ENGLAND OUR NEW APPRECIATION Goldwin Smith and other sensible people used to bemoan the schism in the AngloSaxon race. Episcopalians were almost the only people who felt kindly toward England, and this was was counted to them for a reproach. New England and Virginia had won the Revolution between them and, in the civil war, the English had first antagonized the North and then betrayed the South. At least that was our way of looking at it and it did not leave old England many friends among her children here. Of course those Americans not of English descent, New Netherland's Dutch, Huguenot, Pennsylvania Germans, Scotch, Irish, and the great nineteenth century immigration of Germans and Irish never liked England anyway. There are signs today that all this is changing and that we are beginning to close up the schism in the Anglo-Saxon race. About one-quarter of us are English. All of us speak and think in English. Our institutions are every one of them English. If America has any traditions, memories, ideals they are English or nothing. The very Revolution was not un-English, but, like the revolutions on British soil in 1640 and 1688, was a revolt to maintain against unlawful tyranny the ancient rights of Eng lishmen. The present international situation is bringing people to see these things. We are all realizing that the old English inheritance is something to be proud of; that we are a part of the mighty English-speaking world; that our share in this vast confederacy of free democracies in a possession to be claimed, a defence to be relied on, a duty and responsibility to be sustained. Of course we have had internecine conflicts in the past. What great, highspirited people has not? We do not minimize them, but we are beginning to transcend them and to see them in the great perspective of the painful evolution of freest, biggest racial unity the world has ever known. FOOD ECONOMIES Americans have been the most wasteful of all peoples. The exigencies of the present time will teach us lessons in economy which will be useful after the war is over. The Food Inspector, through the churches and synagogues, is going, on the twentythird of September, to send out enrollment cards. All families in the land are to be enrolled. Every effort is to be made to bring about economies. Reports are to be returned and the campaign will go on while the war lasts. We can eat more beef and less veal; more fish and less beef; more maize and less wheat. We can utilize local garden products which could not be exported. We can and should conserve for our allies the sinews of war, which have come to mean food almost more than anything else. This is a case where every one can help. Moreover almost every one will be benefited by helping. CONFIDENCE FADING IN GERMAN SCHOLARSHIP The schism between Western democracy and Prussianism cannot fail to have an effect on our attitude gogics. Not that the two sets of things toward German scholarship and peda have much to do with each other. It is rather that, having lost confidence in the Germans, we can reconsider their achievements impartially. For hitherto we have awarded German thought an undue favor. Partly because postgraduate study is a fact of continental invention, partly because the unlimited Protestantism of North Germany gave a certain freedom in handling problems not found at English and American colleges, partly, it may be, because it all came on us as something so new, German scholarship in the nineteenth century was revered as German. Every 霎 wild guesser, every ultra-radical who made an advertisement for himself out of his radicalism, every interminable emitter of hyper-involved periodic sentences was hailed as an authority, if only him hight Fuchs, Wolf, von, or zu, and also privat-dozent irgendwo anerkanut gewesen worden ist, nicht wahr? We hope that the end has come for all this. We shall continue to study Harnack and Loofs, Kant and Schopenhauer; but the mere irreverence and abuse of sacred things of a Duhm, the hazy, crazy, arrive-at-nothing emptiness of an Eucken, and very much more of that ilk will not continue to exact the almost: superstitious reverence of our thinkers and students, simply on the ground that their books are written in a language which has not yet achieved what the Eighteenth Century did for French and English: the evolution of a decent prose style. REACTION AGAINST The artificially stimulated enthusiasm for GERMAN IDEAS things German has caused an evolution of higher education in this country away from what used to be the English and American college. The American college was founded on the Oxford and Cambridge type. The course was prescribed and circumscribed. There was Latin, Greek, and Mathematics to be worked at, with senior-year courses in philosophy and Christian apologetics. Men did not study much English. It was assumed they knew English. In all their work English was not only assumed but insisted on. When they graduated they did know more English than the English department can teach. Men did some private reading in those days. There was much of religion, much of discipline, much of class-spirit, and much of ideals. It was considered the education of a gentleman. The German language has no word for gentleman. (Austrians use the English word in their dialect, Prussians eschew it.) So the German educational ideal, when introduced, proceeded to dissipate the education of a gentleman. Everything must be elective. The students had nothing forced on them. As far as possible, the undergraduates were encouraged to play they were postgraduates. This does not work badly in Germany. There, boys are locked up in a state prison called a gymnasium and subjected to Prussian discipline and espionage, until, although pretty well spirit-broken, they know more than most of our