TAMMANY AND FUSION

T

HE Mayoralty election this autumn in New York City is a matter of National as well as of municipal interest. Only three of the forty-nine States of the Union have a population larger than that of New York City. To a very large extent the physical, mental, and moral welfare of its six million inhabitants is in the control of its Mayor; not that the Mayor is himself an allpowerful autocrat, like Lorenzo de' Medici, the great Mayor of Florence, but by his appointments and by his influence the Mayor of the city of New York exercises an authority which in a way is more concentrated and direct than the authority of the President of the United States.

It is not necessary to accuse Mayor Hylan of corruption in order to state his unfitness for the great administrative position which he holds. He is incompetent by training and education. It is one of the curious phenomena of democracy that a population which would not for a moment tolerate John F. Hylan as principal of a grammar school, nevertheless puts him practically in charge of the entire educational system of the city. It is not of course necessary that the Mayor should know how to teach school, but it is necessary that he should know something about the principles of education, and enough, at least, to enable him to select the experts who are going to conduct the school system.

It is a matter of common report that if Tammany had really believed that it was going to win the Mayoralty election four years ago it would never have nominated John F. Hylan. It is also commonly supposed that Mayor Hylan has the support and backing of William Randolph Hearst. This also seems to us to be a very curious human phenomenon. Mr. Hearst, whatever may be said of his principles, is a man of ability, and he selects men of ability as his leaders in his vast publishing business. Unless we are very much mistaken, John F. Hylan is one of the last men that he would put in charge of the business management of one of his newspapers or magazines, and yet he does all he can to put this incompetent in charge of the greatest human magazine in the United States-the City of New York.

The anti-Hylan forces. usually known as the Fusion Committee, have made

AUGUST 17, 1921

their nominations of candidates to oppose the present city administration. They have selected Henry H. Curran, at present President of the Borough of Manhattan, for their candidate for Mayor; State Senator Charles E. Lockwood for Comptroller; and Vincent Gilroy for President of the Board of Aldermen. These are the chief officers of the city ticket. Messrs. Curran and Lockwood are Republicans; Mr. Gilroy is an

(C) Paul Thompson HENRY H. CURRAN, FUSION CANDIDATE FOR MAYOR OF NEW YORK CITY

independent Democrat, a member of Tammany Hall, and a supporter of Mayor Hylan four years ago. The ticket is generally considered to be a good one. Mr. Curran is a graduate of Yale, a lawyer of clean reputation, and has been active in city politics for ten years. He has been a city magistrate, served in the World War with an excellent record, having attained the rank of major in service, and has been an admirable administrative officer as President of the Borough of Manhattan. Senator Lockwood is a graduate of the public schools, is a lawyer, and has been in the State Legislature for nearly ten years.

The popular issue in the campaign is the transit issue-Shall the surface and subway railways charge a five-cent fare or more? The real issue is the efficient

as

economical management of the city's business. It cost about $275,000,000 to run this city last year, a sum provided by the inhabitants, non-taxpayers well as taxpayers. The non-taxpayer pays his share in the increased cost of rent, food, and fuel which comes frori excessive and inefficiently administered taxation. Another curious phenomenon of democracy is that thousands of men will pay each many hundreds of dollars for costly housing, food, sanitation, and schooling, due to an inefficient mayor, without complaint, and will support him for office because he professes that he is going to save them a few cents a day in transportation.

The Fusion candidate, Mr. Curran, has not only got to run against Mayor Hylan, but probably against one or more misguided independent candidates. If the citizens really and vitally interested in a businesslike and efficient government of the city could really get together, Mayor Hylan could easily be defeated. The question is whether they can combine, or whether they will be diverted by jealousies, petty political ambitions, and false issues from opposing a united Tammany.

In an effort to improve industrial conditions, the Pennsylvania State Legislature created some years ago the Department of Labor and Industry, with various subdivisions, one of which, the Bureau of Mediation and Conciliation, exists for the sole purpose of trying to end strikes by reason rather than by force. The Bureau of Mediation is headed by a chief who, under the law, goes in person or sends suitable substitutes to places where labor disputes occur, and endeavors by mediation to bring the two sides to an understanding. Failing in this, he may offer to arrange for arbitration. There is nothing in the law, however, that compels either the employer or the employee to accept the services offered.

