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It hardly seems probable that the banker in 'Good Business' of the November issue died from shock, for the article contains nothing really new, although the facts as stated cannot be denied. Yet, anyone familiar with the real values of life knows that there are some compensations which are above even 'Good Business' and which money cannot buy.

The banker did not talk Horace with his English butler, nor did he put into the hands of his head chauffeur his rare collection of early editions. He paid them each a salary for services rendered. There was, on the other hand, a nonnegotiable bond between the banker and 'the humble instructor' which was tied up with the genial wit and lyric grace of a poet.

As I write this, I am on a train which is bearing me away from a university town, where for eighteen hours I have seen the culture and the charm that 'Good Business' can never buy. The contacts reach out from that quiet, scholarly group of people to the ends of the earth; and the international, understanding minds, which will some day save 'Good Business' and America, are there being developed and conserved.

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Permit me to call attention to the article of one Paul Ernest Anderson in the December issue of the Atlantic, entitled 'Tramping with Yeggs.'

In the concluding paragraph of his article Mr. Anderson states, 'In the end, perhaps, only darkest and most backward Arkansas will be left as his (the tramp yegg's) sole huntingground.'

This statement is so misleading that one comes to suspect that the whole article is rather worthless; nevertheless I feel it must not pass unchallenged.

For the information of Mr. Anderson and his yeggs, it is a fact substantiated by the insurance

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companies that there are fewer bank-robberies in Arkansas than in most of the states of the Union, New England excepted. Moreover, the records of these companies are more likely to be precise than are the statements of any of Mr. Anderson's associates. It is well to note here, for the benefit of Mr. Anderson's friends, that in practically all the cases of bank-robbery, whether daylight or yegg method, the criminals have been apprehended and are now serving sentences of from twenty-five years to life duration.

Mr. Anderson would impress his readers that the knights of nitroglycerin are accustomed to hold the entire population of ‘yokels' at bay by simply firing a few shots over the heads of the citizenry, which reduces them infallibly to a state of abject terror. I wonder if Mr. Anderson ever read the story of the Siloam Springs Bank robbery?

Yes, Mr. Anderson, this is the Bible Belt but it is also the Shotgun Belt. Yours sincerely,

J. P. FISHER

Here is a challenge for someone who understands Einstein.

SIR!

I beg to report the finding of geometric explanation of why twice two is four.

I use 'positive geometry and logic' originated entirely by myself, after thirty-two years of effort.

By results of this finding, I offer to disqualify the current "Theory of Relativity' which I understand to be postulated by one Einstein as a universal condition; such disqualification to be accomplished in not more than two hours, before a competent jury.

I shall criticize or suggest nothing; the jury is to make its own conclusions.

Being without education whatsoever, I command no scientific credit whatsoever.

Reasons for disqualification of the 'theory' are unprecedented and of utmost importance to future actual civilization of mankind in general and of white race in particular.

Your good offices or return of this letter with or without comment are requested by,

Yours truly,

R. A. SEDLACEK

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MARCH, 1926

LAWRENCE OF THE HEJAZ

BY EDMUND CANDLER

We shall have to wait a long time for the truth about Lawrence and his Hejaz expedition. The public edition of his Seven Pillars of Wisdom is to appear in 1927; the private edition, limited to a hundred copies, sometime in 1926. In the meanwhile the really zealous pilgrim may consult the original Oxford edition in the Bodleian, of which five copies exist, printed on a hand press. But he had better make haste, for the author's tyrannous and exacting literary conscience has condemned these volumes to an auto-da-fé. I am not sure if the Bodleian copy is to be destroyed with the other four. It is to be hoped not, since the limited edition, which is to appear Phoenix-like out of the ashes, is not to be a complete resurrection. Some twenty per cent of the original text will be omitted. The revision is, I believe, regarded as an improvement from the technical point of view of unity and perspective, but I should be sorry to lose one of those hundred and forty chapters. The public edition will comprise a little more than a third of the Oxford text. Still, as it runs to 120,000 words, nobody will have a right to complain of short

measure.

