been taught that disorder is almost a crime may grow up to be incorrigibly fussy in her own affairs.

"Of course this does not always happen. Two children having the same training may react to it in entirely different ways. Nevertheless, over-fussy mothers do succeed in training at least some of their children to be over-fussy men and women; missing the inner fruit of life because they are so busy with its outer husk. "If an overly precise woman realizes ber failings she can overcome them. A psychiatrist could help her by showing her how she 'got that way;' but she can help herself to be different if she really cares about it. She should try to see her life as if she were outside of it. Which is more important in her home? Is it hearthappiness? Or is she absorbed in managing mechanical details? Does she laugh with her children-or only look after their diet? Does she know what they are dreaming, or only what they are doing? Does she have their confidence or only their obedience?

"When the family goes for a motor ride, does she help to make it a happy, amusing, entertaining experience? Or is she too busy thinking about the picnic lunch she is taking, the extra wraps, the scratch on the front seat, the squeak of an axle, the way her husband drives and a hundred other things which are not vital to the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness?

"These women who are irritatingly precise and conscientious need one thing: a better understanding of life's values? Companionship, sympathy, affection, poise, mutual tolerance, freedom of expression-these are incomparably more important than all the thousand little things on which many women concentrate.

"We must live and let live. We mustn't be so frightfully serious about every little thing. Do the best we can-and then accept the consequences with satisfaction if they are good, or with good-humored philosophy if they aren't what we hoped for. We must learn to smile at our own mistakes and at those of the people around us. A sense of proportion, a sense of ordi

nary human weakness, a sense of hu mor-well, taken together these make common sense. They would help these over-particular women.

"Suppose that a mother sees her child developing traits we have discussed. For instance, suppose the child won't let other children touch its playthings, is too fussy about its clothes, irritatingly methodical and exact. If a child shows a tendency to keep its playthings sacred, hides them from other children, is a little miser about them, find out what is back of all this. It may be a 'defen sive reaction.' A brother or a sister may be trying to 'hog' the child's playthings. A boy's new electric train may have been broken by the boy from across the street. A little girl's doll, the pride of her heart, may have been messed up by the baby.

"Patience and a calm determination to get at the root of the matter will unearth the cause. And when it is found the mother can set things right. If the child is simply defending himself she must see that he doesn't have to do it. And at the same time she can explain to him something about the give and take of life; something about the need of friendliness and tolerance; something about tact and how to manage people; something about how to defend himself and his rights.

"This can be done. It needs patience and understanding; but it may mean the difference between happiness and unhappiness when the child grows up. Not only its own happiness but that of husband, wife, children.

"It is curious-isn't it-to think that this man at the next table is reaping a harvest whose seeds were planted when his wife was a child. She is probably making his life miserable with her everlasting 'ought to do this' and 'ought to do that.' It could have been prevented, if her mother had seen this tendency toward overconscientiousness, had got at the cause of it and had helped her to a better sense of values. The woman could get this proper sense of values even now if she could see herself as we see her."

INCE the founding of the nation

S various persons, at irregular in

tervals, have felt it was headed downhill and could not be stopped. Somehow or other, it has managed to pull through, even growing bigger and more indecently rich. Probably it will continue to wobble along in → spite of its present disgracefully diseased political condition. However, there is no reason why the significant symptoms of the present should not be pointed out. For one thing, it may help a little in the cure. For another, some time or other one of these prophets of disaster is going to be more or less right.

Speaking not at all from the parEty but wholly from the public angle, this country is in a sorry, soggy, sloppy state, politically. It is hard E to tell which is more discouraging: the issues that do interest the people or the issues that do not interest them.

f

Take first the issues to which they do respond-you can go across the country from coast to coast, stopping in each state to talk and learn, as I recently did, and you will strike fire only when you touch one subject-Prohibition. No man not openly professing to be a dry can be elected to any conspicuous office in dry territory, and none not howling wet can successfully aspire in the wet centers. The most degraded dry can still beat the best wet in some sections, and the most assinine wet can still overwhelm the most deserving dry in the others. The merits of the men, their character and intelligence, their records and views on every other issue are subordinated to this one and every man in politics knows it. Prohibition is the

one thing which really stirs public sentiment.

That is, it was the one thing until a short while ago. Now we have another, and capable of even more deeply stirring men and women-to wit, the Bible issue. Perhaps it would have come into politics without the Dayton trial. It was on its way, but the Bryan-Darrow trial has thrust this issue deep into our politics. Few political observers doubt that we are at the start of another such fight as we had over Prohibition.

