By Gabriel d'Annunzio You know there are athletics of the soul as well as of the body. We can keep keen and clean, vigorous and quick, sensitive and fire-pure in spirit, if we wish. Then man becomes a minor god. In the same way a group of men, or a whole nation, and even a whole age may keep in athletic temper. It then becomes a golden civilization, producing a great race. Or a civilization may become like one of our newly rich vulgarians. Because there is no soul, the lusts of the stomach and a vulgar flesh become the dominant appetites of the age.

Our civilization today has taken to material things as its main interest. Not a life of thrill and lofty adventure is our hunger but how to make a million dollars. The result is that men remain indifferent to the fact that there is no outlet for the artist in man, for the youth in him that wants life to be vigorous rather than merely comfortable.

By Dr. William McDougall The inherited talents, or "gifts," of all the individuals composing a nation are its most precious possession and the continued welfare and progress of any people depend upon the sum of these "gifts" being passed on undiminished from generation to generation. Now, not only do the most gifted persons fail to increase and multiply as the less gifted do; but also they do not produce children equal in number to themselves. Very roughly we may say that, while of the general mass of the population each 1,000 leaves about 1,500 children, of this most gifted part, the cream of the people, each 1,000 leaves only some 500 children to perpetuate its "gifts." It follows that the continuance of the present state of affairs must in the course of a few generations very seriously injure the American people.

Moreover, in this, as in all civilized countries, a considerable fraction of the population are feeble-minded, and

these persons are on the average much more prolific than any other class and they transmit their peculiar deficiencies to their offspring.

By Lincoln Steffens

Our ultimate ideal today is that of a leisure class. In our greatest centers of civilization we have essentially the same spectacle as in Rome in its decline. We see the same extremes of riches, luxury, extravagance on the one hand; and the same great masses of wretched poor on the other. We see among the rich the same vices, the same process of degeneration; and on the part of the poor, the same stretching out for a place in the sun.

In the middle west of the United States, you find communities still vital because their leaders are the men who have wrought and fought and more or less created. In the east you find the successes of yesterday, the men who have left to their children only the problem of realizing the ultimate ideal of the age-a life of idleness. And it is here that you find the good old American stock gone to seed; the stock of which Dr. McDougall speaks, that will not reproduce.

We must get the mothers of today and of tomorrow to say and think something new for their children. Today a mother dreams for her son, "I want him to become a millionaire." But if we are to be saved, mothers must dream, "I want my boy to build a railroad." Of to paint a great picture. Or to organize a great educational system. This does not call for an impossible change in the human animal. It only calls for a change of emphasis. Instead of aiming to build a railroad, as one does today, with the sole idea of making money, there will be dominant the thought, "I want to build."

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1.

Broadcasting will unify the
Orient.

2. Propaganda possibilities of radio.

3. Present world-wide development.

4. The potentiality of a world point of view.

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ADIO broadcasting is a powerful instrument of mass-appeal, converting half continent into a large auditorium. Therein lies its immense possibilities molding oriental opinion. It promises to eclipse the newspaper and the motion picture simply by reason of the numbers that are simul taneously affected. In vividness, radio surpasses the most flamboyant newspaper, simply because it is alive; its dullest stock-market and argicultural reports come from human lips. Such an instrument of massappeal must inevitably quicken the pulse of both Europe and Asia. It is destined to become the ear-newspaper, the ear-stage of the Orient.

But the Orient is poor, it may be argued. A radio is no more expensive than a phonograph, and of phonographs the Orient has its share despite its poverty. In the densely packed cities of Japan, China and India a halfpenny will ultimately buy admission to a radio auditorium in which the proletariat will listen to broadcasted news, stories and plays. Consider the mental eagerness of the Chinese in a Peking restaurant, the Hindus, Persians, Turks in their bazars as they crowd today with rapt attention to listen to the professional story-teller. Radio will prove to be an even more

the breaking down of languagebarriers. Europe for the purpose of international discourse, has tended to reduce itself to the use of three languages; who will deny that radio will aid in effecting a similar linguistic transformation in the East? The transformation must come to pass if the Himalayan mountaineer is to understand the broadcasted lecture of a Calcutta professor or the Hankow student his love-poem.