In the original text there are many

VOL. 137-NO. 3

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books - a history, an intimate human document, a book of travel, a war book much more exciting than a novel, a code of philosophy, a manual of irregular desert-warfare. Which of the many books are going into the public edition I cannot say. I doubt if we find the real Lawrence in it, as we have pieced him together from inferences and confidences in the quarto. He is a quietist, a visionary, a scholar with a passion for the classics, a poet himself in his own medium, but ridden by a demon of self-criticism and self-distrust; and his Seven Pillars of Wisdom falls short of his standard.

He hates noise, and does not care a rush what people say or think of him so long as they leave him alone. One of the many legends about the liberator of the Hejaz I can vouch for as true that for greater privacy and detachment he quitted his fellowship at All Souls to become a private in the Air Force under an assumed name.

Lawrence's flight from the limelight, his refusal of decorations and rewards, his general self-effacement, have been attributed, by people who do not understand his shyness, to vanity—a subtle sort of self-advertisement. I saw him described the other day by the editor

of a reputable London journal as a very vain boy who loved to dress up in Arab clothes. The article speciously discounted his Arabian achievement. Lawrence has been so obstinate in not coming out to receive his ovationand worse, in locking up his bookthat he has made a number of people impatient.

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There is also a class of soldier Allenby and his Staff - that has misunderstood him. As an amateur and an irregular he was suspect of the professional. He broke all the rules. In appearance he is academic and aloof, not a comfortable or clubbable person. I confess to certain misgivings on my own part when I first saw him among soldiers in his stainless khaki Staff uniform in Mesopotamia. He had come over from Egypt on some chimerical political errand-which, incidentally, he detested. This was before his Hejaz campaign, and it never occurred to me that he could fight. And I doubt if it had occurred to him. He was not born a man of action, but had to cast himself in this clay.

That he was able to put himself into the Arab mould seemed, to all who were merely acquainted with him, a miracle. Physically he had been condemned as unfit for active service, but his body was driven by his spirit, and he became as efficient and enduring in the desert as his Bedouin companions. His habits of the recluse helped him here. He had always made it a rule to avoid rules in food and drink and sleep and rest 'not to regulate my life by hours and bells.' Thus he was able to go dry between wells.

But this haphazard, unsociable hermit's existence does not qualify one for command. Lawrence shrank from responsibility and action. Men were not his medium; he hated soldiering, and felt himself unfitted for it. True, he had dabbled in theory. As an

undergraduate of catholic interests he had read the usual books - Clausewitz and Jomini, Mahan and Foch; he had played with Napoleon's campaigns, worked at Hannibal's tactics, and followed the wars of Belisarius, 'like other Oxford men,' but without thinking himself into the mind of a commander. However, his studies in strategy and military history must have been more than an academic hobby. After he left Oxford, but before the war, he knew Syria exactly, and had the strategic geography of the Crusaders and the first Arab conquest in his head. Thus during a lull in the fighting, when he made a secret excursion in disguise behind the Turkish lines, he was able to adjust his knowledge of the terrain and its possibilities to the new factors in the game - the railways in Syria and Murray's army in Sinai.

Lawrence probably knew as much about the technique of war as many professional soldiers. But he owed little to Foch or Clausewitz; he was not a book theorist, and he distrusted axioms. One detects a thinly disguised contempt for the text-crammed Staff College officer, not in his own sphere of shock tactics, but in his inability to understand Lawrence's irregular guerrilla activities- a form of warfare which he invented, suitable to his material, reducible to no rules, but informed with an uncanny insight into the Arab's temper and psychology.

An enthusiast was needed who was a specialist in Arabian affairs, and Lawrence alone had the sympathy, vision, imagination, the 'touch' with the Bedou; combined with, as it proved, an entirely unexpected genius for handling men, and, more unexpected still, a practical knack of making his dreams material. Thus he became one in the historical succession of England's emergency men.

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