It is hard to see how it can be other than disheartening to thoughtful persons to grasp the fact that these two issues, neither one of which has the slightest business in politics, are the only ones capable of striking a spark from nine-tenths of the people of the country today. Any politician in any state will tell you that on the World Court, the tariff, the League of Nations, the railroads, water power, agriculture, or any other item of foreign or domestic policy, there is among the masses a complete and profound indifference. They don't know about them and they don't care. If that is not a disheartening situation to those who look ahead politiccally, what would be?

Equally discouraging is the apparently unshakable determination of half of the qualified voters not to participate in the election of its government. The United States, in the matter of voting efficiency, is practically at the very tail of the long list of civilized nations. Forty years ago 80 per cent of the American voters went regularly to the polls and we were in the first column in point of voting efficiency. Now we are last.

In the 1924 election for the House of Commons in England, 76 per cent of the total electorate voted-in the preceding election 82 per cent went to the polls. In Germany in the 1924 election the vote exceeded 80 per cent. A 20-year average for the Australian and New Zealand States shows approximately 78 per cent voting. Belgium, Holland, and Denmark have an average over 20 years of 75 cent. per In Norway and Sweden approximately 76 per cent of the men vote consistently. On an average, the French vote is slightly above 70 per cent. In Switzerland the record for years shows better than 75 per cent, and in Canada the average is 70 per cent.

It is not a pleasant thing upon which to meditate that we, who started out to show the world what a Democracy really ought to be and how beautifully a great people could govern themselves-should fall back so far that fully half of our population is so little concerned about its government that it does not go to the polls at all.

It isn't only that our people do not vote in the general election, but, what is worse-in very much greater numbers they do not vote in the primaries, which, under our political system are infinitely more vital. The primary in this country is really the key to all politics. It is the gate through which 99 per cent of all candidates must pass in order to get on the ticket. Control of the primaries is control of politics-it really is control of the country. Those who thus control are in a position to limit the choice of the general election voter to their choice in the primaries. And for the most part, primaries everywhere are a farcea mere ratification of a machine's choice, made by an absurdly small number of machine men. Thus is the country run-not by the people but by the politicians.

Our political inertia can be blamed on the movies, on the newspapers, on the politicians, on the

general prosperity, on sports, on any number of things. But the basic fact is that there is in the English people, the French, the German, a political consciousness conspicuously lacking in the United States. The average European considers politics more seriously. There is inherent in him a deeper respect for law and a stronger desire to have some part in the selection of his government, say as to whom shall run things and how. We, too, had a real political consciousness about Up to 1890 the average American's conception of political duty and his interest in his government, city, state, and nation, left relatively little room for criticism.

some

once.

Whatever the reasons, of this we can be sure-the evils of politics in every community are exactly equal to the indifference of the voters in the primaries. That is a provable proposition and it is about all you can prove regarding the situation except that it exists.

Actually, when the vital nature E of politics to every individual is considered, when it is reflected that e it touches the lives of us all directly and indirectly in scores of ways, and that

there is no possible escape from its influence and effect, the steady lessening of political interest and activity among the masses of people, and the unfavorable light in which the voting figures show us in comparison with other nations, are a distinct reflection upon our intelligence as a people. There isn't

any doubt about that. Of course, there is going to be no collapse of governmental machinery and, of course, no one need feel unduly alarmed about the country's future. It will wobble out of these depressing conditions as it has wobbledy out of many others. However, these facts do make a joke out of the old doctrine that "the people rule." Also, they render rather ridiculous the idea that this is the most enlightened na tion of them all.

E was writing his last letter to his mother before they took him to the electric chair. In his last days his mother had written him a letter, reminding him of his innocent early boyhood and telling him to pray. And now, in his cell, he was answering her.

A warden saw that good-by letter; he told me about it because he was trying to make me understand how hard and cruel our new generation of toughs had become. The letter ran something like this:

"My Darling Mother: I thank you for all that you have done for me during my life"-several paragraphs of such thanks, and then this:

"You tell me to call upon Jesus as I did when I was young. Well, all I've got to say about this is that, if you mean the Jesus who they say was nailed to the Cross, there wasn't enough left of Him out in the big world where I went, when I left home, to wad a shotgun with."

Not all of that good-by letter reached the mother's eyes; the warden was too kind. "The boy had no heart," the prison official explained to me.

The only trouble with that boy was that he was one of America's new, unexplainable criminals. Penitentiary wardens all over America have tried to tell me lately how tough the new criminals are coming these days.

You and I, reading the newspapers, learning of the unexplainable crimes of some of our youth, have come to suspect or to believe that a new kind of criminal has arisen in America. But these penitentiary wardens know this new and unexplainable criminal is with us. They have him in their prisons.

