When you see a yellow pine pipe-box or a kitchen stool go for more than a Renaissance enamel would bring or a crystal of the seventeenth century, you have, if you are blessed with a serene mind, two reflections: one, that this is after all pure collecting, collecting divorced from all meaning or beauty or use, like paying trebly for the copy of Keats with the misprint on the last page or one of the ten first stamps of Heligoland printed in the wrong brown through a misunderstanding on the engraver’s part—this is after all pure collecting as a legitimate pastime and quite harmless, better th READ MORE >>
Marseilles presents itself to you without preparation and without comment. It is there that the traveler first sees the Mediterranean; usually the tram goes on, and the traveler with it, to the Riviera or to Italy. Neither Marseilles nor the guide book invites you to stop. READ MORE >>
Why is there not a dragon in the sea With orange fins and purple fangs, Of monstrous length and mighty girth, Whose spume and opalescent Jet could be A blazing fright where water clangs Along the coasts of Earth? Through fire importuning the moon to thrust Its scythe at last to garner flame Cold phoenix throngs could hover. The world should be a ball of golden dust; Each of its creatures then might claim A more resplendent lover. READ MORE >>
The whole truth about the recent general strike in Great Britain has not yet been told; and perhaps it never will be told until the memoirs of the chief actors in the struggle are published. But we know enough of it already to be sure that when it comes it will be a strange story, smacking more of the fencing school than of the duelling ground, of comic opera than of tragedy. The second of these metaphors is the more pertinent, for certainly this “great struggle” belonged rather to the stage than to the world of reality. READ MORE >>
The miners had an unusually good case. They were being asked to accept, at the point of the sword wages which would have reduced tends of thousands of them down to, or even in some cases below, the level of bare subsistence. And this reduction, as well as an increase of hours, was being demanded by a group of men who are notoriously the most stupid, stubborn and inefficient set of employers in Great Britain. The miners therefore had the sympathy of the greater part of the public and also of the press. READ MORE >>
"And the Lorde was with Joseph and he was a luckie felowe."' —Genesis xx.xix. 2 (Tyndale's translation). READ MORE >>
The Agent-General, the Commissioners, the Controllers, all the Jack-Daws set up to keep a close eye on Germany, have issued their first Reports. They are clear and sensible documents, full of justice and common sense, and do credit to the corps of international civil servants, who—as one of the few good fruits of the Treaty of Versailles—are now, under the aegis of the Reparations Commission and the League of Nations, playing so big a part in the life of Europe. READ MORE >>
The Senate Committee, headed by Senator Walsh, is opening up a serious, if not a dangerous, breach in the defences of the administration. A corporation in which the Mellon family is largely interested is accused with some show of reason of conducting its business in defiance of the anti-trust law. A former Attorney-General of the United States, appointed by President Coolidge, believed it to be his duty to prosecute the corporation. But a majority of the Federal Trade Commission, also appointed by Mr. READ MORE >>