The success of such a bureau is largely dependent upon the character of the man who heads it. In this respect Pennsylvania has had rare good fortune. Mr. Patrick Gilday took charge of

Bureau of Mediation at its inception, and made it of great usefulness to Pennsylvania industry and Pennsylvania workers. Mr. Gilday was a selfmade man who worked up through the various grades of coal mining until he became an expert. His kindliness, wisdom, and humanity made him a natural leader. For nearly twenty-five years he was the first official of one of the great divisions of the United Mine Workers of America. He had also been one of the conciliators of the National Government.

For two and a half years, until his death, he served as chief of the Bureau of Mediation. During that period he or his subordinates settled more than three hundred strikes, which is at the rate of one strike every three days. And these strikes were not merely temporarily suspended. They were settled. So great was the confidence won for this bureau by Mr. Gilday's work that after his death the machinery continued to function along the lines he had laid down for it, and strike after strike is now adjusted and ended that without this agency of mediation would drag on in bitter desperation.

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How these adjustments are plished can best be shown, perhaps, by quoting from a letter that Mr. Gilday wrote to an inquirer: "Our first step is to ascertain the true and complete facts in the situation at issue as well as in other related situations as to wages, hours, etc., in like or similar industries, and lay this information before the parties at interest. . . . The State mediators always try to exert an impartial endeavor to see that full justice is accorded both employer and employee. The success of the efforts of the mediators has been largely because they have been able to get both sides to reason together without passion or personal feeling. The mediators have been able, many times, after they have surveyed the situation, to offer a plan in which both sides can agree."

Necessarily the course pursued by the mediator must vary with the particular situation he faces. This item from the Venango "Daily Herald" shows how one particular case was handled: "Mr. M. T. Fredericks, representing the Department of Labor and Industry at Harrisburg, was responsible for bringing about a talk by General Charles Miller, chairman of the board of the Franklin Manufacturing Company, to the striking employees. As a result of this talk and the resulting conferences, the difficulty was adjusted. The function of the Department of Labor and Industry in the handling of labor matters seems to rest purely in the bringing of the two contending factions to a clear understandng of one another's positions, and to

keep all material offered for discussion within proper limits."

During its few years of existence the Bureau of Mediation and Conciliation has brought about the adjustment of many hundreds of labor controversies that affected thousands of workers, that caused the loss in wages of many hundreds of thousands of dollars, that occasioned untold hardships, and that would have resulted in further suffering and perhaps in bloodshed had they not been thus ended. Here is an agency of government appointed for the specific purpose of settling strikes that is actually settling them.

LORD BRYCE AND THE
WASHINGTON CONFERENCE

F the Institute of Politics now in session at Williamstown, Massachusetts, under the auspices of Williams College, has done nothing else than provide a group of thoughtful hearers for the series of lectures or addresses by Lord Bryce, it would have justified its existence.

Lord Bryce, better known in this country as James Bryce, the author of "The American Commonwealth," is one of the greatest living experts on the theory and practice of government. He combines ripe knowledge and high ideals with common sense and an understanding of human relationships. While he never uses the language of the alarmist, he evidently thinks Europe is in a dangerous condition. He does not believe that the Treaty of Peace made at Versailles was wisely framed or can be successfully carried out. This is not because Lord Bryce believes it is impossible to organize an association of nations to maintain peace and justice. On the contrary, he is a believer in such an association. The trouble, in his opinion, is that the Peace Conference at Versailles endeavored to settle definitely too many geographical, racial, and political details and did not deal enough with general principles.

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The task before the negotiators at Paris, he says, "was one of unprecedented difficulty. New states had to be created, territories redistributed, and indemnities secured, and all on a scale incomparably greater than any international congress ever before had tempted. A task so great needed not politicians of the usual type, but persons of the class which we now call supermen; persons who possessed not only profound and accurate knowledge of the facts they had to deal with, but also a wide vision, a grasp of fundamental principles, a calm judgment raised above the revengeful passions of the moment, persons who loved and sought justice, looking beyond the present to the fu

ture, seeking the good of mankind as well as the advantage of their respective nations, able to appreciate the workings of those better forces which alone can bring reconcilement and peace to a distracted world. Such men did not ap

pear."

Lord Bryce answers the question as to why they did not appear by saying that they could not have been expected, since the delegates to the Conference were bound by the national ambitions, jealousies, and passions of the constituents who sent them. Is there any cure for this unhappy situation? "The prospect of improving the relations of state and people to one another depends on the possibility of improving human nature itself. A sound and wide view of national interests, teaching the peoples that they would gain more by the cooperation of communities than by their conflict, may do much to better those relations. But in the last resort the question is one of the moral progress of the individual men who compose the communities."