2. Speech has already been transmitted by radio between Arlington, Virginia, and Honolulu and between Washington and the Eiffel Tower. What may not come to pass when with little power required the voice of Einstein or Sir Oliver Lodge or the President of the United States will be projected to the uttermost parts of the earth? It may happen that by the year 2000 radio will bring about the introduction of English as a world language. Today, in Japan, China, the Philippines, India and Turkey, English is being eagerly sought in the schools.

It is altogether likely that the technically alert Japanese will first discover the propaganda possibilities of radio broadcasting. What it is difficult to accomplish by force of arms may be attained in a few gen

erations by broadcasting. A steady stream of educational lectures passed through the ether can erode minds as rapidly as water erodes rocks. The Japanese now have one of the most powerful radio units in the world. No doubt it will drive home the Japanese point of view to thousands in China, We have only to think of the moral effect produced by President Wilson's exposition of democratic ideals, dropped behind the German lines during the war, to realize what an astute Japanese Government can accomplish in molding Chinese opinion.

3. The French have already established 15 radio stations in IndoChina, through which Indo-China receives every night from France, full market reports and the news of the day. The French might easily inundate China with Paris-made conceptions. .. The English have been even more ambitious. A radio system now links nearly every im. portant British Colony with London. When her plans are completed, England will have instant communication with every British ship, every frontier army post, every handful of British colonists under the sun.

Japan has far-reaching radio plans. Radio seems especially created for the purposes of Japan, with its scattered island possessions. Premier Kato is said to have approved the formation of a company capi. talized at $100,000,000 to operate on a scale comparable with that of any European or American organization. The company will cooperate with the Marconi Co., the Radio Corporation of America, and French and Dutch companies, in building up a world-wide system. Trans-Atlantic radio service is now highly trustworthy, and direct trans-Pacific service will become SO

soon.

Then the newspapers of the West will be able to collect news at a rate so low that Asia will undoubtedly play a more important part in the daily news.

Each nation with interests in the East will surely use its broadcasting

stations to explain its good intentions and to penetrate spheres of influence that it cannot enter physically. It will become more important than ever to win sympathies rather than territories. It is not dif_ ficult to imagine what use will be made of broadcasting by reformers.

Radio in the East seems destined to play a part comparable to that of the press in the West. What may not be expected of it, not only in the hands of a passionate idealist or political leader, but of an enlightened government genuinely interested in the education of the masses?

4. We must not forget that the radio receiver of today bears little relation to the receiver of tomorrow. Almost any prediction may be fulfilled. The few institutions of learning in the Orient will become bea.. cons in a very real sense; the lecture on economics, on poetry, on science, will be heard, in a vast university extension system, in distant auditoriums, schools and huts. The monotony of the Asiatic village will be enlivened. The "Untouchables" of India may listen to a poet's recitation without fear of causing pollution. Strange news from the outer world will reach illiterate multitudes. A dozen stations would meet the needs of all China, six of all India. Station can be linked with station by telephone wire and the orator, the musician, may address himself to a continent. New York will listen to Rome. Patagonians and Eskimos, Hungarians and Californians, may rub elbows electrically. Asia will reach European and American minds. In radio lies the potentiality of a world point of view.

The temple bells of the East-who knows but we may hear them in Chicago? The distress of starving mil. lions in China will be made known across oceans by an eloquent voice instead of by cold, impersonal type. Whole nations will become audiences, and the world will shrink into a little globe that can be held in the hand.

Asia, Jan. '23.

TH

HE talk of two women on a Fifth Avenue bus recently gave a resume of their characters. They played bridge, apparently, a good deal of the time. They were gambling at it. They loved the theater, especially musical comedies. They loved to dance and evidently, when they were not playing bridge, dancing was their chief diversion. They loved their automobile trips. As for dress, how shall a mere man report their conversation about that. One listened to see if any other interest in life would be revealed, but this was all. Their talk had struck bottom.

These women live in one of the most critical generations in history, when there are great enterprises to serve, great books to read, great thoughts to think: and yet their lives, like a child's doll, are stuffed with sawdust. They represent an extreme form of one of the commonest failures in character-the crowding out of things that really matter by things that do not matter much. They are absorbingly busy with trivialities. They have missed the primary duty and privilege of life--putting first things first.

