Sergt. George C. Adriance is responsible for the following statistics of the 353rd, All-Kansas Regiment, of the 89th Division: Methodists 884, Catholics 413, Christians 381, Presbyterians 252, Baptists 242, Lutherans 190, Congregationalists 55, Episcopalians 48, United Brethren 46. Sixteen other faiths are represented by a few, 91 profess no particular faith and 5 are atheists. According to this about one-seventh are Roman Catholics. At Camp Lee, containing 48,000 men, 5,307 are Roman Catholics, a little more than one-tenth. At Kelly Field, Texas, the Methodists lead with 1,630, the Roman Catholic next with 1,625, Baptists 900, Christians 358, Christian Scientists 75, Lutherans 297, Presbyterians 715, Episcopalians 294, Miscellaneous 561, Congregational 192 and Jews 62. Among the fraternal organizations the Masons lead with 355, Odd Fellows next with 290, W. O. W. 217, Elks 142, Knights of Pythias 140, Modern Woodmen 161, Eagles 63, Moose 138, Miscellaneous 564. According to this the percentage of Roman Catholics is nearly one-sixth, but if there are any Knights of Columbus they must be included in the item of Miscellaneous, which would indicate that there were so few as not to be necessary to mention. Speaking of statistics, Hella Temple of Shriners, Dallas, Texas, has 609 members either in the Army or Navy (and it is very reasonable to say that at least 50 per cent of the membership of 3,609 is above the military age) which is a wonderful showing. So you see, brethren, in making these extravagant statements the Reverend James McMahon, and other priests and Jesuits, members of the Roman Hierarchy, are, as is usual with them, talking through their hats. DOLLARS OR HUMANITY "War is hell!" said General Sherman. The grim old fighter was correct in his conclusion; he knew from personal experience what war really meant. No sane man who looks across the bloodstained battlefields of Europe doubts the truth of Sherman's laconic utterance. But war has demonstrated some important facts to the nations of the world— the value of concerted action, the necessity of socializing public utilities and industries, the strong centralization of government. Men are brought closer together, democracy invades the trenches, every one is willing to surrender his individual rights and liberties for the public welfare. The fighters in the field are cared for mentally, morally and physically; nothing is too good for them. But in times of peace, when the dove roosts lovingly in the cannon's mouth, old conditions are revived. Captains of industry and predatory corporations are permitted to exploit the masses in the same old fashion, to take toll from food products, and denude the country of natural resources for the benefit of a few. In times of peace men struggle fiercely for employment and for the necessaries of life; children are permitted to waste their youth in factory and mill, to grow old and stunted before their time; the worship of God is forgotten for that of Mammon. Do we draw too dark a picture? Alas, no!-there are plenty of facts to support our viewpoint. After the world war shall we return strictly to the old conditions of life? We do not believe it. We do not preach any Marxian brand of socialism, where the state runs everything, profits being utterly abolished and private initiative crushed. That would be a dreary outlook indeed. What we are aiming at is more state or governmental supervision; a larger opportunity for men; a better democratization of industry and education; a curtailment of swollen fortunes; a lessening of the abyss between the poor and the rich-more equality in fact. Is that too radical a program? We do not think so! If this great war shall make men think in terms of humanity and then endeavor to realize their concepts, it will not have NOTES AND COMMENTS 119 been fought in vain. In the past many evils have been allowed to exist in the body politic, one of the worst being poverty! Can poverty be completely abolished in America? Perhaps not, but its sad conditions can be considerably ameliorated. The inequalities between rich and poor are too great. In wealthy circles of society a poor man is anathema. The fact is that many people think more of dollars than they do of human beings; men are rated not for their moral worth and talents but for their money. In Jesse Lynch Williams' daring comedy, Why Marry?-now running in New York-there is a little scene that illustrates the situation we have been describing. Helen secretly loves a brilliant young scientist, Ernest Hamilton, of the Baker Institute, who has discovered a valuable antitoxin to save the lives of babies. The members of the heroine's family discuss a prospective marriage between Ernest and Helen. Helen's brother, John, a big manufacturer, is bitterly opposed to his sister wasting her beauty on a mere bacteriologist, who is, besides, practically penniless in the eyes of the social world. The following colloquy takes place between Uncle Everett, a distinguished jurist; Cousin Theodore, a clergyman; and John. John. Oh, look here: I've nothing against young Hamilton. . I like him-proud of all he's done for the institute. Why, Mr. Baker is tickled to death. about the Hamilton antitoxin. But, Theodore, this is a practical world. Your scientific friend gets just three thousand dollars a year! Judge: Well, why not give the young man a raise? John: Oh, that's not a bad salary for scientists, college professors, and that sort of thing. Why, even the head of the institute himself gets less than the superintendent of my mills. No future in science. Judge: Perfectly practical, Theodore. The superintendent of John's mills saves the company thousands of