Iowa, as reported from Sioux City: When Lady Eleanor Smith, daughter of Lord KANSAS LATEST triumph of the Higher Patriotism in Kansas, as reported by E. W. Howe in his interesting Monthly: The attorney general of Kansas has ruled that if a child in school refuses to repeat the flag pledge, its parents may be arrested and fined. A good many children are tired of repeating the flag pledge every day, which is as follows: "I pledge allegiance to my flag and to the republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." . . . The pledge was invented, and forced on the children, by an old maid engaged in welfare work. MARYLAND NEW Zoological classification from the estimable Baltimore Evening Sun: Two men were sentenced to jail for 30 days and MISSOURI CALLING Out the Landsturm against the A world's record for Bible class attendance was NEW YORK FROM an interview with the Hon. John S. The stage last season was the cleanest in years "It has touched a lower level than ever be- He said the statement had been made to him that the moral character of the scene shifters was being imperiled in one or two shows. OHIO PHILOSOPHICAL conclusions of the massed 1. Everyone should strive to give to the world a 2. No personality will be marked with any 3. New ideas in human endeavor are scarce. PENNSYLVANIA FROM a list of "Educational Books For The Art of Making Love (2 vols.), $1.00. How to Develop a Strong and Healthy Mind, How to Make Shoes Waterproof, $.25. 1000 Ways of Getting Rich, $.50. SOUTH CAROLINA FROM a call for 33,373 volunteers to teach the 33,373 white adult illiterates of the State how to write their names: Just a few days ago a man said in our presence We wonder whether any other argument is Additional inducement: A revised copy of Aesop's Fables will be given TEXAS SPECIMEN of literary criticism by Prof. Dr. Leonard Doughty, a favorite pedagogue of the republic of Texas, where the great open spaces breed a race of men with hair on their chests and red blood in their veins: It might have been thought of the Teuton that below all other depths for them. The actual, original "scientific" writings of Krafft-Ebing are less vile and pervert than the current "literature" of the Germans today. The stain of that yellow, bastard blood is upon much of the "authorship" of the United States. It is only a matter of procuring a grade-school "education" under our free system and Americanizing an ungainly name. Except for these, the modern "authorship" that makes the "books" upon our stalls is of those dread middle races, Aryan, indeed, but interminable mixed and simmered in the devil's cauldron of middle Europe, and spewed out of Italy and France, and off the dismal Slavic frontiers, and out of that dismal and cankered East, that like a horde of chancreladen rats are brought to swarm down the gang-planks of a thousand ships upon our shores. It is the spawn of the abysmal fecundity of this seething mass, which now, with the mental and moral deficiency of a thousand generations of defective parentage and low breeding behind and within them, emits these "volumes", as the insane emit shrieks or as a putrid corpse emits odor. After some inquiry I have learned to a confident surety that no one of the "writers" of all this unhappy array was in the service of the United States in the great war. VIRGINIA EXAMPLES of neo-Confederate English from examination papers submitted by Virginia schoolmarms attending the Summer School at the University of Virginia: He run down the street, but it was too late to I like James Witcomb Rily, because he is not The flames shot into the sky a few foot above the house.. WASHINGTON HURRYING on the Kingdom in the Chinook State, as reported by the Editor and Publisher: Newspaper advertising was the best investmade in 1923 by the Garden Street Methodist Episcopal Church, Bellingham, Wash., according to the pastor, the Rev. Dr. J. C. Harrison, who added that $100 worth of advertising had brought in more than $1,700 in silver plate collections. AESTHETE: MODEL 1924 BY ERNEST BOYD H BIS a child of this Twentieth Century, for the Yellow Nineties had flickered out in the delirium of the Spanish-American War when his first gurgles rejoiced the ears of his expectant parents. If Musset were more than a name to him, a hazy recollection of French literature courses, he might adapt a line from the author of "La Confession d'un Enfant du Siècle" and declare: I came too soon into a world too old. But no such doubts trouble his spirit, for he believes that this century is his because he was born with it. He does not care who makes its laws, so long as he makes its literature. To this important task he has consecrated at least three whole years of his conscious-or rather self-conscious-existence, and nothing, as yet, has happened to shake his faith in his star. In fact, he finds the business rather easier than he had anticipated when, in the twilight sleep of the class-room, vague reports reached him of Milton's infinitesimal fee for "Paradise Lost", of Chatterton's death, of the harassed lives of Shelley and Keats, of the eternal struggle of the artist