college-graduates think of knowing. By that time, the freedom of the German university is just what the men need who have stood the system so far. They go on and become scholars. The men who can not endure any more system take to beer and duelling. They are of an age where they are probably entitled to that. In America, we take the undisciplined darlings from their home-surroundings and put them into university-life, at a time when, in Germany, they would still be marching in the lock-step of the gymnasium. If they › ever become either gentlemen or scholars it must be because nothing can prevent it. 1 Incidentally it shows how little real ground for pharisaical pride the North has as against the South in the matter of race-prejudice. All Americans appear to be exactly alike in this particular. The difference between the sections, generally speaking, is simply that the South has the colored problem always with her and the North has not. There is a better way to treat ignorant and backward colored laborers, whether South or North, than the way of murder and intimidation. Religion, education, social service are better instruments to use. Now that the colored immigration is coming, the Church in the North should realize at once her duty to avail herself, at least wherever she is strong enough to do it, of these Christian means toward the solution of the difficult problem. In all industrial centers to which the colored laboring men come, the Church, diocesan and parochial, ought immediately to study the situation and to begin to make her contribution toward solving the problems and helping to raise the oppressed. THE RUSSIAN REPUBLIC * The proclamation of the Russian Republic is a milestone. In a sense also the finger points back to the Slavic past. For the Slavs are not naturally monarchical. Their states at the dawn of history were a rude sort of primitive republic. The Russian cities preserved the republican tradition into the sixteenth century. It was Ivan the Terrible who ruined Novgorod, wiped out her liberties, and carried away her great tocsin-bell to Moscow. Since then, the last gleam of Russian freedom has perished in the ever-gathering night of Tsardom. Whence came this sombre tyranny for which Russia has stood in the modern world? We unhesitatingly answer, that it was the union of the Teutonic war-lust and the Byzantine tradition of old Rome. Rurik was a Norseman of the ninth century, who, in the age when Danish pirates were conquering in England, Ireland, France and Italy, went down the Russian rivers instead of over the sea. He found, not great kingdoms like the Frankish and Anglo-Saxon states, but weak and thinly populated regions with a democratic tribal organization. Henceforth the iron heel of the Teuton war-lord was on the neck of the Slav and when Vladimir the Great married a Byzantine princess and received baptism, there came the bureaucratic tradition of Constantinople to organize the state the Norseman had conquered. All through history the autocratic influences have drawn their strength from the lands of their origins. The modern tsars have been as German as German wives and mothers could make them. The influential nobles were the Baltic nobles, all German colonizers. Such an empire could not fight Germany, but the Slav could. He has risen in his crude, national might and thrown off the Tsar, the Baltic nobles, the Byzantine bureaucracy, the whole superimposed, nonSlavic, un-Russian nightmare of a thousand years. Now we shall begin to learn to know the real Russia, the Russia hitherto in exile or "under ground," the Russia of Tolstoi and Krapotkin, and Dostoievsky, and Gorki, and the inimitable and free folk-poetry and folktale of the Russian people. SPIRIT OF A NEW NATION What the working out of the spirit of a mighty people liberated will be, we cannot prophesy. We must wait and observe. We can probably prophesy that it will be of great moment to Europe and America. Already the deep-seated, agrarian democracy of the Slavic soul has stamped the revolution and the republic as something very different from the middle-class revolutions which so exactly reproduced each other, one after another, in Western Europe. The bitter cry of the workers, the economic problems of our civilization, may find solu . tion and comfort in the new world that is inaugurated in the East. It is not merely the state that will benefit by the contributions of the liberated Slavs. Christianity has never yet really experienced the reaction of that race. Byzantinism has kept the Church of the Slavs tied to the chariot wheels of the Viking conquerors. Today a great free breath of democratic communion in the Gospel-spirit breathes beneath the gilded cupolas and through the cloistered lauras of that ancient Church. The awaking of a free participation in religion must give the West results not yet experienced. The Slav is a mystic. The depths of his mystical experience will be drawn upon as in the past for his religion. At last, however, the mystical expression can be free. We may hope eventually for contributions to our common Christianity which shall be new and compelling, very vital and very real. BACK ΤΟ THE EAST * * * The Churchman Company has undertaken a splendid service in assuming responsibility for the publication of The American Church Almanac and The Church Calendar. The former is the oldest and, we think in many respects, the most reliable of our church directories. It has had a varied career and its tendency has been rather toward the teachings of the ritualistic wing of the Church. Since The Living Church absorbed the Whittaker almanac the collective drift has been toward "catholic" exploitation. These directories have also been padded with a mass of extraneous impedimenta, digressions about the signs of the Zodiac, eclipses, vigils, etc., etc. makes