The high salaries being paid for developed skill and experience sufficient to administer even the departments of large organizations have opened a new avenue for initiative and opportunity of the first importance. There is growing up steadily a new profession, business administration; and the moment that a trade takes on the character of a profession it shows a great advance, for the distinction which marks the term profession, in law, engineering and medicine, is the incorporation into the daily task of a responsibility to the community and insistence upon a high sense of service.

The last quarter of a century has seen the growth of larger units of production and distribution-big business. Our tools are bigger. We build a single dynamo of 100,000 horsepower. This single tool would have been big business 25 years ago.

The public has the natural fear that these great units will be used for domination and extinction of equality of opportunity. Arising from this fear and the wrongs done in the past, we have enacted much legislation to compel competition, such as the Sherman and Clayton Acts.

The original conception of this legislation seems to have been to maintain a great host of highly competitive units in every trade. By degrees we have been retreating from this notion. We have found that to maintain complete competition in service to each consumer in the utilities--transportation, light, power, and communications-meant a fabulous cost in duplication of equipment, with less financial stability, increased operating expenses, poorer service and increased rates to the consumer.

A considerable element of direct or

indirect competition still exists, and must be continued through alternate services-other railways, other forms of power, of light, etc., so that the stimulus to improvement is still held. When we deliberately clothe industry with the security of part-monopoly, neither the industry nor the public disputes the necessity of full control of rates, service and finance by governmental agencies,

However, in the manufacture and distribution of commodities, I be lieve that full constructive competi tion must be preserved. The virility and strength of our whole economic system springs from spontaneous en terprise and the stimulation of com petition. But competition does not necessarily imply destructive competi tion. It does imply that we must maintain a sufficient number of inde pendent units in any given industry to assure us that the fundamental competition is sustained.

Public interest does not require that Mr. Ford, who makes over one-third of our automobiles, shall dissolve his great factory into the hands of 500 small competitors. It would increase the cost to the public greatly, and perhaps lower wages. He has today the most active competition of other great units.

Mass-production industries do not necessarily imply trusts and monopo lies.

Mass production does not necessari ly mean single ownership-it means standard products and standardization increases competition. The whole movement of our trade associations for standards and simplified product is a movement of protection to the smaller unit from extinction by the gigantic unit by giving to them th essential possibilities of mass produc tion.

The real question with regard to unit is whether it is subjected to el fective competition, not the size of il The whole process of combinatio should be weighed solely in the scale of public interest.

I

HAD not seen Kent Raymond for

15 years when I met him again a few days ago. He gave a tender ittle chuckle when I inquired about Betty, his wife. "Betty's mighty easy to live with," he said, “and that's what a man most wants in a wife, isn't it?" He had to rush for his train then, but he had given me an idea that I couldn't forget. Easy to live with! The more I thought about that phrase the more I wondcred just how many of us are easy to live with. What makes a woman easy to live with?

The only way to find out was to ask a lot of husbands. I decided to put the question to all the men I met that day, feeling this would ensure variety. The first one happened to be the iceman. "So that's what you're always doing with the typewriter, writin' stories!" he marveled. "I've wondered. One of the things that makes a wife easy to live with, is it? M-m-m ... well, knowing when to ask a man to do little chores around the house helps a lot. Now my Molly's a cute one, that way. Never a thing asked me when I'm hurrying off in the morning, nor when I come in dog-tired of an evenin'. But on Sunday, after I've eat the only good, slow breakfast I ever have time for, and looked over the paper and maybe played with the radio a bit, she'll say, 'Now if you could just fix this screen for me, and fasten up that rod, and mend that step 80 Teddy won't fall on it again, you'll have a good appetite for the chicken and dumplings.' Now who could be grumpy about helpin' a bit when it's put up to him like that?”

Now I know why my iceman is always cheerful and obliging. He gets a good start from a tactfully managed -home.

The grocery clerk didn't hesitate a

"It makes

minute over his answer: things pretty soft if the wife knows how to stretch the money from one Saturday to the next," he declared. "There's a lot involved there, missus. If you're worryin' about money, and bill-collectors naggin' at you, and you can't get started payin' for a home, and the kids always look kind of poor. folksy, then you get to wonderin' how the man next door with the same pay as yours can own his own home and have a flivver and his kids always lookin' stylish. And you say something to your wife and she snaps back, and the first thing you know there's a row. Yes, bein' able to manage is a great thing in a wife."

The young bank manager said: "Phyllis likes to play with me well enough to sacrifice some other things to do it. I know men whose wives will turn them down cold when they havo an afternoon off, because they want to finish a cake they're baking, or hem the new napkins, or repaint the porch chairs. What they're devoted to ts their own pride and their own desires. But Phyllis is the best little sport, always ready to fit her plans around the little leisure I have; and say, we do enjoy life!"