This is sound doctrine, and a doctrine which we think is beginning to make an impression. The Washington Conference called by President Harding is based on moral rather than on political and geographical relationships. If it can be maintained on this basis, there is considerable hope that it may be successful in some of the respects in which the Paris Conference failed. It does no good to sneer at this moral or ethical basis of an international association as the aspiration of over-pious and impractical minds. As a matter of fact, the attempt to attain world peace by means of political and economic forces has failed. It can at least do no harm to have an international conference in which obligations and duties take precedence over rights and privileges.

Lord Bryce's lectures at Williamstown make us wish that he might represent Great Britain at the Washington Conference instead of Lloyd George. We mean by this no reflection on the personality or purposes of the British Prime Minister. But he was one of the Big Four at the Paris Conference who failed, and if he comes to Washington as the leader of the British delegation we fear that public interest in the Conference may be diverted from the principles and issues in debate to the personalities of the debaters.

seniority rule which has long obtained. The precedent now established will be followed, we are informed, in the next reorganization of the House, when more capable men will be placed at the head of those committees whose present chiefs are regarded as weak.

Mr. Madden has been a member of the House since 1905. His recommendation by the House Committee on Committees for the Chairmanship of the Appropriations Committee was followed by a unanimous vote of ratification from the House.

The new Chairman started his new work by introducing a resolution certainly important in the direction of budget reform. The Appropriations Committee has the responsibility for that reform in the House of Representatives, and Mr. Madden's resolution may, we think, be regarded as an essential corollary to the Budget Act. As the Constitution, authorizing the President to veto any bill passed by Congress, does not authorize him to veto any single item, Mr. Madden offered a joint resolution empowering the President to disapprove any item or provision of an appropriation bill, while approving the remainder.

Some States give this power to their Governors. Why should not the PresiIdent have it? The amendment should have been adopted long ago. It would have permitted our Presidents to eliminate many an extravagant "rider."

The adoption by Congress of Mr. Madden's resolution will also show how earnest that body is with regard to the campaign for economy in expenditures now that it will have, it may think, to clip its own wings a little.

ACQUITTAL, YES;
VINDICATION, NO

HE baseball players and gamblers'

Tagents accused of throwing games

in the World Series of 1919 have been acquitted by a jury. But the public remains convinced that there was crookedness that summer in which some players and some gamblers participated.

Our law does not admit of the old Scotch verdict, "Not proven." To prove beyond reasonable doubt is always difficult under a conspiracy charge. The jury must acquit if reasonable doubt exists. In these cases perjury was clearly committed by some one, for of the persons alleged to have taken part in a talk at a given time and place some swore that all were present, others the exact reverse. The jury could not deIcide which men were lying, nor do we attempt to decide. Such an acquittal is not a vindication.

Public opinion is not bound by the

technical law of criminal

evidence. Judge Landis, now the super-umpire of the two major baseball Leagues, says: "Just keep it in mind that, regardless of the verdicts of juries, baseball is entirely competent to protect itself against the crooks, both inside and outside the game." And the lovers of clean sport applaud Judge Landis's promise: "No player that throws a game, no player that undertakes or promises to throw a ball game, no player that sits in a con

MARTIN MADDEN, CHAIRMAN OF THE APPROPRIATIONS COMMITTEE OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

ference with a bunch of crooked players and gamblers where the ways and means of throwing games are planned and discussed and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball."

There has been some maudlin sympathy for the wives and children of the accused players. If the men are free from guilt, they and all theirs are entitled to sympathy. But it remains true that professional ball players of famous clubs are not nowadays penniless and needy; they are highly paid experts, often earning $10,000 a year or more. If such a man plays "dirty ball," he plays for plain, sordid greed. Again it is said that the players were pursued vindictively, the big gamblers laxly. This may or may not be true. But one man's fault does not excuse another. Bribe

givers and bribe-takers alike are the vermin of honest sport.

CHURCH UNION IN CANADA
PROBABLE

many church leaders in Canada who HERE is strong hope in the minds of have long worked for organic church unity as between Presbyterians, Methodists, and Congregationalists that the "United Church of Canada" will in the not distant future take shape and form. Recently the Presbyterian Church of Canada in its General Assembly voted by a large majority (414 to 107) that the time for union had come and appointed a representative committee to carry out the wishes of the Assembly by conferring with the other two religious bodies with whom organic union is desired.