one feel as if he were reading a patent medicine farmers' almanac. It And what a gift of gratuitous advice they have offered through opaque treatises and pink editorials concerning the definition of this Church, all written to support the a priori conviction or premise that this is "The Holy Catholic Church!!" Strange to say they are most unconvincing. Possibly some-one wants to know all about "The Succession of Bishops in the American Church," or "The American Episcopate,-Succession of American Bishops," which means in unvarnished phrase, The Succession of Bishops in the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America. This is genealogically, we admit, an interesting subject. There is no great objection to the paragraph at the head of this biographical table-a quaint piece of pleasantry extracted from the writings of Ignatius to the Trallians, appearing in Greek of course for greater edification, and which translated means, "Without these (bishops, presbyters and deacons), a Church is, not called." Some few like these sentiments. That is their affair. To others, however, it is still a message merely to the Trallians. Our Church embraces both sorts of opinion. What confounds us is when looking for some such important information we become hopelessly entangled with certain Anglican bishops who have resigned their sees, there are so many of them and unpronounceable names of Russian priests in the Aleutian Islands, Saskatchewan, Unalashka and throughout the United States, also Greek and Serbian clergy, not a few, distributed hereabouts. It all sounds like one of these uninspired emanations from that far-famed reliquary, "The Commission on Faith and Order." These are but a few hints of the tedium burdening these books. We believe that The Churchman will revise the Annual that it is soon to print and give the Church a real Protestant Episcopal Year book, not a mere guide of indifferent value to an ecclesiasticai antiquary shop. Facts of this Church's activities for the year, tables of lessons, a reliable clergy list, including the bishops, of course, and accurate information con Incidentally it shows how little real ground for pharisaical pride the North has as against the South in the matter of race-prejudice. All Americans appear to be exactly alike in this particular. The difference between the sections, generally speaking, is simply that the South has the colored problem always with her and the North has not. There is a better way to treat ignorant and backward colored laborers, whether South or North, than the way of murder and intimidation. Religion, education, social service are better instruments to use. Now that the colored immigration is coming, the Church in the North should realize at once her duty to avail herself, at least wherever she is strong enough to do it, of these Christian means toward the solution of the difficult problem. In all industrial centers to which the colored laboring men come, the Church, diocesan and parochial, ought immediately to study the situation and to begin to make her contribution toward solving the problems and helping to raise the oppressed. THE RUSSIAN REPUBLIC The proclamation of the Russian Republic is a milestone. In a sense also the finger points back to the Slavic past. For the Slavs are not naturally monarchical. Their states at the dawn of history were a rude sort of primitive republic. The Russian cities preserved the republican tradition into the sixteenth century. It was Ivan the Terrible who ruined Novgorod, wiped out her liberties, and carried away her great tocsin-bell to Moscow. Since then, the last gleam of Russian freedom has perished in the ever-gathering night night of Tsardom. Whence came this sombre tyranny for which Russia has stood in the modern world? We unhesitatingly answer, that it was the union of the Teutonic war-lust and the Byzantine tradition of old Rome. Rurik was a Norseman of the ninth century, who, in the age when Danish pirates were conquering in England, Ireland, France and Italy, went down the Russian rivers instead of over the sea. He found, not great kingdoms like the Frankish and Anglo-Saxon states, but weak and thinly populated regions with a democratic tribal organization. Henceforth the iron heel of the Teuton war-lord was on the neck of the Slav and when Vladimir the Great married a Byzantine princess and received baptism, there came the bureaucratic tradition of Constantinople to organize the state the Norseman had conquered. All through history the autocratic influences have drawn their strength from the lands of their origins. The modern tsars have been as German as German wives and mothers could make them. The influential nobles were the Baltic nobles, all German colonizers. Such an empire could not fight Germany, but the Slav could. He has risen in his crude, national might and thrown off the Tsar, the Baltic nobles, the Byzantine bureaucracy, the whole superimposed, nonSlavic, un-Russian nightmare of a thousand years. Now we shall begin to learn to know the real Russia, the Russia hitherto in exile or "under ground," the Russia of Tolstoi and Krapotkin, and Dostoievsky, and Gorki, and the inimitable and free folk-poetry and folktale of the Russian people. SPIRIT OF A NEW NATION * What the working out of the spirit of a mighty people liberated will be, we cannot prophesy. We must wait and observe. We can probably prophesy that it will be of great moment to Europe and America. Already the deep-seated, agrarian democracy of the Slavic soul has stamped the revolution and the republic as something very different from the middle-class revolutions which so exactly reproduced each other, one after another, in Western Europe. The bitter cry of the workers, the economic problems of our civilization, may find solu |