It is practically certain that Phyllis won't be sitting at home alone a few years from now wondering why Jack never asks her to go anywhere with him.

In short, the ability to distinguish between the important and the unimportant."

My doctor was next. I expected something seriously helpful from him and I was not disappointed. "A man to do the best work he is capable of doing must have a comfortable, orderly, serene home. There's not the slightest question about that. A woman, in order to maintain such a home atmosphere, must have the poise and mental alertness that come from steady nerves. So I say that good health is what makes a woman easy to live with. Few women take proper care of themselves. They are too ambitious. I wish I could get a million women in this city to take a pledge to lie down and relax for one-half hour three times a day. If I could make Mrs. Average Woman do that I'd soon be in the almshouse.”

"What makes them easy to live with? Naturally curly hair!" laughed the young druggist who filled my prescription. "I lived my first 24 years with a mother and three sisters. All of them had straight hair, and between having to see them at the breakfast table with boudoir caps over curl papers, or with marcels that had seen better days, or permanents as fuzzy as wool because they weren't 'set' yet -say, when I met a real curly-head I just naturally fell hard. She's pretty when she wakes up in the morning and when she goes to sleep at night and all the time between, and I'm a happy man."

"What I appreciate more than I ever can express," said the schoolmaster who is just moving into the apartment next to ours, "is the way my wife packs up and goes along with me without any whining when I get a chance for a better job. If I am ever a college president it will be because she is willing to tear up all the roots of living which mean so much to a woman, and go where a broader field for me calls."

A friend of ours has just left with an arctic expedition. He has been married only one year and he and his wife were about to spend his first va

cation on a motor trip when this chance came to him. Did this young wife play the part of a baby or a coward? She did not. She refused to consider arctic perils aloud, at any rate. She enthused over the won derful experience he was going to have, and what it would mean to him in a professional way. Best of all, she planned for herself a busy, happy program for the time of his absence. She joined a swimming club; she invited a college chum to visit her; she ar ranged for her dinners at a charming inn so she wouldn't be tempted to neg lect her food; she took a regular seat for Wednesday matinees. All this be fore he left, so that he went away feeling happy about her, able to give all of himself to his job. I cannot ask him my question, but I know what his answer would be.

An advertising man confided, "My wife keeps me up on my toes mentally. I don't have time to read a lot, but she manages so that the little time D do have is used to the best advantage. She gives me a brief outline of a book and reads me the best chapter. She gives me the main point of a magazine article. She marks editorials that I mustn't miss. At dinner she tells me what Senator Somebody said in the Senate, or Lord Somebody said in Parliament, or a visiting Somebody said in his lecture."

air

An office manager who came to din ner was the last man for the day. He said his wife was easy to live with because she had a temper. "I mean it," he assured me. "I've seen what it is to live with one of these long-suffer ing women. The kind that pulls a sweet, patient expression on you and goes around for a week with ar I'm-terribly-hurt-but-I-forgive-you Enough to drive a man to desperation! Now Nancy rises up and tells me just where I get off. I never have to won der what I have done that wasn't jus right. She tells me, good and plenty and that's the end of it. We mak up and forget it. I tell you it's won derful for a woman to be able to for get a grievance.”

The

SIA is in a state of spiritual revolt. From Tokyo to Peking, from Shanghai to Delhi, the whole region is animated, virtually seething, with anti-Christian sentiment. Missionaries are experiencing increasing difficulties in conducting evangelical work. In some regions mission schools and mission hospitals have been closed, at least temporarily. Never in the last few decades has the East risen against Christendom 80 impressively. challenge is all the more significant because it is singularly peaceful. It is a dignified protest against the West's assumption of moral or intellectual superiority and against its inconsistent professions of humanitarian ideals. So far, the discontent, although widespread, lacks efficient leadership. But before long an attempt will be made to coordinate isolated agitations and launch a concerted movement. An indication of this possible tendency toward organization is the Pan-Asiatic Conference to be called in Japan this summer. To this gathering, the first of the sort, Japan, China, Korea, the Philippines, Siam, India, and Persia will send delegates. Japanese and Chinese labor leaders are planning to hold a Pan-Asiatic conference. In addition, there will be held next year at Tokyo an international Buddhist conference. Is it not likely that from such conferences there will eventually develop, to a degree never before realized, a sense of racial and cultural kinship among Oriental peoples?

