FROM THE UNITED STATES FOOD ADMINISTRATION

FROM THE UNITED STATES FOOD
ADMINISTRATION

Food administration must be based upon self-sacrifice of somebody somewhere; the vast majority of our people will accept it willingly and with pride as a contribution that they have made in the national cause.

By our entry into the war we arrive at two issues: First, the issue we must have partially confronted in any event, the control of our food so as to stabilize prices, for unless we can do so we must meet a raise of wages with all its vicious circle of social disruption at a time when maximum efficiency is vital to our safety; second, that we may also meet the increased demands of our allies, to keep them constant in the war.

There is no royal road to food conservation. We can only accomplish this by the voluntary action of our whole people, each element in proportion to its means. It is a matter of equality of burden; a matter of minute saving and substitution at every point in the 20,000,000 kitchens, on the 20,000,000 dinner tables, and in the 2,000,000 manufacturing, wholesale, and retail establishments of the country.

Food saving is in its essence the daily individual service of all the people. Every group can substitute, and even the great majority of thrifty people can save a little-and the more luxurious elements of the population can, by reduction to simple living, save much. This means no more han that we should eat plenty, but wisely and without waste.

Fully 90 per cent of human food consumption in this country is under the control of the women of the country. Therefore if we can mobilize the devotion of our womenfolk to methods of thrift, the elimination of waste, economy in consumption, we shall not only have been able to increase enormously our exports to our Allies, but we shall

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have at the same time reduced our national expenditures and made a large contribution to the savings of our people and their ability to carry a share of our war load.

After the war we must maintain our foreign markets if our working people are to be employed. We shall be in no position to compete if we continue to live on the same basis of waste and extravagance on which we have lived hitherto. Simple, temperate living is a moral issue of the first order at any time, and any other basis of conduct during the war becomes a wrong against the interest of the country and the interest of democracy.

THE ONLY REAL DIFFICULTY

Only one real difficulty has arisen in securing hearty teamwork in food saving-that is, a certain suspicion on the part of the public that savings effected by business concerns are not being passed along to the consumer.

People go into a hotel dining room, and find meat portions reduced, and want to know why prices are not reduced correspondingly.

They carry home bundles from the stores and pay cash, but are not certain that their teamwork benefits anyone except the merchant.

They hear that city gas is to be stripped of 11,000,000 gallons of toluol to supply the Army with high explosives. This will make a leaner quality of gas, which they are willing to use cheerfully if they know that the Government profits by their teamwork in the price of toluol."

There is a real cause of misunderstanding here, and business men must meet it frankly.

At one of the large New York hotels reductions in prices are stated in percentages on the bill of fare. This is not only a commendable way to meet

SIGNS AND SYMBOLS

We may delve in the ruins for symbols and signs,
And trace history back to its birth,

Or claim we're related to old Tubal Cain,
And right there have a spasm of mirth.

Because someone says Masonry's not very old
And seventeen, seventeen is the date

When a Lodge of Free Masons first saw the light
As a Craft-with a Master and mate.

Why hunt for more proof of an ancestral tree,
Or attempt to say just when it came

That men used a square to build a house straight—
For the facts will remain 'bout the same.

We know that a Trowel-if used the right way,

Will put on the Cement about right,

And we know that the mortar, if only half mixed,
Makes a wall quickly look like a “fright."

Now these simple lessons are easy to learn,
They apply to the whole of mankind,

So be sure that your friendships, as stones in a wall,
Are cemented by ties that do bind.

Then the Compass that "circles" the sphere where you live
Should of course be as well understood,

So you can't pick apples forbidden by law,
As did Adam and Eve; if you would.

Now study Dame Nature and borrow her tools,
From your Lodge room, 'most any "old day"
And measure your conduct, by what you can do
If you try; in a straight, honest way.

A CORNER OF THE LIBRARY

BY MYSTICUS

THE GREATER ADVENTURE

"I know not what the world will think of my labors, but to myself it seems that I have been but as a child playing on the seashore; now finding some pebble rather more polished, and now some shell more agreeably variegated than another, while the immense ocean of truth extended itself unexplored before me."—Sir Isaac Newton.

"And so," writes Sir Oliver Lodge, “must it ever seem to the wisest and greatest of men when brought into contact with the things of God; that which they know is as nothing and less than nothing, to the infinitude of which they are ignorant."

L

IFE is the great adventure! We come from the Unknown to this sublunary sphere where we spend a few brief years and then away again into the Unknown. We are surrounded with mysteries. If life be the great adventure, then assuredly death is the Greater Adventure!! Like the initiates of Egypt and Greece we go from the lesser to the greater mysteries.