It never was so easy to fail in this particular way as it is today. The demands of life are absorbing; there are more things to do than we shall ever get done; there are more books than we ever can look at; there are more avenues of enjoyment than we ever shall find time to travel. In consequence, we are continually tempted to dabble. We litter up our lives with indiscriminate preoccupation. We let first come be first served, forgetting that the finest things do not crowd. Preoccupation is the most popular form of failure.

Consider, for example, our read

ing. Five hundred years ago there were no printing presses. Today reading is one of the dominant influences of human life. When one considers how reading seeps in through all our days, what power there is in books to determine our views of life, it is plain that reading is one of man's foremost responsibilities. While only a few people read perverted books, most of us miss the best books, simply because we litter up our minds with casual trash. We stop to pass the time of day with any printed vagabond who plucks at our sleeve, forgetting Ruskin's exclamation: "Do you know, if you read this, that you cannot read that?"

We read enough; but what? "Words, words, words," was Hamlet's answer. How many put first books first? To be sure, we read along specialized lines for efficiency in daily work. Moreover, we read to keep up with the times. And we read the books that are talked about just because they are talked about. Of all social compulsions none is more urgent than the oft-repeated question "Have you read — That club flogs us to our reading, and against the necessity of conversation at the next dinner we buy a best-seller.

Yet, so continuously reading, we read everything except the great books that we should read first. We read the little books that dress us in the tinsel of a ready conversation. Nevertheless, the world's poets and seers will come to us in a book as though there were no one else in all the world for them to call upon. Though we are so foolish as to for. get, they will be there on the mor

row to tell it to us once more. Great books are the perfect democrats.

Dean Briggs tells of some young American people on their first visit to Rome. Morning after morning they arose with the opportunity of a lifetime awaiting them-a whole city, fabulously rich in historical association. And every morning they played bridge in the hotel. Cries Dean Briggs: "What business had such people in Rome! What business had they anywhere!"

"Mr. Jones," said a youth, "is the most wonderful card-player I ever knew!" To which a girl answered: "Has it ever occurred to you that he doesn't know anything else?" The trouble with Mr. Jones is one of our commonest maladies. In a world where the needs are appalling, life short, the finest privileges of life enriching, Jones makes a fool of him. self with trivial preoccupation. This tragedy, however, is often caused, not by flippant triviality, but by life's ordinary business. Business has been drawing off from Niagara Falls a little stream here and another stream there until the Indians "Thundering Water" may in the end be bare, ugly rock.

The consequences of preoccupation are often pathetic. An American once dashed through a great European art gallery. At the door he said to an attendant, "Not a thing here worth seeing!" The attendant replied "If you please, sir, these pictures are no longer on trial-the spectators are." That man had started with normal capacities to appreciate the finest gifts of life, but, preoccupied with many tasks, he had lost through atrophy the power to love the highest. We do not deliberately decide to lose all this beauty-the best books, music, art; we are simply busy.

children. One of the troubles with this much berated generation—is the older generation. What the younger generation needs is not so much critics as examples. Parents, busy with many tasks, have farmed their children out to any agency from school and scout troop to a summer camp, where they can be rid of their responsibility. Yet parents have time to do those things which they consider essential. Their difficulty is that they think some things are more important than caring about their children, that some entrustments are more sacred than that.

More than anything else one suspects that this is at the root of irreligion. It is preoccupation which generally makes the innermost relationships of a man's soul with God of no account. The highest is in all of us. At times it flames up and we know that we are not dust but spirit, and that in fellowship with the Spiritual Life, from whom we came, is our power and our peace.

The trouble with preoccupation is that it takes no account of the flight of time. Someone has figured human life as covering the span of a single day's waking hours from six in the morning until ten at night. Then if a man is 20, it is ten o'clock in the morning with him; if he is 30, it is noon; if he is 40, it is two o'clock; if he is sixty, it is six in the evening. So the day passes and the enriching experiences which fellowship with the Highest offers us are lost-because of preoccupation.

An

The famous Bargello portrait of Dante was lost for many years. artist, resolved on finding it, located in a storehouse for wastage. When the rubbish had been carted out and the whitewash was being removed from the walls, old lines long obscured became visible until at last the lofty, noble face of the great poet was recovered for the world. Rubbish and whitewash had seemed to somebody more important than the face.. Some people who have been crowding out the best by preoccupation and postponement might well begin a new year with the single resolution to put first things first. Ladies' Home Journal, Jan. '23.