dollars. These bacteriologists merely save the nation thousands of babies. All our laws, written and unwritten, value private property above human life. I'm a distinguished jurist and I always render my decisions accordingly. I'd be reversed by the United States Supreme Court if I didn't. We're all rewarded in inverse ratio to our usefulness to society, Theodore. That's why "practical men" think changes are "dangerous.” John: Muck-raker! ... ... Judge: It's all on a sliding scale, John. For keeping up the cost of living you and old man Baker get (Stretches arms out full length.) Heaven only knows how much. For saving the Constitution I get a good deal. (Hands three feet apart.) For saving in wages and operating expenses your superintendent gets so much. (Hands two feet apart.) For saving human life Ernest Hamilton gets that. (Hands six inches apart.) For saving immortal souls Theodore gets(Holds up two forefingers an inch apart.) Now, if anyone came along and saved the world Theodore. (interrupts): They crucified Him. One of the grand events of this world war is the patriotic attitude of organized labor. The working classes have been criticized for holding out for better wages, crippling production, etc., but who have been their critics-why, captains of industry for the most part. But in times of peace the capitalistic employer has never hesitated to shut down his factory and turn away labor from forge and machine, if occasion demanded it; if profits were in abeyance. And now when skilled labor has come into its own, the demand exceeding the supply, it is very natural for the working man to demand his share in the giant profits that are being accumulated by capital. This demand is not an altogether selfish one, for the cost of living has jumped skyward and the poor man has a family to support. Again, think of the hosts of toilers who have laid down their tools for the weapons of war, to go to the front for their country and the cause of democracy. Under our industrial regime the working man has had little or nothing to say regarding the profits that were piled up through his labor; he has had no hand in their distribu tion. He has been hired and fired at will by the Powers that Be! But when he comes back from the trenches, after having made the world safe for democracy, will he consent to go back to the old conditions of employment? We don't know what will happen in the United States, but we are convinced that industrial conditions in England, where labor is a power in politics, will be tremendously metamorphosed. The Independent (February 9, 1918) says: When the enemy has been made "free or harmless" the world will immediately have to ask: What now must be done to organize the democracy for which measureless sacrifice has been made? How shall it be made competent and law-abiding? How shall its ideals of justice, liberty and opportunity be realized? Nobody in his senses doubts that the demands of working men and peasants, the world over, will have to be faced. Those demands will include an inflexible insistence upon a larger share of the world's wealth and of the annual product of industry. They will include insistence upon a more democratic control of industry, supplementing and carrying out the political participation secured by the American and French revolutions a century and a half ago. He is a bourgeois optimist who believes that those demands will not be conceded. He is a Bolshevik who believes that they will be conceded to the extent of creating an out-and-out new social order, either anarchistic or mechanically socialistic. The old individualism will not return unabashed and unchastened, to live riotously. It will have to live responsibly on good terms with other interests. Which way will the center of gravity shift? It will shift, as socialists have desired and predicted, in the direction of a more extensive collective ownership and public control of natural resources, of the means of communication and transportation, of the mechanisms of trade, and of the funds of lonable capital. The effects of the war will drive the nations irresistibly.toward public ownership. The resources of the earth do not belong to the few but to the many. The old plan of having the God-given forests and mines exploited for the benefit of predatory wealth will eventually be abandoned as unjust and wasteful. Reforms will not come at once, but slowly, but they will come nevertheless! "FEAR NOT THEM THAT KILL THE BODY!" If worse than body's death or body's maiming Does just the lack of losing make the winner? It shows the world what only God had seen. If I must fall, may I go bravely under, Not shirking my own weakness, my own shame. But wrongs it never fathered bear its name. God give me strength to keep my colors flying, -C. A. Winston Army Field Clerk, Somewhere in France. THE DEPORTATIONS OF BELGIANS II TEXT OF THE JUDGMENT AGAINST M. CHAS. MAGNETTE, BELGIAN SENATOR, GRAND MASTER OF THE GRAND ORIENT OF BELGIUM, BY REASON OF HIS APPEAL TO THE FEELING OF HUMANITY OF THE GRAND LODGES OF GERMANY. A T LONG intervals, a ray of light penetrates the great prison which Belgium has come to be and tragically illumines the heroic conflicts which the prisoners of Germany are making there for the defense of right and liberty. The judgment condemning Senator Chas. Magnette, the entire text of which is finally known after ten months of silence, shows to what point the Germans have limited the liberty of the Belgians. The judgment, which endeavored to combine in its grounds for accusation the labored subtleties of speech by the aid of which the invader tried to justify the crime of the deportations en masse, merits all the more publicity as it includes, in its very text, the condemnation of German conduct and reveals once more the unsightliness of Teuton morality. TEXT OF THE JUDGMENT Military Government of the province, of Liége. 