Nature is a sphinx whose riddle we must guess like Oedipus of old. I once saw a picture by a French artist, illustrative of the riddle of the sphinx-the eternal problem that confronts every man who thinks. On the bank of a dark flowing river stood a mortuary monument surmounted by a bronze sphinx which held in one of its paws a human skull. Upon the pedestal were carved the two Greek letters Alpha and Omega-The Beginning and the End. Tombs were everywhere to be seen. The hour depicted was twilight; a wintry sky overhead, sombre and gloomy. To this weird necropolis had come a man in antique garb. Under one arm he clasped a great parchment volume. He stood before the monument, earnestly contemplating the, mystic letters. The sphinx gazed at him with a sardonic smile upon its bronze features, as if to say Finis! It was one of the saddest little pictures I have ever seen, full of strange significance. The man had evidently reached the end of his life's pilgrimage, and was asking himself the question of questions: "If a man die, shall he live again?" The iron-clasped book which he hugged to himself was presumably the collected wisdom of the race. Had it brought him any solace in this Valley of the Shadow? Evidently but little! I imagined him a disciple of Lucretius. He had gotten along very well without God and the soul during his life, but in this dolorous hour when the shadowy wings of the Angel of Death enveloped him, his vaunted knowledge so far as it afforded him any answer to the riddle of the sphinx was but a glass shivered into atoms against a rock.

Vanitas vanitatum!

He had been taught that death ended all. Could it be so? He began to doubt his doubts. His mind instinctively recoiled with horror at the idea of total annihilation. It was a difficult thing to think himself not.

The symbolism in this picture appeals to every thoughtful soul. For the follower of Lucretius substitute a modern disciple of Haeckel and Spencer. What a mockery our science and philosophy if they lead us to an open grave, to nothingness. "Why mete out, like Archytes, the earth and the sea, and number the sands on the shore that divides them, if the end of this wisdom be a handful of dust sprinkled over a skull?"

To raise the curtain of death ever so little; to penetrate the darkness that surrounds us with ever so feeble a lamp; to push back the black pall that envelops us by even as much as an inch is something gained. The Sacred Colleges of Agnostics and Atheists, in their fatuous self-complacency, decry all attempts to solve the mysteries of life and death as futile and useless. Satisfied that everything in its last analysis is nothing, they steep themselves in materialism and pooh, pooh all that savors of the mystical.

But spiritually minded people are not content with this negative attitude towards the problem of problems. They welcome eagerly all that the sages of the Orient have to say on the subject; all that students of psychical research have discovered relating to the extraordinary qualities latent in the human personality; in short, everything that throws the feeblest ray on the darkness. One of the latest dissertations on the sphinx riddle is by Maurice Maeterlinck, the celebrated Belgian playwright, and mystic, entitled The Light Beyond. The translation is by A. T. de Mattos. The Light Beyond is a collection of essays illustrating the later stages of Maeterlinck's quest of the Unknown. Everything that the Belgian symbolist touches is invested with poetical feeling and insight. He never writes a dull page, although at times we put down his books with an unsatisfied feeling. His poetical imagination would lift him into the realms of light and life, but his logical mind drags him down to earth. He is sufficiently scientific to express himself with caution regarding the Unknown. Speaking of survival after the change called death, he seems to favor the theory of a modified or progressive consciousness. He rejects annihilation. He says:

The theory of a modified consciousness does not necessitate the loss of the tiny consciousness acquired in our body; but it makes it almost negligible, flings, drowns and dissolves it in infinity. It is of course impossible to support this theory with satisfactory proofs; but it is not easy to shatter it like the others. Were it permissible to speak of likeness to truth in this connection, when our only truth is that we do not see the truth, it is the most likely of the interim theories and gives a magnificent opening for the most plausible, varied and alluring dreams. Will our ego, our soul, our spirit, or whatever we call that which will survive us in order to continue us as we are, will it find again, on leaving the body, the innumerable lives which it must have lived since the thousands of years that had no beginning? Will it continue to increase by assimilating all that it meets in infinity during the thousands of years that will have no end? Will it linger for a time around our earth, leading, in regions invisible to our eyes, an ever higher and happier existence, as the theosophists and spiritualists contend? Will it move towards other planetary systems, will it emigrate to other worlds, whose existence is not even suspected by our senses? Everything seems permissible in this great dream, save that which might arrest its flight.

