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(Continued from page 72) listen gladly. Being free from political influence and depending solely for authority upon its store of truth, scientifically ascertained, I believe it would be respected throughout the world.

Let us imagine such an institution, staffed by a small but able group of men, justly distinguished by ten years of useful service, suddenly confronted with a crisis in international affairs. Ambassadors and departments of foreign relations had regarded the subject of the difficulty as a sleeping dog and it is their policy to let sleeping dogs alone Suddenly there is an ominous growl. The dog is awake and the people of two or more nations are aroused. In such a situation it is virtually impossible for men who hold their positions by either election or political appointment to educate the public in time to avert disaster. Anyway, their function is not educational; they are representatives and necessarily agree with their constituents. Only men armed with far higher credentials than the political dare intervene in such situations or can hope to accomplish very much if they do intervene. The time has come when only the truth can save. How fortunate it would be for the world if it knew where to turn for guidance at such a time!

The establishment of such a seat of authority is not only possible but fairly easy. Moreover, it is going to be established. I have outlined here, briefly, the thought behind the proposed Walter Hines Page School of International Relations which is to function in connection with Johns Hopkins University at Baltimore. Scientific effort does not call for large numbers of men or great expense. In addition to carrying on their research work, the faculty of such a school can also instruct.

What will they teach? Why, the science that they practice. They will gather the facts about international trade, racial psychology, commercial and military geography, diplomatic usage

and experience, effects of artificial economic barriers, effects of new inventions, and all the hundreds of things that enter into the contacts of nation with nation. They will train men to become experts in international relations. Some of them will continue their service in pure research as a life career. Others will be drafted into the government service. Such a school should achieve three things:

1. It will develop a science of international relations.

2. It will ascertain the facts so far as they can be found on any particular problem.

3. It will produce a continually growing body of men trained in that science and available for service in the fields of education, government and business.

As international a consequence, contacts ought to show more conductivity and less sparking.

Eventually there should be at least five or six such schools, in as many different countries. It would be a very excellent development of the plan if, in time, delegates from these schools gathered once or twice a year to compare their data.

Resolu

Here, I believe, is the framework of a program that offers reasonable hope of making progress against the destroying monster of war. tions will not do it, nor will denunci ations of war. People inflamed by fear or injustice, no matter how groundless their information, will still fight, even though they hate war. We must have the facts, localize the prob lems, and attempt to solve them while they yet remain in the narrow ares of their origin. In other words, this is a job for science.

Great tasks should be done slowly. We are beginning with just one school. Faith in the fundamental merit of the plan leads to the expectation that time and the common sense of man kind can be trusted to complete the

job.

The New Industrial Era

Condensed from The Century Magazine (May '26)

Charles Edward Russell

OR the last five years American

remaking itself,

and scarcely anybody outside the circles directly affected has paid attention to the upthrust. Yet it means changes so much greater than those made by most wars that hereafter it is likely to be considered as beginning an epoch not only in our history but in other people's.

The Federal Department of Commerce and the Chamber of Commerce of the United States, being the chief revolutionists, have united in certain widespread and unquestionable investigations, from which businessin the mass-emerges convicted of bewildering extravagance and waste, and poor old government, which we have always regarded as doddering and incompetent, treads the stage in the role of teaching business how to be efficient. It was the War Industries Board of which Bernard M. Baruch was chairman that started the upheaval. The War Board ukased the manufacturers to drop everything but strict essentials, and at once remarkable discoveries were made in the number of things, processes, commodities, and machineries we could easily get along without. Throughout this period the National Chamber was the close ally of the board. When the war was over, executives in the chamber said that what was good for production in war times must be good for production in peace times. They turned to Secretary Hoover, and together they complotted the revolution.

The Department of Commerce has built within itself a Division of Simplified Practice. The National Chamber has built a Waste Elimination Bureau. The experts in both offices look at an industry as a doctor looks at a patient; they conclude that it is suffering from fatty degeneration

of too much. So the doctors intimate to the leaders in that line of business that a national conference is one of the grandest things in the world.

When the conference meets, the department and the chamber are prepared for it with the statistics and facts that show the waste. The conference usually takes one good look at these and appoints a committee to consider the spillage and how it may be stopped. It is a wise committee; it reports a plan, the conference adopts the report to go into effect on a certain date as a trade agreement, and the next thing the retailer knows, instead of being bothered with 27 kinds of wash-boilers, there is but one.