One development in church life in Canada that has led to the feeling that there is no real obstacle to what sounds like a radical step has been the springing up of several hundred "Union Churches," organized on the proposed basis of union. These are neither Methodist nor Presbyterian, and they have "presbyteries," having oversight of pastoral charges. These Union charges have been urging the parent churches to hasten the organization of union, and threaten, if there is any further delay, to perfect their own organization of a new church.

It is now about ten years since the Congregational and Methodist churches in Canada declared themselves ready to proceed toward organic union with the Presbyterian churches upon the general lines of a basis which had been formulated in principle in previous years in discussions at successive Presbyterian General Assemblies. There seems, therefore, no radical difficulty likely now to be encountered.

The Moderator of the General Assembly of this summer, the Rev. Dr. Charles W. Gordon, better known to most of us by his pen name, Ralph Connor, before the important question was put said:

I think we all agree that we have passed through a great crisis in our history. I am not saying that there are no shadows along the horizon: I am saying this with every confidence that the deeper shadows are behind, and I am not going to allow any one to persuade me that anything untoward is going to befall our beloved Church in the days and months before us. I think we owe a vast deal of thanks to both sides of what has been a really burning question for their fine Christian and brotherly spirit.

A well-informed correspondent of The Outlook in Canada points out that Canada has been a particularly fruitful

ground for Church unions. The various bodies of Methodism from England and the United States organized branches there, and they took deep root. Since 1833 these different bodies have been drawn together, until in 1884 the final union took place which created the Methodist Church in Canada. Similarly the various bodies of Presbyterianism in Scotland, Ireland, and the United States had flourishing branches in Canada. Their unions began in 1861; and in 1875 the last combination took place that brought all the various branches into one great Church. These unions have been so happy and successful that they have paved the way for further consummations. Hence the present and greatest negotiations for union. These negotiating churches have over half a million members and claim two million adherents. Last year for a special Forward Movement they raised $10,000,000.

The membership figures of the Canadian Presbyterian Church may be with interest compared with those just made public for the Presbyterian Church (North) in the United States. The census lately completed shows a total communicant membership of 1,692,558, a net gain for the year of over 55,000.

one of the most beautiful cathedrals in the world, a monument of the first rank in history, art, and religion. It was a shining mark for the Boches during the war, and they arrived at Rheims as soon as possible after the war began. The war was declared on August 1, 1914, and on September 4 the Germans reached the cathedral city. For ten hundred and fifty-one days they bombarded it, with an average of a thousand shells a month. Most of its 125,000 inhabitants had fled. Of its seventeen thousand houses only fourteen were not damaged.

But what did the Germans care for mere houses when they could wreck a great cathedral? They discharged incendiary bombs charged with picric acid against it and finally set fire to some wooden staging. The fire spread to the roof and interior and destroyed them. The shells also destroyed the sandid twelfth and thirteenth cent glass, many pilasters, vaultings and culptures, and gashed the stone figures of the saints in the doorways.

Now

THE RESTORATION OF RHEIMS TOWHERE, the Germans knew, could they wreak vengeance that would hit harder than at Rheims, the religious cradle of France.

king. Now the statue of Joan, which was removed during the bombardment, has been set up again in its accustomed place before the Cathedral.

Nor can any one who has not visited the devastated regions of France and talked with the sufferers appreciate how much Ambassador Herrick's words the other day at Rheims meant to those sufferers. He said:

The eyes of the world are on France to-day, watching as eagerly for her recovery from the war's disasters as they watched before for her success in the war of justice. . . .

We know of the sacrifices you made at Rheims and the splendid work you have accomplished during the year that has passed since my last visit here. I am convinced that from the ruins of Rheims destroyed by war will arise a new Rheims which will be the sanctuary of beauty as it is the sanctuary of glory. . . .

I take this occasion again to proclaim my unalterable faith in the lofty and practical idealism that inspired the men who baptized this soil with their blood that the cause of right and liberty might live.

The occasion was the laying of the corner-stone of the Carnegie Library at Rheims. It was given by the Carnegie Foundation. Mayor Roche, in greeting Mr. Herrick and Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler (who, as President of the Foundation, tapped the stone into place), thanked the people of the United States for their work in the Rheims region, and all of the 80,000 inhabitants who have returned to Rheims and who could