11. c N. 3933: Liége, Dec. 21, 1916. Judgment against the Belgian Citizen (Walloon), Charles Magnette, Lawyer at Liége, held for trial. I confirm on the basis of article 18, paragraph 2, of the imperial ordinance of December 26, 1899. An imprisonment of 3 weeks, which shall begin December 12, 1916, and in addition, a fine of 1,000 marks, in lieu of which in the event of non-payment, an imprisonment of one day for every five marks. GROUNDS M. Magnette is the Grand Master of all the Lodges of the Free Masons of Belgium. In this capacity, he has written many letters to different Grand Lodges of the German Empire which, according to the translation, are all expressed in the following terms: BROTHER CHARLES MAGNETTE, Grand Master of the Grand Orient of Belgium to the Grand Lodges of Germany. VERY DEAR AND RIGHT ILLUSTRIOUS BROTHERS: Liége, November 7, 1916. You can quite easily understand that it is not from gaiety of heart that I again address you, after the sad failure of the attempt which I made at the very beginning of the war. Numerous, since then, have been the occasions which were offered me to appeal to your feeling of humanity and of Masonic fraternity. I have refrained from them. Nothing would permit me to suppose that the sentiments which prevail in your Grand Lodges and which you had expressed to me either by your responses, or better still by the silence which greeted my letter, had been modified in a sense favorable to our ideas and to the true Masonic conception. That is why Belgian Free Masonry, mutilated, limited in all of its manifestations, reduced to inaction and to silence, yet always and more than ever filled with latent life and suppressed hopes, has been forced to take refuge, except in what concerns the multiple works of fellowship to which it has consecrated itself, in an abstention chosen, debated logically, and desired. But there are moments in the life of humanity, so important, so solemn, that everything must give way before the imperious duty of proclaiming, before the world, the great principles which underlie modern civilization, of crying out in indignation against the violation of these sacred principles and of trying to stir our greatest enemies to the very depths of their hearts in order to arouse in them that righteous anger which every man of honor must feel against one of the most amazing and most unexpected outrages to be found in the history of the universe. One of the principles of our admirable code of morals, of that complete and irreproachable table of rules of conduct, the strict observance of which would make a man perfect, tells us: "Let your wrath be kindled against iniquity." I obey this commandment and, renouncing all ill will, I come for the last time to ask you to join your voice with mine in kindling our wrath against iniquity, to fight against it and to overthrow it. The iniquity which at this moment rends our hearts, which brings tears to the eyes of countless numbers and wrests lamentations and imprecations from hundreds of thousands of human beings, you know, and it makes the civilized world shudder. It is the establishment of forced labor, it is the deportation en masse of legions of laborers, torn from their native land, their firesides, their families, and driven away into a hostile land, there to be forced to a labor which they would never have accepted voluntarily and which they have even formally refused, in spite of enticing offers. It is, in a word, a modern form of slavery. How I wish that you might hear-as we also have been able to hear too often -the passing of the trains overloaded with these unfortunate exiles. There are moans, cries of terror, wails, songs too, for the song is often an expression of sorrow. You could not have controlled your emotions and perhaps even you, like many of us, would have wept at the sight of this distressing spectacle. I know we do not hesitate to repeat it and to prove it-that war has its inexorable laws. But yet is it possible that the conquests of the spirit of civilization and culture have put a check and limits to the power of the force hitherto absolute, even victorious, and that the country to which you belong has participated in the accomplishment of these pacific conquests? But the brutal, the complete suppression of individual liberty, the return to the very sad wanderings in the history of the Jews, the captivity of an entire innocent population which has exemplified for more than two years a calmness, a dignity, and a marvelous patriotism, is it possible, my brothers, that all of this does not cry out for revenge and that you are going to permit it to go on? Freedom, its conquests, its developments, its applications, its manifestations, is the very foundation of Masonic life. Without freedom of thought, without freedom of speech, which permits the free expression of this free thought, Freemasonry would have no reason for existence, for usefulness. Is there not upon us the vigorous obligation of spreading about us this possession, precious to us, this freedom which we Masons claim as our right and which we use, the obligation of letting all brothers in our common humanity profit by it, and of defending it unrelentingly when it is threatened and compromised. That is why the agency of Freemasonry obtrudes itself in the dreadful conflict which has just arisen. Our institution, I know it, is not made for exterior manifestations. It prefers assiduous, quiet labor, under shelter of passions professed in the |