All this, being the affair of one trade, nobody else pays attention tɔ. Yet day by day we pay attention to a thousand things that are nothing to us compared with this. For if we multiply the wasteful conditions about wash-boilers into every product of every factory, we fetch up among figures that soar and sums that dazzle. In 1921 the Federated American Engineering Society experts, headed by Mr. Hoover, undertook a survey of conditions in six great typical American industries and laid bare things that struck the attentive into an amazed silence.

They found the preventable waste in these industries ranged from 29 to 64 per cent, the average waste among them all being 49 per cent. And these six industries-textiles, metals, boots and shoes, printing, building, men's ready-made clothing-were supposed to be among the most carefully managed of all that make our industrial greatness.

From this shattering fact they deduced another. They concluded that the total of preventable waste in all American industry must be something

like ten billion dollars a year. Ten billion dollars a year-it is the total cost of all government in the United States, plus the cost of all automobiles sold here in a year, plus the cost of all the gasolene sold to run them, plus the cost of all the American homes built in a year.

Ten billion dollars, and all waste. Not because of anybody's incompetence. Custom, competition, and tradition accounted for almost the whole of it-and the reluctance of the American to cooperate.

Upon this condition of disaster the plans of the department and the chamber arose with healing in their wings. As for instance, what do you know about paving-bricks? Probably not much; and care no more. Yet you might wisely know and care, for they come up annually in your tax-bill. Up to 1922 there were 66 varieties of them manufactured in the United States, although every manufacturer knew that 84 per cent of the business was done in five of the 66 styles.

But to make the 66 the manufacturer must have 66 different molds and patterus. He must stop a factory hand at work with one pattern and have him substitute another. He must have warehouse space to carry the sacred 66, carrying many of them for years with little or no sale but with tax, interest, and insurance charges running all the time against them. He must invoice them and watch them and handle them as if they really meant something in his life when they meant nothing-except bother.

The brick-makers came to Washington in a national conference. And today instead of 66 varieties of paving-brick there are only four, the consumer is as well satisfied, work is better at the factories, and the manufacturers are saving a million dollars a year.

The always lengthening list of industries remade now includes many that directly affect people's lives and households' budgets. Range-boilers afford one illustration. Manufactur

ers were making 130 varieties. To produce them was a heavy burden; to store and try to distribute them an-other. As for the poor retailer, to carry them, account for them, protect them, and have capital invested in them, were so many items in the load he must try to shift to the consumer's tottering back. There was a national conference, a committee, a report, and 117 varieties of range-boilers disappeared into the past.

Hardware manufacturing underwent a great change. Of the simple tack and the nail 426 kinds were being marketed. A committee buried 217 of these. Of shovels, scoops, and spades there were 4460 varieties on the market. A committee actually knocked out 4076 of these as being redundant, with an annual saving of about ten million dollars.

In the days when there were 40 varieties of steel reinforcing bars for use with concrete in building operations, some dealers felt obliged to carry as much as 150,000 or even 200,000 tons, for which the needless costs in space, time, labor, and capital were reflected in the cost of building and thence into the tenant's rent. After a committee had cut out 29 of the 40 varieties, the dealer that had car ried 200,000 tons found he needed only 75,000, while $4,500,000 of annual waste had been elided from the nation's industry.

were

One plow-bolt would seem about like another. Yet 1500 varieties of them manufactured in the United States. When a farmer bought a plow with a certain kind of bolt and the time came to renew that bolt he must get one of the original kind if the country had to be raked to find it. Say the plows sold in one farming community comprised 400 kinds of bolts, the dealer in that town must keep on hand all of the 400, although of half of them he might not sell a cent's worth in ten years. Joy must have been unconfined in those pre cincts when a committee knocked out 44 per cent of the plow-bolts.

(To be continued)

Confessions of an Ex-Feminist

Condensed from The New Republic (April 4, '26)

Anonymous

Ma feminist-or rather, I was a feminist. In the old days I was one of the most ardent of all the defenders of every sort of measure which would spell equality and freedom for women-votes, birth control, the removal of legal discrimination. Since those days I am greatly changed. What has changed me is matrimony. In six years of married life I have gradually but surely descended from that blithe, enthusiastic, cocksure young person I was eight or ten years ago, to the colorless, housewifely, dependent sort of female I used to picture so pathetically and graphically to my audiences-the kind we must all have a chance not to be!

tice, he has not helped me and has often stood in the way.

For, let me admit it promptly, I have failed and failed ignominiously, in putting my theories into practice. As wife, housewife and mother, I am a fairly complete success, but as an individual I have amounted to nothing. I am like a vine with two branches: one branch grows and blooms luxuriantly, but the other is so bruised and stunted it is almost dead.

