A. P. Herbert, whose initials are a trademark of wit, is an editor of Punch, who tells us his recreations are writing, reading, and making friends-all happily combined in the present drama. ¶Statistician, economist, and author, Dr. I. M. Rubinow, a holder of three degrees (B.A., Ph.D., M.D.), is a middle-aged father whose children are now in college. ¶For eleven weeks M. M. W., a victim of sleeping sickness, lived, moved, and had her being in another world. Then, not only did she recover, but on her return to normal existence she brought with her a store of recollections as vivid as they are inexplicable. Psychologists, attention! ЧА happy discovery has brought to light the wide-ranging letters of the second President, John Adams, to Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse

letters covering thirty years and most of the subjects under the sun. Further portions of this correspondence will appear in a succeeding issue. A member of an old Sussex family, Violet A. Simpson has written smuggling tales of that seacoast, as well as modern and historical novels of London.

An Englishwoman of letters, Dorothy Margaret Stuart makes her début in our columns. Like his famous grandfather, Bernard Darwin has lived the life he loves. A great golfer, he has played for England against Scotland and against the United States, and has twice reached the semifinals of the Amateur Championship. And in the rigor of the game he has never lost the pleasure of it, as golfers know who for decades have followed his regular correspondence in the London Times. ¶Since his graduation from the Yale Divinity School in 1915, Reinhold Niebuhr has been pastor of the Bethel Evangelical Church of Detroit. It is a pleasure to announce that Mazo de la Roche is the winner of the Atlantic Novel Prize of $10,000. Since the first of the year our office has been piled

high with bulky manuscripts, which by the closing date had exceeded eleven hundred. By gradual degrees the number was reduced to six, then to three, and finally, by unanimous vote, to 'Jalna.' A young Canadian, Miss de la Roche had her first short stories accepted by the Atlantic a decade ago. First a writer of whimsical juveniles, she now comes into her own as a novelist of bold and original power. Likewise a Canadian, Frances Beatrice Taylor is on the staff of the London Free Press, London, Ontario. Edith Ronald Mirrielees has contributed stories and essays to the Atlantic. As Director of the Blue Hill Observatory of Harvard University, Alexander McAdie is on more intimate, more jovial terms with the elements than most of us.

In her many years' residence in China, Nora Waln has learned the dialect of every province in which she has been stationed. An American by birth and the wife of an English Civil Servant, she was at her husband's side through the hot days of the Nationalist uprising. Henry W. Nevinson, special correspondent to the world at large, has observed, over a period of thirty years, the outbreaks of war, famine, and turbulence that scar our globe. Of more pacific interest is his recent visit to the New Zion, where he passed several months. Publicist and a solicitor of his native city, Cork, John J. Horgan has inherited and sustained an active interest in the Nationalist movement. His father was an intimate friend of Parnell, and his election agent in all his political campaigns.

**

We are sorry not to include this month letters regarding a paper which has been discussed with an intensity of feeling recalling few parallels in our experience. For publishing its analysis of the Sacco-Vanzetti Case, the Atlantic has been extolled and vili

fied, reasoned with and patted on the back.

We enter no defense for an article characteristic of the Atlantic's continuous policy of seventy years; but it seems fair that critics who believe no evidence should be discussed while still within the jurisdiction of the courts should realize that the fortunes of Sacco and Vanzetti have been under such jurisdiction for six years, and that in such a case the single alternative to free speech lies in the subsequent publication of an obituary notice.

After all, under our happy American custom, criticism should be free unless the case against it is urgent and overwhelming. For the rest, we ask the privilege of quoting from an editorial in the Brooklyn Eagle:

Those who think of the Atlantic Monthly as a literary magazine, and wonder that it gives space in its March issue to an article by Felix Frankfurter scathingly treating the nonjudicial attitude of Judge Thayer in trying the Sacco-Vanzetti cases, forget that eleven years after he had electrified New England with the Biglow Papers, first series, excoriating the Mexican War, James Russell Lowell became the first editor of the Atlantic, and that most of the poems of the second series, in which Civil War patriotism and reconstruction patriotism were the themes, were written at the solicitation of James T. Fields and published in the Atlantic. Lowell was then Professor of Belles-Lettres at Harvard. Felix Frankfurter is a Harvard Law School professor. Harvard and the Atlantic have nothing to do with politics. With dignified and earnest Americanism they have been identified for seventy years.