against the indifference of his age and the foul bludgeonings of fate. The Aesthete's lot has been a happier one. His thirtieth birthday is still on the horizon, his literary baggage is small, or non-existent-but he is already famous; at least, so it seems to him when he gazes upon his own reflection in the eyes of his friends, and fingers aggressively the luxurious pages of the magazine of which he is Editor-in-Chief, Editor, Managing Editor, Associate Editor, Contributing Editor, Bibliographical Editor, or Source Material Editor. His relationship to the press must al ways be editorial, and to meet the changed conditions of the cosmos, a changed conception of the functions of an editor provides him with a vast selection of titles from which to choose. The essential fact is that he has an accredited mouthpiece, a letter-head conferring authority, a secure place from which to bestride the narrow world in which he is already a colossus. Thus he is saved from those sordid encounters with the harsh facts of literary commerce which his predecessors accepted as part of the discipline of life: Meredith reading manuscripts for Chapman & Hall, Gissing toiling in New Grub Street, Anatole France writing prefaces for Lemerre's classics, Dreiser polishing dime novels for Street & Smith. It is natural that he should thus be overpowered by a mere sense of his own identity, for there is nothing, alas, in his actual achievements, past or present, to warrant his speaking prematurely with the voice of authority. That he does so unchallenged is a proof to him that he himself is his own excuse for being. In a very special sense he accepts the Cartesian formula: I think, therefore I am. When he went to Harvard —or was it Princeton or Yale?—in the early years of the Woodrovian epoch, he was just one of so many mute and inglorious Babbitts preparing to qualify as regular fellows. If some brachycephalic shadow lay across the Nordic blondness of his social pretensions, then, of course, the pilgrimage assumed something of the character of a great adventure into the Promised Land, the penetration to an Anglo-Saxon Lhasa. His immediate concern, in any case, was to resemble as closely as possible every man about him, to acquire at once the marks of what is known as the education of a gentleman, to wit, complete and absolute conformity to conventions, the suppression of even the faintest stirrings of eccentric personality. To this day he feels a little embarrassed when he calls on his father in Wall Street, carrying a walking-stick and wearing a light tweed suit, but he trusts that even the door-opener's scorn will be softened by the knowledge that here is an artist, whose personality must be untrammeled. Those who knew the Aesthete during the period of his initiation will recall how he walked along the banks of his Yankee Isis, or lolled behind the bushes, discussing Life; how he stood at the Leif Ericson monument and became aware of the passage of time;-Ebeu fugaces, labunter anni, he now would say, especially if he were writing a notice of the Music Box Review; how he went to the cemetery to contemplate the graves of William and Henry James, and noted in himself the incipient thrill of Harvard pride and acquired New Englandism. But these gentle pursuits did not mean so much to him at first as the more redblooded diversions of week-ends in Boston, and such other fleshly sins as that decayed city might with impunity offer. More refined were the evening parties on the northern side of the town where, in a background of red plush curtains and chairs but recently robbed of their prudish antimacassars, whispers of romantic love might be heard from well-behaved young women, whose highest destiny, before lapsing legally into the arms of a professor, was to be remembered when, at a later stage, a sonnet evolved from a brain beginning to teem creatively. For the rest, football games and lectures, the former seriously, the latter intermittently, maintained in him the consciousness of the true purpose of a university education. From the excellent Professors Copeland and Kittredge he distractedly and reluctantly acquired a knowledge of the elements of English composition and of the more virtuous facts of English literature. He read, that is to say, fragments of the classical authors and dutifully absorbed the opinions of academic commentators upon them. American literature was revealed to him as a pale and obedient provincial cousin, whose past contained occasional indiscretions, such as Poe and Whitman, about whom the less said the better. Latin and French were filtered through the same kind of sieve, but without so many precautions, for in neither case was it possible for the aspirant after knowledge to decipher easily the kind of author to whom the urge of adolescence would naturally drive him. The Loeb classics left the un-Christian passages in the original, while the estimable Bohn unkindly took refuge in Italian, the language of a "lust-ridden country", as Anthony Comstock points out in that charming book of his, "Traps for the Young". However, he still possesses enough Latin to be able to introduce into his written discourse appropriate tags from the Dictionary of Classical Quotations, though his quantities, I regret to say, are very weak. I have heard him stress the wrong syllable when speaking of Ouspensky's "Tertium Organum", although he will emend a corrupt passage in Petronius, and professes to have read all the obscurer authors in Gourmont's "Latin Mystique." There came finally a subtle change in his outlook, from which one must date the actual birth of the Aesthete as such-der Aesthetiker an sich, so to speak. I suspect it was after one of those parties in the red plush drawing-rooms, when he returned to his rooms with what seemed like the authentic beginnings of a sonnet in his ears. From that moment he had a decided list in the direction of what he called "creative work". While the stadium shook with the hoarse shouts of the rabble at football games he might be observed going off with a companion to indulge in the subtle delights of intellectual conversation. His new friends were those whom he had at first dismissed as negligible owing to their avowed intention of not being he-men. The pulsation of new life within him prompted him to turn a more sympathetic eye upon this hitherto despised set, and they, in their turn, welcomed a new recruit, for the herd instinct is powerful even amongst the intellectual. Under this new guidance he came into contact with ideas undreamt of in the simple philosophy of the class-room. Strange names were bandied about, curious magazines, unwelcomed by the college library, were read, and he was only too glad to discover that all the literary past of which he was ignorant or strangely misinformed counted as nothing in the eyes of his newly emancipated friends. From the pages of the Masses he gathered that the Social Revolution was imminent, that Brieux was a dramatist of ideas; in the Little Review he was first to learn the enchantment of distance as he sat bemused by its specimens of French and pseudo-French literature. Thus the ballast of which he had to get rid in order to float in the rarefied atmosphere of Advanced Thought was negligible. He had merely to exchange one set of inaccurate ideas for another. II It was at this precise moment in his career that the Wilsonian storming of Valhalla began. With the call to arms tingling in his blood, the Aesthete laid aside the adornments of life for the stern realities of a military training camp. Ancestral voices murmured in his ears, transmitted by instruments of dubious dolichocephalism, it is true, but perhaps all the more effective on that account, for Deep calls.unto Deep. I will not dwell upon the raptures of that martial period, for he himself has left us his retrospective and disillusioned record of it, which makes it impossible to recapture the original emotion. Harold Cabot Lilienthal-and, I suppose I should add, in deference to my subject, hoc genus omne-was apparently not capable of the strain of ingesting the official facts about the great moral crusade. It was government contract material and proved to be as shoddy and unreliable as anything supplied by the dollar-a-year men to the War Department. By the time the uniformed Aesthete got to France he was a prey to grave misgivings, and as his subsequent prose and verse show, he was one of C. E. Montague's Disenchanted-he who had been a Fiery Particle. He bitterly regretted the collegiate patriotism responsible for his devotion to the lofty rhetoric of the New Republic. By luck or cunning, however, he succeeded in getting out of the actual trenches, and there, in the hectic backwash of war, he cultivated the tender seeds just beginning to germinate. He edited his first paper, the Doughboys' Dreadnought, or under the auspices of the propaganda and vaudeville department made his first contribution to literature, "Young America and Yougo-Slavia". Simultaneously with this plunge into arms and letters, he made his first venture into the refinements of sex, thereby extending his French vocabulary and gaining that deep insight into the intimate life of France which is still his proudest possession. When militarism was finally overthrown, democracy made safe, and a permanent peace established by the victorious and united Allies, he was ready to stay on a little longer in Paris, and to participate in the joys of La Rotonde and Les Deux Magots. There for a brief spell he breathed the same air as the Dadaists, met Picasso and Philippe Soupault, and allowed Ezra Pound to convince him that the French nation was aware of the existence of Jean Cocteau, Paul Morand, Jean Giraudoux and Louis Aragon. From those who had nothing to say.on the subject when Marcel Proust published "Du Côté de chez Swann'' in 1914 he now learned what a great author the man was, and formed those friendships which caused him eventually to join in a tribute to Proust by a group of English admirers who would have stoned Oscar Wilde had they been old enough to do so when it was the right thing to do. The time was now ripe for his repatriation, and so, with the same critical equipment in French as in English, but with a |