What is the cause of this general unrest? Perhaps the World War, more than anything else, has been responsible for it. The spectacle of Christian nations slaughtering one another in this enlightened century bewildered and shocked "pagan" Asia. The Orient had long felt that Christianity was an intolerant, militant, militaristic,

imperialistic doctrine. If what the powers of Christendom have done to the weak and unprepared East be taken as a standard for judging the moral tenets of Christianity, this suspicion is not entirely unreasonable. The World War convinced the masses of Asia that Christianity is a doctrine of might, and that its professions of love and brotherhood are but shibboleths.

In August, 1925, the educational societies of Kiangsu, Chekiang, and Hupeh provinces of China issued a joint proclamation denouncing Christian schools as "distributing centers for poisonous teachings." "Because of the deliberate suppression by missionaries of patriotic aspirations among the Chinese students," it declared, "China has become utterly helpless in the face of foreign capitalism and imperialism." The Anti-Christian Federation of Peking, in a circular telegram last December, called upon the entire people of China to observe Christmas every year as Anti-Christian day. It said:

"Our people have for many years suffered from the insults and aggres· sions of Western Imperialism. Why, during all these decades when China has been made an object of imperialistic aggressions, have our four hundred millions, with the solitary ex• ception of the patriotic Boxers of 1900, remained docile, and with folded arms watched the despoliation of our country? Because the imperialists have employed hosts of missionaries their advance guards, as their spies, who have performed their duties so efficiently that patriotism and nationalistic sentiment among our people have been effectively squelched.'

as

The World War, apart from its sav. ageness, had another aspect which has served to strengthen the nationalistic

feeling in the Orient. The Wilsonian doctrine of self-determination was seized upon by the smaller nations of Asia in an endeavor to shake off the foreign over-lordship which they thought was the cause of their misery. The nationalistic consciousness thus awakened bas encouraged the revival of the religious and moral teachings indigenous to the soil of Asia and has abetted the movement that is aimed at the curbing of Christian influence. Even in Korea, a country long regarded as a most fruitful mission field, the same trend toward disillusionment has been increasingly perceptible. Since 1920, the mission schools have experienced serious troubles due to the discontent of the students. 1922-23, particularly, an epidemic of student strikes spread through the mission schools. In certain sections the missionaries in Korea found it difficult to keep the schools open. Friction also developed between the missionaries and the native Christians who were clamoring for a church independent of foreign control.

In

The adoption by America of the allembracing Oriental exclusion law of 1924 has proved a potent factor in intensifying the nationalism and the racial and cultural consciousness which the Great War had already awakened in the East. China and India, though resenting the open insult, rather welcomed that law because in it they saw the hope of a united Asia. Would not Japan, thus flouted by America, alter her traditional policy of acting in unison with the West and cast her lot with her Asiatic neighbors, who would ac claim her their natural leader? "For 30 years," said Dr. Sun Yet-sen, "I have tried in vain to persuade Japan to become Asia's leader. I hope this antiJapanese legislation has taught her the lesson which we of China have striven to teach without success." C. R. Das, India's Nationalist leader, said:

"The American immigration law is an exhibition of the traditional jingoism of the imperialistic West. The law is merely part of a larger scheme against all Asiatics. The Western

world cherishes the vain notion that it represents a higher civilization, and that Asia is its legitimate prey. Asia's hope of liberating itself from Western domination lies in the federation of all its peoples. So long as Europe and America believe in Christianity with out Christ, the federation of Asiatic peoples is essential to their self-pres‐ ervation."

Even before the exclusion legislation the American missionaries in Japan had not been free from adverse cri ticism. Mr. T. Kagawa, the well known Christian author, tells us that 300 churches supported entirely by Japanese reap a harvest of 7600 soulevery year, while 1000 churches main tained or controlled by foreign, chiefly American missions convert only 260 a year. When the exclusion law wa passed a large number of Japanes Christians urged that the Japanes churches sever relations with American missions. Even within the las few weeks two prominent Japanes publicists spoke plainly against Chris tianity. One is Count Kabayama, who on the eve of his departure for Lon don to attend an international confer ence, questioned the sincerity of th professed humanitarianism of Christ anity. The other is Mr. M. Zumot who, addressing the Tokyo Rotar Club, boldly declared that "Christian ity came to Asia in a spirt of arrogan superiority and narrow exclusiveness, and that "Christianity, masterful, e clusive, and imperialistic, cannot t counted upon as a force making fo harmony and peace in so far as re lations between East and West are con cerned."

Such voices are heard constantl throughout Asia. Whether the awa ening of these ideas will result in co certed movement among the peoples c Asia will largely depend upon Japan attitude. Obviously, Japan is at th parting of the ways. The outcom rests with Washington and Londo For Japan's attitude toward her Asia neighbors will to no small extent 1 influenced by the attitude of Euro】 and America toward herself.