In turning the big guns of the Atlantic Monthly on Judge Webster Thayer, the magazine's management lives up to the highest traditions of the Atlantic. Professor Frankfurter does not use weasel words. Of the Thayer opinion denying a new trial he says: "The opinion is literally honeycombed with demonstrable errors, and a spirit alien to judicial utterances pervades the whole.'

The Reverend Mr. Parrish's prophecy of the disruption of Protestantism has been received with mingled concern and repudiation. From the correspondence we have selected two letters as representative of the more tolerant opinion. That Mr. Parrish is not alone in his conclusions is clearly evidenced by the sermon recently delivered by the Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick at Appleton Chapel.

Every minister will understand the mood which, in all probability, prompted the writing of "The Break-up of Protestantism.' It is the mood of a tired soul, as old as Elijah when he fled to the wilderness after his conflict with the Priests of Baal and Ahab and Jezebel, and wished to die, because he supposed he alone was left to defend the worship of Jehovah. I suppose every minister has written a sermon on substantially the same lines, after a long strain of work under peculiarly discouraging conditions. I hope one of Mr. Parrish's parishioners will take him soon on a fishing trip.

Protestantism will not break up; neither will Catholicism. They may change organically, but neither Protestantism nor Catholicism is an ecclesiastical system only. They are types of temperament. There are Catholics within Protestantism, and Protestants within Catholicism. If Luther had not initiated Protestantism, someone else would have. For the despotism of Catholicism was due for a revolt sooner or later. It was inherent in human nature. Any discerning, broad-minded Catholic knows that Protestantism helps to keep Catholicism alive. Left to run her course, Catholicism would become so despotic that she would again develop revolt. No man can be trusted with too much power, neither king, nor pope, nor priest. It is a matter of history.

A business friend of mine in New York has on his desk a motto which flashed into my mind as I laid down Mr. Parrish's article: 'Startling, if true!' For instance, it is evident at a glance that in his outlook on the present-day Sunday School Mr. Parrish is writing from Episcopalian data. Many of the things he says are not true of the Sunday Schools of Nonconformist churches.

One of the elements of Elijah's depression was that he thought he was alone in the fight. He discovered later that there were seven thousand others who had not bowed the knee to Baal. Perhaps a broader outlook on churches of other faiths might help to save Mr. Parrish from his pessimism.

With much of the article I am in agreement, especially the section on church finances. He is right. Another commendable thing about the article is its freedom from cynicism and bitterness. Most writers in such a mood are not so restrained. Mr. Parrish must be a stimulating preacher. His parish is to be congratulated upon having such a leader. He will not die of dry rot. He is thinking hard on fundamental things. If he thinks wrong part of the time we can forgive him.

His article will provoke much discussion, just

shopkeepers' tills by force, of swoopings down by night to secure the savings of many years. But they said it was better that things should continue as they were, even with the Yunnanese making such trouble, rather than that there should be civil war again, with the future uncertain.

"This new party echoes winged words of freedom but how are we, the people, to know the future? Since 1911, by the republican calendar, we have heard many golden words and been "dolls of yellow gentian." Change is not good. It is best always for life to continue in the ways of the past, and then when disaster occurs it is disaster to which we are accustomed.'

As fast as opportunity came, the refugees moved on to Hongkong, to wait there until the future should be revealed to them.

In the brilliant moonlight, about ten o'clock on Sunday evening, the Radicals opened fire. On Monday defenses were organized on Shameen as a precaution against a rush of refugees from whichever side might lose. Tuesday and Wednesday occasional bullets whizzed across the island, them cutting a hole in our neighbor's chimney, but with no decisive victory on either side. On Wednesday afternoon three Soviet Russian women, wives of men said to be in charge of the Radical army, came to stay at the Victoria Hotel on Shameen.

one of

So far, the Chinese gunboats had manœuvred aimlessly up and down the river, taking no part in the conflict. On Thursday morning my gardener told me that the 'navy' had been bought at a good price, paid in silver coin, by the Radicals. Walking along the Bund just before lunch, I saw a Russian man in civilian clothes summon a sampan to the French Concession steps and go out to a Chinese gunboat in midstream. The boat got

up steam and entered into the firing against the Conservatives.