I

I am a very fortunate woman. have a splendid husband who, after six stormy years of matrimony, is still my lover as I am his. I have a beautiful daughter of four, radiant in health and spirits, and I have the deep satisfaction of knowing that her happiness and welfare are largely due to the devoted and unstinted care I have given her in these first impor

In those golden days of youth I wanted the rich domestic life of husband, home and babies that my mother's generation enjoyed and in addition to this I insisted emphati- tant years of her life. cally upon a complete individual life of work, contact and achievement in the outside worid. Like my husband, I would go out during the day to the world of work and toil and achievement, and together at night we would enjoy and tend our common fireside. In those days, there were no doubts of the practicability of such a life for me. My husband-to-be would be the type of man who would be sympathetic to my point of view-an advocate of the rights and equality of

Women.

Such a husband mine held every promise of being. He believed that I should have my work, my career, a8 well as home and babies. Yet it has been his attitude, largely sub-conscious, perhaps, that has caused my fail. ure. He has given lip-service to my aspirations, but when it has come to the difficulty of putting them into prac

But I am also a profoundly unhappy woman. For I am outside the stream of life and only a spectator. At present I am merely background -pleasant, important, perhaps necessary background, I admit-for two other individuals. I have no separate, integral life of my own. I long for Instead, engrossing, satisfying work. my days are devoted to a round of petty, tiresome details, with the benefit and comfort of these two individuals as an end.

In my inexperienced days I used to say that if matrimony proved unsuccessful, a woman should up and out. Her child, if any? Take it along and support it herself. Now, though I trust I still retain a reasonable selfrespect, I should think once, twice, thrice and profoundly, before I would up and out. I should be fearful of my ability to make my way, with a

child clutching me, in that economic struggle where I lost my place in line shortly before the child was born.

Take this business of jobs, as it exists before matrimony is complicated with children. In the old days I could earn a better salary than could my husband; but when it came to what I considered our joint job, the housekeeping, I had no luck in getting my lover to see my point of view. He would not do his share. My male burnt the toast with malice, grumbled or just bolted, and won out that way. Now he has his coffee in bed! (Of course, this damnable maternal instinct that loves to coddle and make comfortable the creature it loves, has a lot to do with this.)

As for joint care of our child-I lost again. When I staunchly argued that this business of getting up for 2:00 A. M. bottles should be done by turns, he said: "Can't do it-I must be fresh for my job." But his job was a lazy, six-hour one, while, as I pointed out, mine, with a house and child, was a 14, sometimes 24 hour one, and I also needed to be fresh.

"But if I lose mine," he argued, "where will the bread and butter come from?" I lost again, for I could not, at that time, bring in bread and butter.

Intelligent care-takers for children are extremely expensive and rare; and I would not entrust my child's continual care to the type of nurse or maid we could afford.

As for "economic independence": Last week I went shopping. I discovered my purse was empty. I had forgotten to ask my husband for cash and he was out of town for the day. I had no checking account so I could do no shopping. More dependent was I than my thoroughly domesticated mother, who did, sometimes, get some of her own butter and egg money.

As I look about at my various feminist friends I can point to none who has made a complete success of the

demand for a

full-sided existence.

Some have interesting work; but to be free for that they have chosen not to have children. They, like myself, = Those who have only half a loaf. have work and children, too, are all They are overworked, overdriven. continually drawing on their reserve of physical and nervous energy. Most of them have modern-minded husbands; but all of these, like mine, complacently take it for granted that, while their wives have work in the outside world as strenuous as their own, it is still up to them, being women, to see that the domestic job runs smoothly. Some of my friends But in have maids, some do not. either case the responsibility of work or supervision is up to them.

Have I suggested that in my own case my husband was chiefly to blame for my failure? Well, that is neither accurate nor fair. The shortcomings and weakness of my own natureshall I say, of my sex?—are equally to blame. We women for countless generations have been too pliant, too ready to give ourselves to coddling and making comfortable our grown children, our men. From squaw days down we have been too ready to let them tell us that our business is attending to “details."

The maternal instinct, I am convinced, has been a sinister, as well as a blessed, force in the world. With invisible but powerful hands it draws us would-be career-following women back into the old ways. It prevents our being ruthless, as men are, in realizing our individual ambitions and personal satisfaction. Simliarly, the instincts bred in the bone for generations cause our modern husbands, while giving lip-service to our femin ist creed, to feel, in any real crisis where sacrifice is demanded of them, that the best is for the male and the rest for the woman. At any rate, this has been so for my husband and me; and therefore, as a feminist who would put feminism into practice, I am a failure.

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