Ask the warden to describe the hardness and the toughness of this new criminal and words fail him. He

He tells

falls back on concrete cases. you, puzzled, about this youth or that, and lets you draw your own conclusions. And I must pass the puzzle on to America.

Here are stories of these new criminals that I have found during the past few weeks in some of our penitentiaries:

The other day an amazed and wideeyed prison official told me about a young convict I had seen an hour before sitting on a bench playing with another young fellow. I had picked this young convict out of a crowd, for he was a striking figure. And he was as full of play as a puppy. There were over 600 convicts sitting in that great, long room; they spend their days on the benches there doing nothing. To each of these criminals this boy was a criminal hero, the last word in devil-may-careness.

"What can you do with a fellow like that?" a prison official asked me. Then he told me the boy's story. "He is a lifer, and lucky to be alive. He comes of a good home in Ohio. One night he helped to murder a storekeeper in a robbery. He wanted dance and movie money. When the police caught him he kidded them. In court when he was tried he was arrogant to everybody. When the jury found him guilty of murder in the first degree he only smiled. He didn't turn a hair when the judge sentenced him to death. When they brought him here to the penitentiary he played the hero among the convicts. mind was all right-he read plenty of books-but he didn't have any feeling.

His

"Well, the day for electrocution came. They took him to the death cell to get him ready."

I had seen that death cell. A man about to die who could keep his courage there would be superhuman.

"A barber cut a patch of hair from the back of his head." (The electrode must touch the flesh, directly.) "The young fellow complained about that in a half-joking way. Just 13 minutes before he was to die a guard came running in with a reprieve from the governor. The governor had changed the sentence to life imprisonment.

"What do you suppose that young fellow did? Well, sir, after they had read him the reprieve he turned around to the man who had cut his hair and said: 'Well, that's a hell of a fine haircut you gave me! It'll take six months to grow that out again.'

"What can you do with a fellow like that?" asked the jailer. "And we're getting a lot of his kind these days. He wasn't any more excited by his reprieve than he was by his sentence. The trouble with these young fellows these days is that they have no emotions."

As clean cut a young fellow as you could want to see plays a saxophone in the band of one of our penitenti aries. He reads modern novels; he writes rather well. As he stood in the band handling his instrument like an expert he attracted my attention because of his evident refinement. He had poise and assurance.

He's there for life. He tried to rob the home of a well-to-do and respected family. The father of the household bravely arose from his bed and went out in the hallway to defend his family. Out there he found this young man, heroin-crazy. The young man fired his revolver and killed the citizen with one shot. Then he ran away, but he was later caught.

He was buried in the death cell for weeks--in a room next to the electric chair. His plight never seemed to worry him. When the governor changed his sentence to life imprisonment he showed no great joy.

"I didn't worry very much in the death house," he told an official visitor. "I used to say to myself: 'Well, I've had about every sort of a kick I could get in this life. Maybe there's a kick in going over the other side'."

A hush always falls over a prison the day a man is to die. Prisoners

are restless and nervous. In some prisons they wail in their cells during the killing. One of the most terrible recollections of this writer's life is of hearing some years ago the wails of hundreds of cell inmates in the Cook County jail in Chicago while five men were being hanged. The prisoners throughout the day imagine the terror of the man in the death house, living his last hours. Imagination has them in its grip.

Such imaginings are almost baseless, especially when one of our new criminals is in the death house. Not long ago a guard in a death house became suspicious because the man in the death cell was so quiet. He investigated. His prisoner, who was to die for murder within six hours, was busy lettering a cardboard sign with charred matches. He was marking out these letters: "Room to Let."

In a penitentiary tailor shop I saw a young man of less than 20 sitting on a table, tearing apart an old coat. His fingers were long, slender, sensitive. His black shoes were carefully polished; his trousers were pressed; his hair properly combed. He had a whole lifetime ahead of him in prison, for he had been convicted of murder.

He had stolen a sedan in his home town and had joy-ridden in it nightly for over a month with a painted, 16year-old, dance-loving. movie-mad "sweet-heart." Another girl and another youth had joined them in their rides. For gasoline, dance and movie money the two boys, equipped with revolvers, had taken to holding up gas filling stations. One night, as this young convict's partner was holding up a station which he had already held up twice before, a hidden policeman stepped out of a shadow and began shooting.

The young bandit stood and shot it out with the officer until both were dead. Then the young man I saw in the tailor shop and the two girls, tried to drive away. But they were caught, and the boy escaped the death chair only because he was pitiably young and had not used his revolver.

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