On Friday, June 12, I was awakened from my afternoon nap by our old Chinese nurse shaking the foot of my bed violently. I sat up and stared at her face, which was overspread with a greenish-yellow pallor.

'Kuan Yin have mercy on my ten parentless children in Peking,' she wailed. "The Radicals have control of the City of Rams. We Chinese know that the Cantonese mass will now rise up and butcher all the Chinese of other provinces found here. The anger of the populace has seethed for many months against the strangers within their gates they will not distinguish between the Yunnanese and Chinese from other provinces. Murder and death! Ai-yah, ai-yah

Unable to stop her wails, I rose and began to dress. I opened the door of a wardrobe and found fat three-year-old Chung Hung, son of my cook, wrapped up in the filmy mass of my favorite chiffon dress. As I went through the house I discovered most of the Chinese members of the household crouched in fear in dark corners. Chou, the cook, had pasted thick brown paper over the glass door and windows of the kitchen. Chang had laid tea in the stuffy tightly closed dining room and refused to move it to the usual cool corner of the verandah.

"The Cantonese loves only himself' was the refrain. There was no interest in the theory, which I presented in the kitchen, that perhaps it was a natural thing for the Cantonese to dislike the Yunnanese who had bled their city.

I pushed open a shutter and went out on the verandah. A hundred yards away in the Pearl River floated a badly mutilated body. I heard my husband enter the front door and speak to Chang in his usual quiet voice, asking him to tell the servants that they

were all quite safe so long as they did not leave the place until the trouble was over. I saw Lee, the gardener, come around and fasten the high garden gates, with the double bolts. My husband said nothing as we had our tea, but I knew by the slight twitching of his face that he must have walked through hell on his way home from his office in the centre of Canton city.

From three o'clock that afternoon until Monday morning the Cantonese massacred the 'strangers within their gates' with the unrestricted cruelty of mob insanity. The Yunnanese surrendered their arms when the Radicals defeated them in battle. They cast aside their uniforms at once to hide their identity, but in the arena of the masses this did not save them from death. All 'strangers' alike were the prey of the maddened crowd. Only those who could speak the native dialect were passed over. A victim beseeching mercy was cornered, and while he kotowed the persecutors pierced holes in his head with nails on the end of long sticks. They shrieked with crazy delight at the welts which rose on bambooed flesh. They vied with each other in dexterity with sharp-cornered stones. Women and children screamed wild approval when a can of oil was poured over a man and a match set to his trousers. The mob secured flat-bottomed boats and carried on their massacre drifting before my verandah. They flung dying men into the Back Creek, allowed them to strike out for the Shameen shore, then gently pushed their heads under water with broad boards.

We Westerners sought to intercede in the unequal conflict, and one man brought three wounded Yunnanese on to the island; but the consuls, knowing the grave danger of Western interference in native affairs, forbade participation in the trouble.

On Shameen, nerves were taut as violin strings. Unable to succor the afflicted, we threw ourselves into artificial activities as a means of escape from thought. There was a nervous whirl of dancing, bridge, and high poker stakes. Cocktails fomented laughter. Men dreading to be alone filled the Club Bar.

Chang, our faithful old boy, who had served my husband loyally for eighteen years and twice saved his life, went raving mad and attempted to assassinate all three of us. Frothing at the mouth, he attacked my little daughter with a pair of long scissors, cut me through the cheek, and struggled desperately, slashing right and left, before my husband could control him. He had to be sent away to an insane hospital, babbling that the Cantonese were after us in ten motor cars.

On Monday morning, June 15, a proclamation was issued from the Government Buildings, announcing that a new government had been formed and that peace and order were now restored for the good of the people.

The massacre stopped. Crowds dissolved. The city waited with empty streets for the first move of the new government.

II

The Government announced that it consisted of two parts: National and Provincial. Hu Han-min, a returned student from Japan, later replaced by Eugene Chen, was Minister of Foreign Affairs. Liao Chung-kai, born in San Francisco and well known as a leader of the Canton Labor Party, was Minister of Finance for both divisions. Later Sung Tze-ven, educated in the United States and a brother-in-law of Dr. Sun, became Minister of Finance. Hsu Sung-chi, later replaced by Chiang Kaishek, was Commander in Chief of the Army. Hsu Him, a teacher at Canton