Nevertheless, so soon as it ventures too far in the ultramondane spaces, it crashes into strange obstacles and breaks its wings against them. If we admit that our ego does not remain eternally what it was at the moment of our death, we can no longer imagine that, at a given second, it stops, ceases to expand and rise, attains its perfection and its fulness, to become no more than a sort of motionless wreck suspended in eternity and a finished thing in the midst of that which will never finish. That would indeed be the only real death and the more fearful inasmuch as it would set a limit to an unparalleled life and intelligence, beside which those which we possess here below would not even weigh what a drop of water weighs when compared with the ocean, or a grain of sand when placed in the scales with a mountain-chain. In a word, either we believe that our evolution will one day stop, implying thereby an incomprehensible end and a sort of inconceivable death; or we admit that it has no limit, whereupon, being infinite, it assumes all the properties of infinity and must needs be lost in infinity and united with it. This, withal, is the latter end of theosophy, spiritualism and all the religions in which man, in his ultimate happiness, is absorbed by God. And this again is an incomprehensible end, but at least it is life. And then, taking one incomprehensibility with another, after doing all that is humanly possible to understand one or the other riddle, let us by preference leap into the greatest and therefore the most probable, the one which contains all the others and after which nothing more remains. If not, the questions reappear at every stage and the answers are always conflicting. And questions and answers lead us to the same inevitable abyss. As we shall have to face it sooner or later, why not make for it straightway? All that happens to us in the interval interests us beyond a doubt, but does not detain us, because it is not eternal.

Behold us then before the mystery of the cosmic consciousness. Although we are incapable of understanding the act of an infinity that would have to fold itself up in order to feel itself and consequently to define itself and separate itself from other things, this is not an adequate reason for declaring it impossible; for, if we were to reject all the realities and impossibilities that we do not understand, there would be nothing left for us to live upon. If this consciousness exists under the form which we have conceived, it is evident that we shall be there and take part in it. If there be a consciousness somewhere, or something that takes the place of consciousness, we shall be in that consciousness or that thing, because we cannot be elsewhere. And as this consciousness or this thing cannot be unhappy, because it is impossible that infinity should exist for its own

1 "The Light Beyond." New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1917. Pp. 299

THE INSTRUMENTAL ACCOMPANIMENT

41

unhappiness, neither shall we be unhappy when we are in it. Lastly, if the infinity into which we shall be projected have no sort of consciousness nor anything that stands for it, the reason will be that consciousness, or anything that might replace it, is not indispensable to eternal happiness.

The third essay in this notable volume is devoted to "Communications with the dead," and is a brief résumé of all that has been accomplished by workers in the field of psychical research. What are Maeterlinck's conclusions on the subject of alleged spirit communications? He says:

Must we, with Myers, Newbold, Hyslop, Hodgson and many others, who studied this problem at length, conclude in favor of the incontestable agency of forces and intelligences returning from the farther bank of the great river which it was deemed that none might cross. Must we acknowledge with them that there are cases ever more numerous which make it impossible for us to hesitate any longer between the telepathic theory and the spiritualistic theory? I do not think so. I have no prejudices-what were the use of having any, in these mysteries?-no reluctance to admit the survival and the intervention of the dead; but it is wise and necessary, before leaving the terrestrial plane, to exhaust all the suppositions, all the explanations there to be discovered. We have to make our choice between two manifestations of the unknown, two miracles, if you prefer, whereof one is situated in the world which we inhabit and the other in a region which, rightly or wrongly, we believe to be separated from us by nameless spaces which no human being, alive or dead, has crossed to this day. It is natural, therefore, that we should stay in our own world, as long as it gives us a foothold, as long as we are not pitilessly expelled from it by a series of irresistible and irrefutable facts issuing from the adjoining abyss. The survival of a spirit is no more improbable than the prodigious faculties which we are obliged to attribute to the mediums if we deny them to the dead; but the existence of the medium, contrary to that of the spirit, is unquestionable; and therefore it is for the spirit, or for those who make use of its name, first to prove that it exists.

Do the extraordinary phenomena of which we know-transmission of thought from one subconscious mind to another, perception of events at a distance, subliminal clairvoyance-occur when the dead are not in evidence, when the experiments are being made exclusively between living persons? This cannot be honestly contested. Certainly no one has ever obtained among living people any series of communications or revelations similar to those of the great spiritualistic mediums, Mrs. Piper, Mrs. Thompson and Stainton Moses, nor anything that can compare with them for continuity or lucidity.

Maeterlinck, after confessing the wonderful results of mediumship, is still somewhat skeptical. He writes: "For the proof to be more decisive, it would be necessary that no one, neither the medium nor the witnesses, should ever have known of the existence of him whose past is revealed by the dead man, in other words, that every living link should be eliminated. I do not believe that this has actually occurred up to the present, nor even that it is possible; in any case, it would be very difficult to control such an experiment. Be this as it may, Dr. Hodgson, who devoted part of his life to the quest of specific phenomena wherein the boundaries of mediumistic power should be plainly overstepped, believes that he found them in certain cases." He cites several of these cases and analyzes them. Other chapters in this book are devoted to the war and the prophets, the life of the dead, knowledge of the future, our injustice to death, etc.

THE INSTRUMENTAL ACCOMPANIMENT When a person is really full of information, and does not abuse it to crush conversation, his part is to that of the real talkers what the instrumental accompaniment is in a trio or quartette of vocalists.-Oliver Wendell Holmes.

WRATH

The spirit of wrath-not the words-is the sin; and the spirit of wrath is cursing. We begin to swear before we can talk.-Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar.